My father was the manager of a small-town, bottled gas plant. One year, the large corporation which owned the plant came up with a new campaign to squeeze a little more out of their beleaguered managers. It was called IADOM. My hard working, loyal but laid-back dad was forced to wear his own IADOM button. Of course, everyone asked him what it stood for. The answer? “It All Depends On Me.”
Even as a self-centered teenager I thought that was pretty awful. My father’s stress level was high enough before they sent him the pin.
Now I don’t want to do that to pastors, but in all honesty, I have to say that in fifty years of watching churches thrive or languish, a congregation’s corporate culture is a very significant factor in church health and the culture is – to a very large degree – “set” by the solo or senior pastor.
I’m sorry if I’ve just pinned an IADOM button on your chest, but this is my honest conclusion.
What am I talking about? Some people call it the “climate of the church.” One excellent pastor claimed that his church was thriving because it had a good diet – common, he claimed, in that denomination – but it also had a great climate, which, he asserted, was rare in that ecclesiastical tribe (and that was correct). Not surprisingly, the pastor himself was indefatigably cheerful, optimistic and faith-filled. I remember thinking, “I’d like to go to his church!”
Erwin McManus, hailing from a very different tribe calls culture the “environmental architecture” of a congregation.
Culture is the feel of a church, the vibe of the congregation, the atmosphere of the ministry, the personality of the place.
If a pastor has been with a church for a number of years, in most cases, the personality of the pastor has become the personality of the church.
I have the arrogance to believe that I can tell you a lot about the manager of a “big box” store by interacting a bit with a few of the employees.
A few more thoughts about culture:
- Culture includes priorities and values. What is important here? Is this a fun place or a neat, clean, orderly place? (It’s probably not both.) What’s more important here, a great sermon every week or a warm handshake from the pastor every week? (Having both would be nice.)
- Culture involves set ways of doing things. How you decide who should lead is part of your culture. How you handle your conflicts and complaints is part of the culture.
- Culture involves attitudes. Listen for those tell-tale “around here” statements. “We do it like this around here.” “You never know what the board is thinking around here.”
- Culture is also revealed by “Aren’t we going to…?” questions. “What? Aren’t we going to have a Christmas program?” “Aren’t we going to have a song after the sermon?”
- Culture includes a spiritual and emotional environment. Some churches are “charged” with a positive, spiritual energy. Other congregations seem to have no charge left in their batteries. Some churches are cheerful because the pastor is cheerful, others, like dysfunctional biological families, are continually tense, because the “papa” (the pastor) is continually tense.
A few thoughts about improving a church’s culture:
(1) Church cultures can change because people can change.
According to the New Testament, the Christian life should be a continual process of transformation (Romans 12:1,2, II Corinthians 3:18, Philippians 3). This is profoundly encouraging. Twenty years ago I dove into a ministry of “redevelopment transitional” (or interim) ministry because I believed that God could change people and changed people would change churches. Today I help pastors to help churches through revitalization journeys with the same conviction: God can change our churches!
(2) Church cultures can change because pastors can change.
As I’ve shared above, the pastor is the key to the church’s temperature. Pastors, being people, can change, and therefore, their churches can change as well.
Early on in my long-term pastorate I had some honest board members tell me that I wasn’t very joyful. I can’t say that I mastered the art of rejoicing in the Lord, but I definitely made it a major personal goal and I know that it changed me and it changed the church.
(3) Pastors and church leadership teams can improve their congregation’s culture by tackling the culture-destroying sin of gossip.
See this article on The Everlasting Gossip Stopper. The use of this simple skill can – in and of itself – significantly improve the culture of some congregations.
(4) Pastors can improve their church’s culture by slaying those nasty “elephants in the room.”
I’ve seen churches plagued by sin elephants, conflict elephants, issue elephants, crisis elephants and even – and this one is very common in 2023 – current event elephants. You can read more about elephants in Four Elephants Which Can Hurt Your Church and Slaying The Big, Fat Anxiety Elephant.
(5) Pastors and other culture-challenging church leaders can deliberately influence their congregational culture by spending more (un)serious time with their people.
I’m not saying that you have to be silly, or ignore serious issues (like the elephants I wrote about above) but it’s possible for church leaders to project their positive personalities and attitudes into the congregation in such a way that the negative attitudes of church “cranks” are overpowered. Assertiveness, at its best, involves the deliberate insertion of beliefs and attitudes into a system. I have seen this work. See these posts about the Negativity Bias In Your Organization and Countering The Negativity Bias In Your Organization.
(6) Positive preaching and positive praying – especially from the Sunday pulpit – can have a strong influence on a congregational culture.
Learn to live with the attitude of the Apostle Paul, as illustrated vividly in his Letter To The Philippians. When you’re making some progress personally, share what you’ve learned by preaching through this wonderful book. But don’t try to teach others how to “rejoice in the Lord” if you haven’t yet learned how yourself. It won’t work. People have a way of seeing through your attitudes.
(7) There’s no substitute for having and preaching and teaching and talking up a simple, Biblical vision.
See my post: Give Your People A Simple Dream Of A Revived Church. As above, you must believe it before you can expect anyone else to believe it. If you preach visionary words with a visually handicapped heart, your people will know it, or simply be utterly unmoved by your words. Do you believe that God can make your church great?
(8) God uses pastors who have “fallen in love” with their churches and communities to change their churches and their communities.
If you don’t love the people you probably can’t do much for them. But God can enable you to love them (Romans 5:5) to an amazing degree. I believe that the “formula” here is about the same for both the saints and the sinners in the pastor’s life: pray for them, serve them, spend time with them, give to them and forgive them. In time, God will give you a heart of love toward them. It’s a lot like parenting: your communicated love forms an emotional bridge over which your beliefs and values can flow to your children.
(9) Pastors should be allowed to lead their congregations and pastors should continue to bear with the congregations which don’t allow them to lead.
Of course, pastors need to be accountable to boards and congregations; I would never advocate for the pastor-as-dictator style of church government. But churches of almost any denomination are most apt to flourish when the pastor is allowed to dream about a great ministry, to design how that ministry could look and to direct the church’s staff and lay leaders in the pursuit of that dream. Read more about this in Three Great Expectations For A Leader.
The flip side of that important truth is that pastors who are not being allowed to dream, to design and to direct the church to the degree that they believe they should, must defeat the demons of pride, self-will and impatience and lead, as best they can, until a trusting congregation gives them a greater latitude to lead them forward.
Here’s the bottom line: As Peter Drucker famously put it, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Culture matters, big time, as we seek to see our congregations experience heaven-sent revitalization. But because God lives, and is far more powerful than all the negative forces influencing your congregational culture, your church’s culture can change.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
- Each participant should, privately, write down one word that describes your church’s culture. Now talk about those words. Do we agree?
- Better yet, enlist an “outsider” (someone unknown to your church) to visit one of your church’s worship services and fill out a Secret Seeker form. Discuss the completed form as a group.
- Looking at suggestions 1-9 above, discuss some actions which could be taken by church leadership to improve your congregational culture.
