Pastors and church leaders spend a lot of time talking about strategy, mission, vision, and those things that matter. Yet, they are catalyzing forces for your church and what God has called you to.

However, it won’t matter if your culture and values do not support your strategy, mission, and vision. The words on the wall will be meaningless.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And he’s right.

Culture is a squishy thing. Simply put, culture is how things “get done” without telling anyone. It is the knowledge that this is who we are without being told.

Every church has a culture. It is how worship is done, what is expected of preaching, what can or can’t be changed, what the church would say is the most important thing.

I remember working at a church and going through orientation and learning all the church policies, communication, working with the social media team, getting things done, etc. After the meeting, my assistant pulled me aside and said, “Now, let me tell you how things get done.” That’s culture.

Culture is influential, and often in churches, no one knows how the culture started or why things are the way they are. One of the things I encourage leaders to do when they walk into a new job is to ask why and how questions constantly. Why did this get started? Why do we do this? How did this start? One of my favorite questions is to ask, “What was the problem or issue that led to a meeting that resulted in this decision or way of doing things?” It gets at the why and the beginning, and then, you can ask, “Is that still an issue or a problem?”

I heard of one church that started something because of problems in the parking lot, but when those problems no longer existed, they wouldn’t make changes to their ministry because “we’ve always done it that way.” That’s culture.

What’s important to know is that culture isn’t bad. But it does determine things. And make no mistake, every church and family has a culture.

In his excellent book Look Before You Lead: How to Discern & Shape Your Church Culture, Aubrey Malphurs lists nine reasons values and culture matter to your church:

1. They determine ministry distinctives.
2. They dictate personal involvement.
3. They communicate what is important.
4. They guide change.
5. They influence overall behavior.
6. They inspire people to action.
7. They enhance credible leadership.
8. They shape ministry character.
9. They contribute to ministry success.

Here’s my encouragement for you. Look at this list and ask some questions:

• Is our culture clear?
• Are our values clear?
• Do we like our values and culture?
• Of the nine things listed above, would clarifying our values and culture help with any of those?

As we are starting a new year, figuring out what church in this polarized, covid world looks like, this is a perfect time to clarify who you are as a church and what matters most to you.

Covid did many things in our world and our churches and organizations. All crises do this: they accelerate things and show what was hidden beneath our success. As churches move forward, I think one thing is true: All pastors must think like church planters. 

You might wonder, why? Do they really? What if they aren’t church planters?

First, the why.

The reality is, everyone is a church planter right now.

Most pastors I talk to are seeing 40-50% of their church come back. Most pastors and churches aren’t sure who is a part of their church anymore. There is a constant wonder of where that person is or what happened to that family. As a church planter, you constantly think about who is coming back, who is a part of our church.

Not meeting for several months to a year in some places in many ways wiped the slate clean for churches. It took away a lot of security, a lot of programs of things you used to do, or “the way things have always been around here.”

And the last reason pastors need to think like church planters is in how church planters think. They are dreamers; they try things others won’t try because they are simply trying to survive. But, they are passionate and want to reach people. Now, I’m not saying pastors aren’t like that, but many aren’t. And this isn’t about personality type. I’ve heard many pastors push back on this idea, but that doesn’t mean a pastor can’t think this way.

Here’s how to think like a church planter:

Dream. When was the last time you dreamed about the future, the hopes and plans God has placed on your heart? Take some time to get alone and dream. Here are some questions to work through in that time. So many church planters start a church because they have a dream, see a church, and see a future. This is born in them over many years, and their passion grows and grows.

What do you hope and pray God will do in your church, in you, in your people over the next several years? What are you asking God for? What impact are you hoping to make? This isn’t necessarily about crowds and growth, but impact.

Clarity. What churches and teams need is clarity. So many churches and staffs are tired, demoralized, and exhausted right now. They have spent the last year feeling like they aren’t moving forward, that they aren’t doing anything. So many staffs have no idea what is important anymore. Most pastors lie down each night wondering what is working, who is a part of their church and struggling.

This is why clarity matters so much. Your staff needs to know what matters right now. It doesn’t mean that is the most important thing for your church, just what is most important right now. Something has to win; something is more important than something else. So I told our team: right now, the most important thing is rebuilding through Sunday morning. This means re-engaging people, rebuilding teams, and helping new people and those coming back get connected to God and each other. This doesn’t mean we aren’t doing other things, but it gives us a list of priorities.

So, for the next 3 months, what is the most important thing? The next 6 months?

Don’t go further than that. Most church planters aren’t. They live in monthly cycles. This isn’t the greatest long-term plan, but you are rebuilding. You are restarting.

Look around on a Sunday. Look at your teams and what you do. What isn’t clear? What is confusing? This is the time to get clear on why you do what you do.

Patrick Lencioni describes the job of a leader this way, “Create clarity, communicate clarity, over-communicate clarity.” So if there is one thing pastors need to do right now, it is to create and communicate clarity.

Simplify. One of the things true of many churches is they begin things but never end things. And this makes sense because people are committed to something, someone started something. But over time, things become complex. Slowly, people can’t remember why something started or if it is even doing what it intended to do when it started.

This is an opportunity to simplify.

Church plants are often very simple, many of them meet in rented facilities or don’t have the staff, so they can only do so much.

This is a chance to ask of every program and ministry:

• Why did we start this?
• Does it still do that?
• Do we still need it?
• Do we need to tweak anything to make it more effective?

Start over. I just started at a new church. There are a lot of advantages to starting new, to starting over. A church planter is starting over, starting new. They can do all the things they were never able to do at their last church, all the dreams and ideas they’ve had to put on a shelf, they can take off. The same happens in a move; you take all you’ve ever learned and apply it.

What if you did that without moving?

I remember reading something Andy Grove said years ago, “If the board replaced us (the leadership team at Intel), and they brought in someone new to lead this. What would they do? Why don’t we do that?”

What a great question!

If someone new came in, what would they see? What would they stop? What would they start? Here is a list of questions I asked myself and influencers at my new church when I moved. I’d encourage you to ask yourself, your team, and influencers those same questions now. There is so much gold waiting for you if you will dig a little bit.

Leading right now is not easy, but leading was never supposed to be easy. This is an opportunity, a chance to reimagine what can happen and how God can use your church to reach your community and beyond.

Pause, dream, listen and move forward.

I’m praying for you.

There will be a staff meeting or a production meeting in many churches where we will go around the table and talked about what worked and didn’t work in a service or an event. We’ll learn from what we missed, the miscues, or things that we forgot. We’ll celebrate what worked, how God moved, the guests that came, and the taken steps.

This is all well and good and important.

But over this past year, I have been reminded of something we often miss: Celebrating the unexpected or the things that didn’t go as we planned.

In most churches, we do a good job of celebrating wins and learning from things that don’t work. But what about celebrating what God did in the things that don’t work or go as we planned. I think in covid, many of us had our plans turned upside down. Ideas we had didn’t play out the way we expected. But instead of just turning the page, what if we celebrated what God did in the unexpected? What if we looked back to see God’s hand? To see what he was up to when our plans were upended? I think it can help grow our faith and help us have some closure in some areas.

Here’s an example from my life and church.

In January of 2020, the church I planted merged with another church. In March of 2020, the world shut down because of covid, and our church went fully online. All the plans we had, all the things we had worked on and hoped to do, went out the window. Fast forward to today, that campus won’t reopen. On the one hand, we can look at that and say that it is a failure. It isn’t what we set out to do. The campuses we hoped to launch out of that campus aren’t happening on the timetable we set.

Yet, as I look back over this past year, I see God’s hand all over the place.

I’ve talked to countless pastors leading small to medium-sized portable churches like Revolution, and they are exhausted. Some of them have even left the ministry to take others jobs, which is heartbreaking. Some of those churches no longer exist. In many ways, that merge saved the staff and me at Revolution and kept us in ministry.

What God did was not only in me or at Revolution. The roles the staff of Revolution played at Pantano were perfect fits for us and needed, even though we didn’t know it at the time. We stepped into things that existed and didn’t exist at the time of the merge, and we went fully online as a church. We were able to experiment, learn and help move a church forward into a new hybrid church world.

If we look at a normal way of celebrating things, we can miss this.

So, pull your team together and pull out a journal and write down how you saw God move in the past year in unexpected ways.