Culture is the summation of the values, thoughts, attitudes, and actions of those persons within it. According to John Kotter, culture is more simply, “the way we do things around here.” And every environment in which we find ourselves has a culture.
Your home has a culture.
Your workplace has a culture.
And your church has a culture.
Culture is built over years of shared experiences, of joys and pain, and responses to factors in the environment. It is like the set of unwritten rules that people abide by while in that particular environment. It’s not just about behavior – it’s about how you think. How you feel. And then, of course, how you behave. The culture of a given environment is what lays below the surface; it’s that which truly governs that environment.
The concept of culture is a little bit like rebar on a construction site. No one comes to a building in its early stages and marvels at the extensive nature of its rebar. Instead, we wait until the structure actually starts to go up; we don’t want to see what makes it stable—we want to see what makes it pretty.
Even though rebar isn’t pretty, it’s incredibly necessary. Rebar gives a building its stability and strength. It’s what holds everything together below the surface, making a structure resistant against the forces of time and nature.
Without rebar, a building crumbles, because rebar is what truly governs the shape of everything else that goes on top of it. The same thing is true of culture.
That brings us to an important question: What do you want the culture of your church to be?
Surely there are lots of answers here - we want the unwritten rules of the church to be kindness. And joyfulness. And truthfulness. And mission. All of those and more. But what would it look like if the best descriptor of the culture in your church was summed up in one word:
Discipleship.
Surely that’s at least part of - if not the main - answer to the question. This is the broadest mission of the church, after all - to go and make disciples of Jesus. But it’s not part of the culture until it’s not just the mission of the church; it’s the mission of every member of the church. It’s not part of the culture until everyone thinks of discipleship as part of their own job description.
Isn’t this where we want to be? Isn’t this the kind of church we want to lead? Not one in which paid staff members run programs that people participate in, but instead, one in which every member of the church sees the ongoing spiritual growth of the whole congregation as their own personal job description. But how do we begin to embed this value in the culture? How do we not only “do” discipleship, but create a discipleship culture? Here are three suggestions:
- Spread out leadership. Far too often leadership in our churches is confined to a select few people. The same people. If we want to embed discipleship into the culture, it will only happen as we empower and release new leaders with regularity.
- Free up margin. One of the obstacles to a cultural characteristic of discipleship is, ironically, discipleship programming. Often our people are so over-programmed that they don’t have any margin to embrace the more organic opportunities for discipleship around them. They can’t just invite someone to read the Bible with them. Or to meet for breakfast and prayer. They are too busy going to another discipleship class.
- Treat discipleship as a lifestyle. Do we need discipleship classes? We do. But even as we do, we must be careful that we don’t treat, and therefore train people to think of discipleship as an intellectual pursuit. Discipleship is a way of living, and until people see that, it can never be part of the church culture.
The call of Jesus to us (and our people) is to make disciples. Let’s do what we can to make sure this call is integrated deeply into everything we do in the church. When that happens, discipleship becomes everyone’s job.