IMPROVING YOUR CHURCH’S CULTURE

Leadership

The dawn of the 21st century brought a focus on organizational culture to the point that it is a recognized professional discipline. There was even a focus on church culture in the last presidential election cycle of 2008 as the question continues to circulate, “Can a person be in a church for many years without knowing the beliefs and culture of that church?” Leaders must understand that people attending a church get to know the culture quickly and people in the community have a perception of a church’s culture. Members and regular attendees usually “buy-in” to the culture of a church much like they would develop brand loyalty for goods and services. Every organization is characterized by a culture, including churches. In fact the culture of a church perhaps does more to contribute to her success or failure than corporate culture contributes to a business in the secular realm. Various characteristics combine to form corporate or church culture. David Byrd stated that values, beliefs, habits, and goals form corporate culture. (Byrd, “Communicating Your Corporate Culture,” 08 Aug. 2008) This is also true of church culture.

 

CHURCH CULTURE CHARACTERISTICS

The concept of culture under discussion may be illustrated from science—specifically bacteriology. Long before I was a church leader I was a medical technologist. During my training I did an internship in a medical microbiology laboratory. We received potentially infectious samples collected from the hospital patients and would intentionally plant the samples on media plates. Our goal was to simulate the balanced environment necessary for the collected samples to grow into bacterial cultures that could be identified by the trained eye. Cultures such as this would spread across the media plates and often crowd out competing cultures and become a homogenous culture or community of bacteria. This is not unlike the culture of the church though we should not take the analogy too far. Healthy cultures spread and often become the predominant society.

So what characteristics combine to form the culture of a church? Personally, I prefer the metrics used by Christian Schwartz in Natural Church Development when considering the combination of characteristics that form the church culture. Admittedly, this is a risky discussion, as I may be accused of being unspiritual since I am describing the way a church feels and functions in rather technical terms. I don’t particularly like it either. As a pastor, I like the feel-good side of the church. However, if you as a pastor or leader desire to drastically improve the culture of your church, you may need to get somewhat technical in order to improve the spiritual. Church leaders sometimes consider dealing with business or technical aspects of the church as unspiritual or that those things will take care of themselves. Sometimes these seemingly unspiritual aspects have great effects on the growth and success of a church.

Now back to the Natural Church Development (NCD) quality characteristics that have great effect on church organizational culture. NCD lists eight:

1. Empowering Leadership: leaders who motivate and empower people for ministry and service
2. Gift-Oriented Ministry: people serving according to their spiritual and natural gifts
3. Passionate Spirituality: includes prayer and a spiritual formation process
4. Functional or Effective Structures: structures that help the church function
5. Inspiring Worship: worship that moves and motivates people to active service and missions
6. Holistic Small Groups: Bible study life groups that develop authentic Christian relationships
7. Need-Oriented Evangelism: people sharing their faith in relational and relevant ways
8. Loving Relationships: genuine caring and living accountability within the fellowship

BUILDING BLOCKS OF CHURCH CULTURE CHARACTERISTICS

For NCD the focus is on the adjective preceding the characteristic. The reader might easily understand all but one of the metrics listed- Functional Structures. All of the other characteristics may receive a high quality, but if the (FS) measurement is low, the church may be unhealthy. Within (FS) characteristic are things that support the growth culture or inhibit it such as:

1. Constitution and Bylaws
2. Branding and community identity
3. Personnel and volunteer selection policies and procedures
4. Explicit and implicit policies
5. Official and tacit influencers
6. Schedules and calendars
7. Programs, silos, and turf mentality vs. collaboration and empowerment
8. Confining mental models
9. Procedural practices such as how meetings are conducted
10. Buildings, facilities, property and how they are managed
11. Leadership training and meetings of deacons, elders, and teachers- (what goes on at the meetings?)

This series will include short articles on these eleven points with the purpose of encouraging leaders of churches and broadening their thinking. The hope is that leaders will find new avenues through which to address these issues.

THE CHURCH STRUCTURE PARADOX

Church planters acknowledge that there is tension between the need to establish structures to provide protection and stability and the need to maintain a spontaneous empowering growth culture. Many church planters desire to delay establishing structure as long as possible, or at least for two years or the point where the new church has received as much momentum as possible from the initial launch. For instance, Saddleback Valley Community Church waited for years to purchase property and build, while another church plant bought property within a year. The latter church may have short circuited their growth. Another aspect to the church structure paradox is that as improvements in one area are made, problems are sometimes accentuated in other areas. This requires leaders to stay the course and continue improvements over time.

 

SIMPLE DISCIPLESHIP: A CHURCH CULTURE-SCAPING RESOURCE

Simple Discipleship 2009

I believe church leaders must be intentional about these factors that greatly affect the culture of the church. Leaders can establish structures with the emphasis on “functional” or “effective.” Herein is the connection to Simple Discipleship, which will gradually shape the church culture to be one that is disciple-making and transformational. Like corporate metrics for micro-culture scaping, SD also deals with the church’s values, beliefs, habits, and goals. Within the SD process, the leaders remain focused on the spiritual growth of people, while the members subscribe to “chosen accountability” through self awareness using the SD 360 Survey.

Think about it. What do the structures say to present members as well as new members and guests? What might your church look like if the structures were redesigned to be empowering, effective, and functional? Simple Discipleship can help. Churches are defined by their culture though most people use terms such as sprit, fellowship, harmony, and so on.  Define the culture of your church and seek to improve it.

Simple Discipleship Blessings,

Dr. Tom Cocklereece

Purchase Simple Discipleship: How to Make Discipleship in the 21st Century at http://www/simplediscipleship.com, http://www.churchsmartresources.com, or Amazon.com.