Are they written down?
Every church has values. Most churches have these values written down. If you don’t have yours written down then you’re not leveraging the power your values can bring to the church. I’ve heard it over and over “Values sag”. If you’re not revisiting your values as a church, evaluating which of your values is starting to sag, then chances are your church is off course or at least has a value for flying by the seat of your pants. I’m being a little bit sarcastic, but if you really don’t take time for reinforcing the most important aspects of what makes your church unique, then your church will end up being very susceptible to changing winds and fads.
Missional Values
Thanks to this guy named, Rick Warren, most churches these days have some variation of the 5 Purposes as presented in his book, The Purpose Driven Church. Worship, Evangelism, Discipleship, Serving and Community are 5 solid missional values. Your church may have more or less. I’ve seen some churches simply state their missional values as, “Love God, Love People.” These are examples of missional values. They affect what we do as a church, how we disciple people, very often they end up on a wall, in our membership classes and if we’re smart, we revisit our missional values often in our teaching schedule.
Cultural Values
Cultural values are a little bit trickier to figure out. Most churches haven’t figured out what their cultural values are. Most of them are unspoken, but with the right kind of exercises, they can be brought out, celebrated and maximized for your churches benefit.
Some examples of cultural values are: excellence, work ethic, preaching style, seeker-sensitive, recovery focused, education, social justice, and simplicity. The list goes on and on.
Two Kinds of Cultural Values
There are two kinds of cultural values: realized, aspirational. Realized values are already apart of your churches identity. When you talk about these values you can be proud and show specific examples of how it shows up in everyday life. When realized values aren’t followed, everyone notices!
Aspirational values are what you WANT to be a part of your church’s culture. Sometimes these are revealed to you through God and you just have to work on them.
Sometimes aspirational values are discovered when you noticed them in another church or organization. Maybe you like something about how Starbucks treats it’s customers and you want to bring that into your church’s culture.
Sometimes aspirational values are pipe dreams. It’s important to do a values discovery to figure out which values are which so that you don’t waste your time on values that are counter-cultural to your church and to figure out which ones you can maximize to accomplish the vision God has given you and your church.
Comments