Ask five people on your staff to name your church’s values. Most of them will name a few. Somebody will nail all of them, probably whoever designed the wall graphic.

Then watch Tuesday.

Watch the hiring conversation. Watch the budget meeting. Watch what happens when somebody underperforms and the room decides to be gracious about it for the fourth month in a row.

Your values are known. They are just not deciding anything. They are words, but not behaviors driving the organization. 

Repetition fixes a communication problem, and you have been repeating these values for years. Tuesday still looks like Tuesday. So something else is going on.

Almost Every Church Has a List

Very few churches have a list that costs them something.

Patrick Lencioni sorted the counterfeits into three categories years ago, and they hold up in ministry with almost no translation. Once you can name them, you cannot unsee them on your own wall.

The ones you wish were true

Aspirational values describe the church you want to be. They read beautifully. They also confuse your staff, because your team is watching behavior instead of the wall.

A church claims to be “for the unchurched,” yet every environment assumes you already know the vocabulary. A church claims generosity and has never once given an offering away. Nobody is lying about it. The value describes a future the church has not built yet.

Aspirations are worth having. Put them in the plan.

The ones every church claims

Integrity. Excellence. Biblical. Loving.

Ask whether a single church in your city would publicly claim the opposite. If none would, you have named the minimum standard for being a church.

These are the price of admission. They belong in your handbook, your hiring conversations, and your elder qualifications. They will not shape culture, because a value that describes everyone describes no one.

The ones that belong to 2013

Accidental values form quietly. They describe the people who happened to be in the room when the church started, and they harden before anyone decides whether to keep them.

“Family” is the most common one in ministry. It sounds warm. In practice, it often means slow to hire, slower to release, and permanently confusing for anyone who joins the staff after the founding group.

You are leading a different church than the one that launched. When accidental values go unexamined, they narrow your hiring pool and quietly veto the future.

What a Real Value Actually Does

Strip away the three counterfeits and look at what survives. A real value functions.

• It works as a foundational building block for how decisions get made.
• It becomes the covenant in the chaos, the thing the room returns to when pressure is high.
• It gives you language for hard conversations that is about behavior instead of personality.
• It makes you distinctively you, meaning another church could not claim it without lying.

That last one is the tell.

A value you have never used in a hard conversation is a preference.

Your Culture Is Already Being Written

Here is what makes this urgent rather than interesting. Culture does not wait for you to define it. When the stated values stop deciding things, the real ones form anyway, and they form around whoever is loudest, longest-tenured, or hardest to confront.

Your new hires figure out the actual values in about six weeks. They learn them in the parking lot, from the staff member who explains how things really work here. Every one of those conversations is a culture you did not design instructing someone you just recruited.

Sort the List This Week

Do this in your next staff meeting. It takes about thirty minutes, and you do not need a facilitator.

1. Have every leader write your organizational values from memory. No phones, no website, no wall. What people cannot recall, they are not using.
2. Sort each value into one of three piles. The ones describing who you hope to be. The ones every church claims. The ones describing the team you had a decade ago.
3. Look at what is left standing. That is your actual list, and it is usually shorter than the wall version.

Step three is the point of the exercise.

One More Thing

If sorting the list surfaces more questions than answers, that is usually a design problem rather than a values problem. The Church Accelerator Intensive work I do with churches all over the world creates an organizational system for your staff and core volunteers so you never lose clarity and alignment in the chaos again.

Check it out. It could be exactly what your church needs in this season.

Gavin

Quotes to Share

• “A value you have never used in a hard conversation is a preference.”
• “A value that describes everyone describes no one.”
• “Your new hires learn the real values in the parking lot within six weeks.”