In the previous blog, we introduced a podcast with Bobby Harrington, Bart Shaw, and Renee Sproles on creating a Disciple-making culture in a church. In the podcast, Bobby, Bart, and Renee discussed that culture eats strategy for breakfast. However, you have to have some sort of strategy to create a culture in a church. Bobby stated that the reality is that you will create a culture, it is inevitable. What you must be intentional about is using a strategy to create a specific culture that produces disciples who make disciples. You can listen to the full Podcast along with other resources on our Disciple Making Culture Resource Page!
Bobby argued that a church’s culture is created through core values, core beliefs, behaviors, and narrative. “It’s what we truly believe. Again, it’s not what we say we believe, but it’s what we truly believe. My core value is the value that I place on scripture believing, adhering to, and following scripture alone as my final authority. because that belief is really true of me, you’re going to see it in my behaviors, you’re going to see it in how I talk. You have things you really believe, and a church will have that. What do you really value and believe?”
“We have beliefs, faith statements. These are the hills that we’re either willing to die on or to be wounded defending and every church needs clarity on that. What they’re, what truly matters. For the discipleship. org tribe we value being disciples of Jesus and making disciples of Jesus.”
“That leads to behavior. What disciplines, what behavior are we committed to so that they become habits? These habits and behaviors are the essence of living out our beliefs. They’re we might call it the hand expression of what’s in our head. They’re the habits that form lifestyles and lifestyles reflect behaviors. So when we say, ‘culture is here’s how we do things around here. Say at my church, one of the things I’m grateful for is we have a culture where everybody’s in a discipling group. It’s just like, it’s what we do around here. we may not have the best preaching on the planet, but we have a culture where everybody’s knows that we’re about being in discipling groups. That’s our behavior.”
“Then finally is narrative. It’s how we talk about ourselves, it’s our language, like language, you work on your language and then your language works on you. It’s our language, descriptions and sayings, and it’s our stories. What’s our unique story? We’re all disciples who make disciples. We like to celebrate disciple-making stories. If somebody’s being baptized, we have the person who discipled them baptizing them. We talk about this person who is being baptized and who is going to disciple them.”
“Notice that dominant cultures have congruency throughout. The values and beliefs are reflected in the behaviors, which are reflected in the stories we tell in the language, and then their intentionality. We intentionally do those things all the time.”
Bobby then went on to describe the stereotypical culture of the modern church. Bobby argues that the modern church focus on the 3 P’s: Preachers, Praise and Worship, and Programs.
“The North American church has valued and made a core belief, great preaching, praise and worship and programs. We have persuaded people and people have persuaded us as church leaders that you get a successful church if you have great preaching, great praise and worship, and great programs. This shows itself up in behaviors. In your typical church, it’s a successful church if you can get a great preacher and if we have the best band, the best lights and sounds, LED screens, and the best programs. Those are the behaviors.”
“So your people want to sign up for the right programs and go to the right church with the preacher, the praise, and worship, and then we have a narrative about that. ‘Well, our preacher, he’s a great preacher. Did you hear the preacher this past Sunday? Wasn’t he awesome? So and so is such a great praise and worship leader, or our church just has the best programs for kids.’”
“I think all of those things I’ve just said create a culture that’s not a disciple-making culture. Are disciples going to be found in those churches? Yes. Are some of those things helpful in creating disciples? Yes. It’s better to have a good preacher than a bad one. But the three Ps that our culture prizes, Praise and worship, preaching, and programs, often those things don’t actually make disciples.
Bart responded, “That is the church in America for sure. And there’s been reasons for that. We’ve had to adapt and contextualize to culture. Some of those things are good. Some are probably not so good. The emphasis can get one or two degrees off and over time you’re way off. I’ll say this in defense of that culture. I think 20 years ago, you could get by emphasizing those things in a way that you can’t now.”
“You’re always contextualizing and trying to meet the needs of people. At some point, it was relevant, it was helpful, and it brought the church alive to people who had never seen it and heard it that way before. Which is great, but then you can get stuck there. I read Mike Breen’s book years ago, how to build a disciple making culture and he said something to the effect that if you look to build the church, you rarely get disciples. You look to make disciples you always get the church.”
“When you’re trying to build the church you rarely get disciples if you follow that methodology, but if you get at the heart of obedience and what it means to make disciples and followers of Jesus, if you give agency to the people, it fundamentally changes, and you get, you make disciples, you will get the natural byproduct, which is the church, and so we are trying to reverse that trend, and that is a cultural wave inside the church that we’re fighting against. And it’s hard because we’re fighting against the consumer mindset we’ve built. We’re having to try to help people reimagine what it looks like to have agency as a disciple, to disciple their kids and their families, and to be a disciple maker when they thought only the professional can do that thing.”
Renee added, “It is a challenge to move from a come and watch, to come alongside and do it with me, to go and do. Come and watch is not unnecessary. You need good teaching, but what I’m finding is, that we, in North America, have viewed humans as brains on a stick, and we think if we mentally assented to the right information, it’s equivalent to actually doing it. That’s not the case. Your people to have correct behaviors need to know the right beliefs. And yet a lot of times you can work backwards. You can require a behavior that brings great understanding to the belief, to the Scripture. So, requiring your people to obey, even when they don’t understand it, especially when they don’t understand it, especially when they don’t like it, and celebrating that when they do it can be super powerful.”
In part 3 of this blog series, we discuss moving from a consumer church culture to one that does life together.
Check out our other resources on our new Disciple Making Culture Resource Page!