Last night the TV weatherman explained that the jet stream would influence our climate for the next several days. I went outside and tried to see it. I couldn’t.
A similar force that no one sees but everyone feels in the church is its culture.
Like the jet stream, church culture is invisible, but its influence is undeniable. A leader can launch a fail-safe program—to attract youth or to clean up a neighborhood, for instance. But if the idea runs counter to the culture, the program, and possibly the pastor, will not survive.
Church culture, shaped over many years, reflects the dominant theological themes, skills, and interests of the group. It is born of the traumas and triumphs marking the church’s life. In New England where I pastor, many congregations are deathly afraid of liberalism, which once overtook many northeastern churches. Whether right or wrong, these churches interpret every innovation through the lens of that well-remembered fear.
Church culture also reflects attitudes of the larger community. A working-class community usually includes churches with a working person’s attitude toward congregational life. An executive-type community produces a different kind of church. The former will expect pastoral leadership to be strong, forceful. The latter will prefer leadership that is more managerial and consultive.
Like the jet stream, cultures are always shifting, but changes are usually slow, almost indiscernible. Some pastors try to break a culture and force change abruptly. Usually in such cases, people leave for other places (or the pastor does). There is turbulence. Some churches never recover. Wise pastors bend the culture bit by bit. That requires patience, trust, love, and a few miracles. The climate of a church first has to be understood before it can be adjusted.
Many of us assume that if we simply talk sense to people, they will see it our way. Not so.
Hebrew culture: forged in desert heat
In Scripture we get glimpses of different cultures and factors shaping them.
Abraham’s family was nomadic. Everything was shaped by the nature of a journey and an unknown destination. Altars were the place of worship, and they were temporary; life was uncertain. The patriarch was preoccupied with providing an heir to fulfill God’s preposterous promise of a family virtually infinite in number. The culture was centered in faith in a God who would provide both a home and offspring. The dark side was instability, a quickness to gerrymander quick solutions to problems God didn’t seem to be solving.
The culture of the wandering Israelites was dominated by the corporate memory of 400 years of slavery. The people struggled with their identity. They were quick to distrust leadership. They lost their nerve in stressful situations. Their fidelity was shallow, and they were easily seduced by pagan idolatries. Leader Moses cried a lot and prayed a lot.
The culture from which most of Jesus’ disciples came was held hostage by a centuries-long view of the Davidic Kingdom, which pointed to a political and social restoration of an ancient state. Every time Jesus said the word “kingdom,” the disciples heard “institution.”
For a long time, they didn’t grasp that Jesus was talking about a kingdom planted first in the heart and then projected out through witness and submission to God. As late as the Acts 1 account, it appears that Jesus had backed culture-bound losers. But he hadn’t.
The culture of the church in the early chapters of Acts is constricted by an ethnocentricity. The apostles had heard Jesus say, “Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the rest of the world” (Acts 1:8), but, for all practical purposes, their paradigm included only the first two. Only the pain of persecution and some dramatic intrusions by the Holy Spirit forced the church to expand its cultural limits and reach out to Gentiles. It took them almost 15 years to “get it.”
Wise pastors become students of the culture they face. They do not assume that logic, reason, surveys, and charisma will dissolve resistance and motivate people. Many of us assume that if we simply talk sense to people, they will see it our way. Not so.
Henri Nouwen seems to be describing institutional culture when he recalls his first days at L’Arche in Toronto:
“The first thing that struck me when I came to live in a house with mentally handicapped people was that their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then. Since nobody could read my books, they could not impress anyone, and since most of them never went to school, my twenty years at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard did not provide a significant introduction. My considerable ecumenical experience proved even less valuable. Not being able to use any of the skills that had proved so practical in the past was a real source of anxiety. In a way it seemed as though I was starting my life all over again.”
Nouwen’s point: if he was going to serve them, he would have to do it on their cultural terms, not his. Many would-be leaders never learn that.
Jesus’ response to his culture
Notice how Jesus coped with the jet stream of culture in his ministry:
1. Jesus entered his culture and played to its strengths and realities. He clothed his message in common story forms, often using agricultural analogies. He engaged people where they worked and in the ways they perceived reality. He spoke out of their history and showed respect for their institutions unless they were clearly corrupt or heretical.
My first pastorate was in northwestern Kansas among farmers and ranchers. My degrees, my skill with words, my entrepreneurial drives meant nothing to them. They’d had a new pastor, on average, every two years for several decades. What they wanted was someone to lead worship, maintain pastoral rhythms, and help in the fields when they needed it. Only when I learned to drive a tractor in a straight line, herd cattle on horseback, and kill a rattlesnake did I gain even an ounce of respect and the right to take them further spiritually.
2. Jesus went first for the hearts of people. It was as if he was saying, “Transform hearts, and the systems will change.” It took the disciples more than three years to realize that their ministry would not be temple-based, Jerusalem-centered, and priest-oriented. It would mean ministry in the streets by simple, Spirit-filled people speaking the gospel and doing great acts of loving service.
The second church I served had a culture marked by bitterness and suspicion. A previous pastor had burned his relational bridges, split the church, and left with the congregation unraveling. For more than two years, my wife, Gail, and I simply showed love. We systematically had the entire congregation in our home for dinner; we gave them our hearts. Slowly the embittered culture began to change and heal. Today, many years later, that church is past the bumps, making a difference in its community.
3. Jesus started small. While he paid respect to the center of Hebrew culture (Jerusalem and the temple), Jesus drew his core followers from the edges of society—younger, marginalized, and needy people hungry for change. Then he let the weight of what he had accomplished in them slowly overwhelm the institutions and hierarchies. He avoided the temptation to go for the “home-run ball” and settled for the “singles and doubles” of leadership development. Fifty years later, the world was being transformed.
4. Jesus gave people a dream—the dream of a new kingdom. With the dream came the promise of power, the assurance that he would never leave them impotent, that he would return. That promise became so strong in their souls that they were willing to risk their lives. What culture-bound churches need is an all-consuming dream that makes people look forward not backward.
Gail and I spent several years with a small congregation in the heart of New York City. When we joined the church, there were fewer than a hundred active people, many of them quite young, single, struggling with personal issues. The culture of the church was dominated by the theme of survival. We helped them see what their church could become. When we left four years later, they were several hundred strong with a new young pastor, fulfilling the dream. Their culture now has a can-do spirit. They are eager to seize ministry opportunities.
You can’t see your church’s cultural jet stream, but it affects your leadership—rain or shine. To lead well, you have to know which way it’s blowing.
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