written by Tim Loftis, Lead Consultant - Revitalise
In the City to City Revitalise framework, we seek to evaluate and measure two main areas of emphasis in a church: Gospel Faithfulness which we believe then leads to Gospel Fruitfulness. There are six measures which we use to examine a church’s gospel faithfulness. One of those measures is ‘Culture and Values’ which is described as, “the extent to which the church has a kingdom/gospel culture - characterised by prayer, mission, discipleship, forgiveness and the fruit of the Spirit - that shapes every part of church life and ministry”. While that definition is a good one, measuring it can be a difficult thing to do in the midst of a dynamic church congregation doing gospel work.
How then do we identify and address the culture question?
Culture is often described as the “felt personality” of a church which is an invisible, often unspoken set of attitudes, behaviours and values that define “the way we do things here”. The ‘vibe’ or ‘feeling’ that a church exudes and embodies can show itself in the way the members interact, treat outsiders and handle areas like leadership, communication, and conflict resolution. Churches and other ‘like’ organisations can have either an unhealthy, (sometimes referred to as ‘toxic’), or a healthy culture and while most people seem to be able to identify it, they find it difficult to know how to change or impact the culture.
Churches ignore culture to their peril as it can certainly be one of the key drivers of health and growth in the congregation. It is also true that an unhealthy or toxic culture can impact a church’s growth and effectiveness by allowing the behaviours and attitudes that promote that culture to go unchecked. This can often be seen in the way staff and leadership teams interact as they navigate the challenges and difficult waters of ministry to ‘broken’ people, as ‘broken’ people themselves. This is often why we have to address the culture of a church or staff team when we are working with a church on the revitalisation journey.
In the Building Your Church Culture workshop, we take the church leadership team through a process of assessing their current culture and then understanding how to intentionally build and enhance a healthy church culture. Using the premise that “culture is influenced and measured by values”, we take the team through a process to help them identify both the toxic AND the healthy indicators of their culture and the values that drive them. This is accomplished through a series of interactive exercises using the team’s experience of dealing with difficult ‘toxic’ people in ministry (without using names) who impact culture negatively, as well as their experience of working with the kind of people who help to embody and drive the healthy culture they want to encourage.
The process of identifying toxic characteristics and attitudes can be helpful in pointing out those behaviours to correct or avoid in the teams and the congregation as a whole. It is then good to move on to identifying the positive characteristics of the people who encourage the healthy culture which is desired. We then take the time to compile and state those characteristics as values that underlie the behaviours. For example, if we recognise these behaviours - smiling workers, an eagerness to volunteer, reliability, and displaying a servant attitude - we might recognise that these behaviours point to and underline the value of “Serving with Joy”, which is a great value that could drive part of a healthy church culture.
Once we have a list of 4-6 values we help the team work on stating them in concise, memorable and easily communicated language. These will be rolled out to the whole congregation eventually, but we encourage the team to start with all the volunteers who serve in the church. We finish the workshop time with some discussion on how the staff and leadership team can embody and model the values to the whole church.
It is important to note that this process is not a ‘one and done’ exercise, but that it should be something that is revisited regularly to ensure that we are paying attention to the culture as the ministry moves forward. As our definition from the framework says about Culture and Values they “shape every part of church life and ministry”.