The Context
St. Peter's Brockley had grown quickly and consistently over seven to eight years and had begun planting new churches. On paper, the organisation had a lot going for it: a committed team, a clear mission, strong community respect, and genuine enthusiasm at every level. But the team felt stuck. Workload was high, problems kept recurring, and the pace of new activity left no space to address the underlying issues. Efforts to grow were running ahead of the foundations needed to sustain them.
The leadership commissioned a structured review to understand what was really going on before trying to fix it.
The Goal
To conduct an independent diagnostic review across the organisation — understanding how each team functioned, what was working, what wasn't, and what was most likely causing the recurring problems. The aim was a clear, honest assessment that the leadership could act on, not a report that described symptoms they already knew about.
Fundamentally, this meant advising leadership directly — telling them plainly what was happening beneath the surface and what needed to be addressed, in an order they could actually act on.
What we did
Eleven one-to-one interviews were held with team members across every function — leadership, operations, worship, kids and families, community outreach, finance, youth, production and dance. Each conversation explored what the person did, how long it took, what they did outside their role, and the challenges they faced week to week.
The findings were analysed across three interconnected themes that emerged from the interviews rather than from a pre-existing framework. First, the organisation was still operating in an early-stage model — leadership and the core team driving everything, with the wider community invited to join rather than help shape direction. That model works at the start, but creates an unsustainable dependency on the team as the organisation grows. Second, most team members were leading others in some form but without a shared understanding of how to do it well — defaulting to instruction rather than preparation, which was producing poor volunteer retention and recurring handover failures. Third, there was a consistent pattern of managing problems rather than solving them — moving to the next thing rather than taking the time to address root causes, which meant the same problems kept returning and gradually wore people down.
Each of these was analysed not as an isolated finding but in relation to the others, since they were reinforcing each other: an overstretched team had no time to solve problems properly, which left leadership doing too much, which left no capacity to involve the wider community, which put even more pressure on the team.
Three specific recommendations were made: restructure decision-making and idea generation to involve the wider community more actively; agree and embed a shared approach to leading others across the whole team; and pause new growth and planting activity until the current foundations were strong enough to support it.
What changed
The engagement gave the leadership team something a report alone couldn't: direct advice on where the organisation actually was — not just what it felt like from the inside — and what to do about it, delivered in conversation with the people who'd have to act on it. The three-part analysis named the specific patterns driving the dysfunction rather than describing surface symptoms, and the recommended plan gave the team a concrete sequence of steps to work through rather than a set of vague principles.
The recommendation to pause new growth — the most challenging finding to deliver — was grounded in evidence from across the organisation rather than presented as an opinion, which meant it could be received as the honest counsel it was intended to be rather than dismissed as external caution.
Rolling out the recommended changes is an ongoing project made more difficult by the constantly shifting demands made on a growing organisation trying to serve a highly diverse community. Imhotep continues to provide advice on how to transform the organisation to be more effective in a way that aligns with its values.
What we learned
The most important thing this project reinforced is how rarely a presenting problem is the real problem. The team described their challenges in terms of volunteer unreliability, workload, and feeling stuck — all real, but all symptoms of something structural underneath. Getting to the root required holding a wide range of information simultaneously: what each person said, what the patterns across conversations revealed, what the organisational model implied, and what the data on time and activity showed. No single interview contained the answer. The picture only became clear when everything was viewed together.
It also reinforced the value of the diagnostic stage as a standalone piece of work. Organisations that feel stuck are often tempted to go straight to solutions. The most useful thing here was slowing down enough to understand the situation properly before making any recommendations at all.
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