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How is your church's culture being formed?

July 18, 2005

I'm reading through Culture Shift by Robert Lewis and Wayne Cordiero right now. It's a great book so far - one that I'm intentionally reading slower than normal so I have time to process and reflect on it. I came across this today and it just resonated with me, so I thought I'd share it with you all.

As we look across our congregations we often fail to see a transformational culture being birthed from healthy hearts. Instead, we see business as usual. The influence on our churches from the worlds of entertainment, corporate excellence, felt-need marketing, multimedia, technology, and even business management all offer helpful elemements (NOTE: I would argue the helpfulness of several categories mentioned, but agree that things like technology and multimedia can be helpful if used as means rather than an end in and of themselves.)

But along the way, we need to ask:

• Are our church cultures transforming the broader culture, or mimicking it?
  
• Are we too susceptible to the latest plug-and-play church program or pattern of quick fixes?
  
• Do we care more about doing the next event than about transference of values?
  
• Will we one day find ourselves filing our mission statement away in a drawer rather than living it?
  
• Are we stuck, simply mimicking the best practices from others rather than finding out God's best for our church?
  

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