Leading a Healthy Church Culture - Lesson 18

As we think about these five handles, what I'd like to suggest if I were working with a group and those of you that are following us online, you may want to work with your church group, and I would encourage those of you here to do the same, there's a handout here that I want to share with you. It's what you're seeing on the screen here, and it's a way to work through your current church values, what to analyze. What are your current values of the church? And because as we talked about, the values are going to determine the products and practices, and the values largely determine how your church culture looks. So, the simple questions are laid out there. What do our leaders model and teach? And as you think through those scenarios, you simply answer those questions. And then how do we allocate our scarce resources? Simple questions to ask, but maybe not simple ones to answer. What behaviors do we reward? What do we measure? And how do our leaders respond to crisis? 

As you work through the answers to those questions -- and I would encourage an exercise to do that with the church leaders -- as you work through those, you'll begin to see, as you answer these and as a collective, you begin to see what values really begin to emerge. What are the real values, what are the actual values of our church? And then you simply list those. What are your current church values? And you may find that those differ a whole lot from those that are officially talked about. You may find that those differ greatly from those that are publicized and maybe put on a wall somewhere or stated in a nice, orderly fashion somewhere in the church, you know, in a policy manual or something. But the first step with using these handles is to analyze, to determine what are our values, and it's simply by asking the questions, what are the answers to these five handles? Does that make sense? Do you follow that?

It's a simple process, but it takes time to work through, and again, as I've worked with groups, we would spend as much as two days on this process, so it's not a small task, but it is something that's hugely important for the local church. Then finally, once you have determined what your actual values are through analysis using these five handles, then the five handles can become a strategy matrix, and here's how it works: What do you wish for your church to value? So, you have what your church actually values. Now, what do you wish for your church to value? And as you think about that, as leaders, then to use the desired values strategy matrix, and it's really quite simple. It's a complicated word to simply state as you work through this, you simply fill in the blanks for the first value. Let's say you want to value evangelism. people coming to Christ. lives being transformed by the power of Christ. Well, the first question then is what will our leaders model and teach? How will they go about modeling and teaching that value? And then secondly, how are we going to allocate our scarce resources if we want that to be a value of our church? And I was working with a church recently and they said, we really want to value prayer, and so we simply worked down through and answered each of those questions of what behaviors will we reward and what will we measure? And we become very specific about those so that our values become part of our strategy. Does that make sense? And that's how it works. 

Now, you'll notice that in the analysis, there are five handles. In the strategy, there are four. The reason that we've dropped the one out about responding to crisis, you can't plan for that. As a crisis happens, you have to be prepared for it, but you can't plan it, so it's not a strategy of how you work with crises. Does that make sense? So, there are really only four embedding mechanisms, the handles that we are suggesting here. So, you simply determine what your values are that you want. And by the way, I would suggest any church, if you have more than five or six values, it's too many, and I've seen churches with 15 or 20 values. It's really tough to get your arms around all that, so I would suggest that you think, what's the core of who we are and what we're about? And let's focus on those. If you work through this process faithfully, and the first step is acknowledgment, is analysis, and then determining where it is that we want to go and what kind of a culture do we want to reflect, and then begin to ask in applying these primary handles in that process these four questions: What will our leaders model and teach? And we're talking to leaders here. How will we allocate scarce resources? What behaviors will we reward, and what are we going to measure going forward. As we work through those and have specific answers to those questions, we will see the values begin to shape, as God has intended for us to do that within our organizations. So, that's in essence what it is to lead a healthy church culture, and I trust that this has been helpful for you.