Culture Check: What is growing?

"Now is the time!  Here come God's kingdom!  Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news" Mark 1:15 CEB

"Culture works like a movie sound track.  It makes or breaks the story we're telling.  Every organization is telling a story, not unlike a movie: there is a script (our words) and acting (our behavior).  But every great movie has a great sound track to match, which provides the tone and energy for the story.  This is our culture--and it must match our words." --Tim Elmore at www.growingleaders.com

Culture is a popular word.  It has multiple meanings.  One of the most commonly used definition is: a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or social group.  Culture is always present even if its not clearly articulated. Culture dictates a group's rules, roles, and responsibilities.  At the church where I grew up, you were not allowed to enter the sanctuary during a time of corporate prayer.  There was no written rule or guidebook, but a strongly enforced policy that was accompanied by ostracization and shaming from the entire community if you violated the principle  along with a pastoral reminder of church etiquette. Undisturbed prayer and worship was an incredibly high value that was reflected in its culture.  That is the essence of culture; a reflection of communal, institutional, and organizational values.

Every time that I hear the word culture, I am reminded of my first academic exposure to the concept of culture.  It wasn't in history class, social studies, or business courses, but in biology, particularly microbiology in medical school.  A culture is a medium that cultivates growth.  It is an environment that contains nutrients that sustains growth of particular organisms, dependent upon the needs of the organism.  For example, the traditional culture for growing bacteria is gelatin infused with sheep's blood.  However, the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, requires additional nutrients including a change in the acid/base balance (called the pH) in order to grow in the culture.  The important thing to understand is that components of the culture promote selective growth .  

Both of these definitions collided in a recent zoom meeting.  The meeting was a discussion with a top leader in my denomination (Fmcusa.org) and leaders of a church outside of our denomination, who were exploring a possible affiliation.  At one point in the meeting, our leader suggested that while it is important to be in harmony with the doctrine of our denomination, it was just as important to be comfortable with our culture.  The statement is not only accurate, but reveals the importance of organizational and institutional culture.

Culture is revealed by what grows and thrives! When churches or religious organizations are asked about their values, often a list of aspirational values are given.  Aspirational values are those things that the organization or group aspires to reflect but in reality, they are not a priority that informs their culture.  For example, churches that list prayer as an aspirational value but offer little in the way of instruction, opportunity, practice or celebration of prayer have a culture that is not informed by prayer.  In fact, one could argue that there is something amiss in their current culture that prevents the priority of prayer.

Your church or organizational culture is perfectly situated to grow what ever is growing and thriving. Conversely, it may have elements within its culture that prevent aspirational values from ever being realized.

Near and dear to my own calling, is the development of diverse communities of faith who are reconciling movements in their broader communities. "Liberated people in transformed relationships creating a new reality based upon Christ-centered and Christ-embodied love" is a succinct way of defining that.  In light of that, I have had the privilege of working with churches who express the desire for diversity, inclusivity, gender-equity  and anti-racism yet when you look at what is actually occurring in the life of the congregation, you see very little diversity, no advocacy against racism, no women in leadership, and the few people who participate in the congregation who are outside the dominant ethnic, cultural, or social group are marginalized or tokenized.  The church is often sincere about its aspirational values, but ignorant of what is required to develop a culture that fosters those values and equally ignorant of the unwritten values that are inhibiting diversity.

  There are a number of reasons for this:

1. For many congregations, their culture is invisible: Culture is the codified understanding of roles, relationships, and responsibility, as well as identity.  Identity is an important influence of culture and the development of values that actually form the culture.  Identity is based upon founding narratives that give us meaning.  For many congregations, they have accepted narratives based upon political, nationalistic, and even traumatic narratives, and the assumptions in which these narratives are based are normative, and thus invisible.  I spoke with a pastor in 2016 who stated that to be a Christian was to vote along the Republican party ticket.  The unspoken and  assumed narrative in this is based upon a mix of Christian exceptionalism, Christian nationalism, and anti-structuralism.  All of which are not related to Jesus, or Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God, in fact, they are antithetical to that which Jesus valued.  Understanding a congregations hidden assumptions is integral for understanding its culture.

2. For many congregations, there is a lack of intentionality in culture development.  The culture of many congregations comes about as a result of its leadership, or lack there of.  I once worked with a church that had exclusively white membership despite being located in a ethnically diverse area.  The church leadership desperately wanted to engage the broader community but felt frustrated that "Black people are not interested in us".  A review of the church's practices revealed a open support for a local political candidate who was known to have racist policies, no advocacy in their community's issues of racial justice (The public school system had been suspending Black students in a ratio of 5:1 for example), and no fellowship with Black churches or multi-ethnic churches in the region.  Additionally, few of the congregation actually had relationships with Black people in its community, even when they were their next door neighbors.  The culture of that church prevented Black people from feeling welcomed much less that they were being sought after to be valued contributors to the community.  Congregations like this one, need to re-create its culture by dismantling practices and confronting values that prevent it from fulfilling its mission.  This is difficult and strenuous work and often results in a "pruning" process where congregational members choose to leave to participate in a congregation where they are preserving existing values.  Thus intentionality comes at a cost.

3. Congregations seeking culture change require prophetic insight, and visionary leadership.  Prophetic insight is ability understand oneself, congregation or culture in light of presence and promises of God, as modeled by Jesus and expressed in Scripture .  It is asking "How does Jesus see our culture?"  Would and did Jesus value the things we value?  Would someone in Jesus' station in society (Think Mt 25) be welcome, enfolded and empowered in our community?  Once we have that insight, then a visionary re-imagining of the congregation must take place.  This is not as simple as a meeting or a task force but a discerning process that never really ends, but is constantly revised as we continue to ask ourselves the prophetically insightful questions.

4. Your congregation or organizational culture is captured by who defines "we".  The New Testament is a journey of God to reconciling Godself to all creation and to develop a new identity for those who have been reconciled.  The "new creation" defies racism, sexism, and classism (Gal 3:28) so that all of the old definition of "us" and "them" is collapsed into a "we" without diminishing the cultural identities of its participants.  Who is your congregation's "we"?

Congregations can not be all things to everyone and that not what I am recommending.  What I am recommending is that if your congregation seeks to live out its mission to love its neighbors and to be a neighbor, it has to evaluate its culture to see if your neighbor is welcomed and valued.

Toxic culture is like polluted air.  You can try to breath more efficiently but eventually you have to engage the environment as it is preventing optimal function and causing illness.  

What's your congregational or organizational culture like? What is being cultivated and what is absent?

Time for a culture check