Leadership Journal

(Editor's note: This is a follow-up to Angie's recent column "Discerning Your Church's Hidden Core Values: It's the unstated, underlying purpose that really drives a church." Click here to read that column.)

Thanks, and wow. Thank you to everyone who responded to my previous column about hidden core values. Thanks for sharing your insights and questions. It was a privilege to read about your stories and your struggles, and I hope what follows will be of help on your leadership journey.

First, a quick review: Most churches these days have some sort of mission or purpose statement. All churches, however, also have their own internal culture, a set of shared attitudes, values, and beliefs that define church and shape its practices. This deeply entrenched culture can be summarized into an "ethos" statement which is almost never officially articulated, but is nonetheless extremely powerful. Here are some (more) examples:

• Let's just have church and go home.
  
• We're better than you.
  
• Don't ask questions.
  
• Bigger is better.
  
• Christians don't have problems.

Aligning a church's actual values with its stated values is crucial to ministry effectiveness. The most effective churches will have a mission that reflects biblical values, and an internal culture that reflects the mission. When a church's ethos matches its mission, it becomes a unified whole with a unified goal. But when there's a disconnect between these two areas, the church will resemble a rowboat full of people pulling in opposite directions.

So, how do you determine your church's actual core values? Unfortunately, your church's ethos will rarely stand up and announce itself, although those of you who have participated in tense congregational meetings may have gotten close. Rather, a leader must look for clues that will help point to the prevailing ethos.

Keep in mind that identifying an organization's ethos is a discovery process that can take months or even years. Sometimes the culture is so deeply entrenched, it's difficult to identify, which is also what makes it so hard to change.

How do you discern your church's hidden values? Here are some questions to stimulate the discovery process.

1. Mission: Improbable? Start by looking at your church's current mission statement. Do you have one? Is it biblical, and is it reflected in the church as a whole? Are you fulfilling your mission? If not, where's the tension? In our case, one tension was in the area of evangelism. The answers should give you some initial clues for discovering your church's actual values. Our church said it was evangelistic, but the budget, attendance, and conversion rate showed otherwise.
2. Who's the boss? Take a look at your leadership structure, both formal and informal. Who's allowed to call the shots, and what are their values? Do staff members buy in to the church's mission? Do they practice it? What about the other "power brokers" in your church? (You know who they are!)
3. He said, she heard. Are key elements of your stated mission, vision, or values in conflict with each other or with other things that have been communicated to the congregation? For example, a church may describe its Sunday worship as a "gathering of believers" while also expressing the desire to be "seeker-focused." This tension is also seen in sub-ministries whose leaders have been allowed to build their own "empires" separate from the church's overall mission.