What's your Church Culture?
Written by Dan Leppo Thursday, 13 October 2011 20:00
In its most basic form, every Christ-following church should be devoted to worshipping, knowing, and serving the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. However, one of the awesome gifts God has given His church is the free will to ‘customize’ the approach towards accomplishing these core tasks. Undoubtedly, you, as a pastor, felt God’s calling to lead a church, and a major part of that calling was imparting your gifts in building the church. With the assistance of the Holy Spirit, you are charged with developing a culture for that church. What should that culture look like?
First, you should be considering the strategy of how you’re going to reach out to your membership and your surrounding community. When given the charge to prepare for the seven years of abundance and seven subsequent years of famine by Pharaoh, Joseph developed a strategy in dealing with these upcoming issues. What is your strategy? Are you and/or staff prepared to respond to the leading of the Lord and the needs of the people? Do you have access to the necessary resources? An underdeveloped strategy leads to less than optimal connection and service to your membership and community. Membership growth becomes more difficult and attrition becomes more likely.
Even if you have a good strategy in place, to you have the organization structure established to implement the strategy? Is your leadership effectively communicating and delivering the strategy you’ve developed? How do you monitor this? An occasional staff meeting is probably not enough. Moreover, do you or your staff have the tools to execute the strategy?
As a pastor, you’re likely drawing on many aspects of life to help you develop your culture. Running a church is clearly a people business, and the business world has defined an important component of its sustainability via a focus on customer service. In other words, are our clients and customers satisfied with the products and services we’re offering? After all, they likely have many options to choose from, so we need to make sure they feel not only that they’ve received value, but also that they’ll come back again because they know where the value is. This is the case for churches as well. Jesus promises He’ll never forsake us – neither should His church lose track of its devotion to caring for and servicing its membership.
Your strategy, organization structure, and stated objective of superior service are all important in developing your church’s culture. However, the delivery of these must be consistent and repeatable. Sheep are typically easily influenced and prone to wander, so in order for them to be secure and safe they need to know that there’s a reliability to the leadership’s approach.
Do you have the tool or tools to accomplish the objectives of your culture? MRMBER.COM would like to introduce you to a Kingdom-based solution to aiding you with the implementation of your church’s culture. Our system provides an interactive environment that fosters regular and easily accessible communication between you, your staff, and your membership. Accountability is at the forefront of the system, and this is what will help you deliver the culture to your flock. If you’re interested in learning more about such a tool, please contact us at 1800-564-9905.
