Church Culture: How to Assess It, Shift It, and Shape It

Introduction

Church Culture: See It, Say It, Show It, Grow It

Ever since the publication of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture in 1951, the church writ large has delved deeper and deeper into the relationship of the Christian church with the culture of the world outside of it and in which it lives. We commend this missional thrust and acknowledge that the church’s purpose is to interact with the culture around it if it is to be God-honoring in impacting the lives of people. But this book is not about the culture that surrounds the church, it is about the culture within the church—your local church specifically. The discipline of church culture as a subject of research and study has flourished in recent decades, especially as the corporate world has learned ever so convincingly the role of organizational culture in increasing any business’s efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability. Around the same time the lessons from the business world spread to countless other endeavors in virtually every realm that depends upon organizational principles to accomplish its work. In more recent times, the church world has incorporated sound business culture principles and exploded in its understanding of organizational culture behaviors to accomplish a church’s mission.

This book will help make churches more effective in their mission and ministry by making their culture healthy and relevant. It is the result of conducting hundreds of workshops over the past ten years for churches and denominational judicatories on accelerating a church’s growth and changing its culture. Invariably, at the end of a workshop we are asked: This is so helpful. But do you have a book about this so I can learn more? Well, here it is.

Church culture is more important than ever. The world is increasingly secularized. People and institutions everywhere are suffering from long-term effects of the pandemic. Social unrest and polarization have created turmoil in our country and elsewhere. These forces demand a response. Churches must be able to assess and—where needed—change their organizational culture, or they will cease to be effective or even survive. And that is to say nothing of the internal cracks and preexisting conditions in most Christian denominations, including the long season of disaffiliation within The United Methodist Church (to which most of our team members belong) and gut-wrenching stresses within other denominations and church associations. This book is written as a resource for (a) pastors of churches in denominations that are going through cataclysmic change; (b) new church-planting teams desiring to establish a healthy culture; (c) disaffiliated churches now exploring a new identity and connections; and (d) any church leaders of any tribe needing to reset their culture for any reason.

Lovett Weems says that one reason an appreciation of culture is so important is that people never make judgments about organizations, including the church, on the basis of an objective assessment of reality. People do not have enough information to make objective judgments. They make judgments based on perceptions that bear some resemblance to reality. Those perceptions are most powerfully communicated through the images of symbols and culture."¹

In short, your church’s culture—as much as and perhaps more than its worship, programs, mission outreach, and community presence—is a major force in getting new people to check it out, attend, participate, and become a disciple of Jesus Christ. The book is essentially a course, laid out to teach what I (Jim Ozier) have learned in a fifty-year ministry career pastoring churches of all sizes and in vastly different settings, and what my colleague, Yvette Thibodeaux, has learned coaching and consulting with a multitude of churches and businesses. Specifically, this book teaches the importance of assessing a local church’s culture and how to implement the highly effective model of culture change. It’s a process we call the See It, Say It, Show It, Grow It model of creating church culture. Each part of this book takes you deeper into the importance of church culture.

Part 1, Church Culture: Understanding It and Assessing It, provides an explanation and application of church culture, including a recent history of popular research and writing about the importance of church culture for your ministry.

Understanding: Culture eats strategy for breakfast goes the popular quote often attributed to Peter Drucker. In the sports world, new coaches often say at their introductory press conferences, The first thing we need to do is change the culture. It’s the same in business when a new CEO is introduced: First, we have to change the culture. Whether it is wholesale changes, targeted shifting of needed elements, or better messaging the existing culture, the importance of culture should not be denied, overlooked, or avoided. For whatever reason, other denominations and non-denominational churches have focused more on church culture than has mainline churches, like the UMC. But, in the post-pandemic church world, a church’s culture is more important than ever because the long-established pre-pandemic culture of every church and organization has been shaken to the foundations. A new culture will emerge. The question is, will it be guided and led or simply random and happenchance?

Assessing: We also provide the principles of assessing a church’s culture and then tools to lead a thorough assessment of your church’s culture. We demonstrate how to use these tools effectively. The tools are both qualitative (observation-type interview questions) and quantitative (survey and research instruments). Tools will range from easiest to use for smaller or less complex churches to much more detailed and statistical for larger churches with multiple layers of structure.

Part 2 builds upon the emerging understanding of why to prioritize church culture in your ministry. After you have assessed your church’s culture, we show how to create the culture you want in your church. How? By teaching an intentional culture-change process that works in any church of any size, the See It, Say It, Show It, Grow It process. Often churches and pastors fall into the temptation of assuming a church’s culture is the sum total of all the things it does. And consequently, changing the culture sim ply means changing the things the church does. However, this assumption is incorrect. We approach a church’s culture not as the sum total of all the things you do, but as the launch pad for everything you do. And we will show step by step not only the how to’s but also the why to’s and when to’s that can make positive culture change a reality in your congregation! The top priority of any leader is creating and maintaining the church’s culture; it is a strategic decision designed to get the results you want.

This process begins with seeing it, which promotes an easy-to-implement methodology of the lead pastor discovering her or his own culture words and then strategically messaging them throughout the congregation to lay the foundation for the church’s culture.

We continue to detail the sequential steps of the culture change/creation process and demonstrate the best places and ways to successfully (a) thread, (b) spread, and (c) embed the desired culture throughout the church to get the results you want to achieve ministry improvement and fruitful action. It doesn’t help to know the laws of church culture or to have learned the lessons of creating culture if we are not able to produce results. That can only happen with congregation-wide buy-in.

Throughout the book and in the accompanying online resources, you will find easy-to-use tools in the form of graphs, charts, and visuals that can aid any pastor in teaching a congregation about navigating church culture and implementing the lessons that will help achieve that buy-in to the importance of making your church’s culture your top priority.

Part 3 demonstrates how to build your culture team and highlights the two critical functions of this team: (a) promoting and (b) protecting the church’s culture. In addition, we launch readers into the world of first-time guests and how this culture team works with the senior pastor to promote the church’s culture in a way that is compelling and connects with the guests while showing how they fit into the church’s life. The hope is that every first-time guest will walk away from their experience with your church saying to themselves, These are the kind of people I can hang out with. That is the relational lynchpin that brings about church growth and is made possible through a clear and compelling culture.

Find additional resource tools online at www.abingdonpress.com/culture-extras. These tools include The Complete Culture Audit and Eleven Laws of Church Culture, plus a PDF version of the diagrams, lists, and illustrations from this book. We recommend you use the PDF for your work with people in groups, as they are easy to enlarge, print, and distribute according to your needs.

We conclude this short course by reminding readers that while church members are vitally interested in the what their church is doing, an unchurched first-time guest is much more interested in the why behind the what. Throughout this book, we will emphasize how important it is to include the why behind every what the church is doing, which is integral to a healthy church culture.

Accordingly, this course begins with why you will benefit from reading another book on church culture.

Part One

Church Culture: Understanding It and Assessing It

Chapter 1

Why Another Book on Church Culture?

The culture of your church will reflect the values of your team.

—Tony Morgan, The Unstuck Church

Why is it that we are not where we should be as a church? Have you ever asked that or some similar question? Yvette and I hear it in almost every church we work in. And after ten years of reasearch, consultations, and coaching, I think we can safely say: The answer is your culture. That’s why noted church author Samuel Chand—along with most other church thought leaders—maintains that the strongest force in an organization is not vision or strategy—it is the culture which holds all the other components.¹

Why another book on church culture? Because all churches have been somewhat shattered coming back from the pandemic, dealing with an increasingly secular world, and being caught up in the social polarization that has affected all of American society. Every church has seen its culture tested. What is church culture? And why is it so important? Chand says it forcefully, Culture is the atmosphere in which the church functions. It is the prevalent attitude. It is the collage of spoken and unspoken messages. Every group of people has its organizational culture, including your local church.

Pastor of a fast-growing church in Texas, Stephen Blandino more recently wrote Every organization has a unique culture, but not every organization created their culture on purpose. Most drifted into their culture. Unfortunately, the same is true of churches. Culture is simply the by-product of ‘the way we do things’. When you don’t think strategically about what you do, the by-product is usually a mediocre—or even toxic—culture.² Throughout this book we’ll see that culture is important, because even though it shifts over time, it also shapes the identity of the church, which impacts the strategies, mission, and ministry of the congregation. And, as every pastor knows, it is difficult to change. In the chapters that follow you will see how to lead and manage those culture shifts and changes in ways that generate goodwill and cooperation within the church.

Jenni Caldron of the 4Sight Group, which specializes in creating a great workplace culture, explains it this way: Culture is the lynchpin connecting strategy to vision. Or as she further summarizes, Culture is the vehicle that brings vision to life.³

Heather Zemple, nationally known speaker on volunteer engagement, in a presentation titled Creating a Discipleship Culture, says it simply: Church culture is the way most people act most of the time.⁴

Edgar Schein is generally regarded as the Father of Organizational Culture. His groundbreaking research and writing on the topic has proven foundational for further study of any organization’s culture, be it corporate, educational, government, nonprofits, or even churches. If you really want to get nerdy, you can read more about him and other thought leaders on church and organizational culture in the afterword section of this book.

In his classic Organizational Culture and Leadership, Schein aptly points out that every organization (including in the church world) is greatly influenced by and must exist within the macroculture. Figuratively speaking, the macroculture is the world in which we live, and of late it has drawn us all into a shattering polarization marked by distrust, disinformation, suspicion, and an almost toxic fraying of relationships, both in international events and within our own respective social communities.⁵

The macroculture has also withered under the oppressive burden of the pandemic and its aftereffects, causing almost all organizations (including churches) to see themselves as restarts.⁶

Why another book on church culture? Because this one is written from the perspective of and context of a Connectional Church, like the UMC. And let’s face