This might be cheating #everdaymay peeps, but I have been writing all day and tweaking what I pasted below. And honestly, I have no writing left in me for tonight, my brain is fried. This is the script for my capstone presentation that I will be presenting (tomorrow or Saturday) in the morning. It is just an excerpt really of my 35 page paper that I will be completing in the following week. So, if the nerd in you wants to read it, then have a field day. If not, I won't judge you for skipping out. If you do read it, I would love to engage in the conversation by hearing your feedback. So comment away and fill my academic love tank.
An unprecedented number of new Protestant churches are currently being planted in North America. The proliferation of academic scholarship and interest in the study of church planting across denominations is rapidly changing the ecclesiological landscape in North America. This is evidenced by the sheer amount of church planting resources, which is greater than at any other time in history, whether those resources are books, funds, potential planters, or supporting churches. With this explosion of new churches and tools there is also fresh opportunity for the creative birth of church organization and the embedding or creating of a specific culture within church organizational structure. One of the advantages of church planting is that founding leaders have a unique opportunity to create a culture that reflects their basic assumptions about the mission and purpose of the church as laid out in the New Testament.
Any organizational leader or founder has his own vision or mission that reveals basic assumptions about the church. The word ‘assumption’ is important because what a leader assumes to be true is what the organization will ultimately reflect and what will result in the specific culture of the church. “This is just what we do here” is a phrase that reflects organizational culture. This concept of organizational culture is located within the social sciences discipline, specifically within the branch of organizational theory. Edward Schein, a well-known scholar in the field of organizational management, defined organizational culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid, and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems” He goes on to say, that “culture is to a group what personality or character is to an individual.” The behavior that results is visible to all, but the forces underneath that cause certain kinds of behavior may not be as apparent.
Although the field of social science provides a practical lens through which to understand the church, it alone cannot be the only analysis. Missional scholar, Craig Van Gelder states that a unique characteristic of the church as an organizational structure is that it is both “holy and human.” The biblical or ecclesiological framework for this study is “the missional church”. This framework will become synonymous with leaders basic assumptions of the nature and function of the church.
The term missional was first coined in 1998 in the seminal work Missional Church, compiled by a team of inter-disciplinary academics across multiple denominations. Since this term was coined, it has carried with it a wide spectrum of implications and definitions. Missiologist Ed Stetzer claims that, “Missional is not synonymous with movements attempting to culturally contextualize Christianity, implement church growth, or engage in social action. The word missional can encompass all of the above, but it is not limited to any one of these.” Stetzer says “the word "missional" can be like an ecclesiological junk drawer. People sometimes use the word to justify whatever definition of the church that they prefer. And in doing so, it's loses its meaning.”
As a result, a group of missional practitioners came together recently to form a Missional Manifesto which clearly defines and states the basic principles of what it means to be missional. According to this missional manifesto, “To be missional is to understand the church as the people of a sending God, that are entrusted to participate in the world the same way He does—by committing to be His ambassadors. The calling is applicable to both the ambassador’s native culture and to cross-cultural ministry across the globe. This implies that every believer is “sent out” by the Spirit into a non-Christian culture to spend his or her life participating more fully in God’s mission. Missional is the perspective to see people as God does and to engage in the activity of reaching them. The church on mission is the church as God intended.”
The framework for the missional church is solid, simple, and strategic. However, it is not self-implementing, and requires the design of an organizational structure that works hand-in-hand with its theology in order to fully participate in God’s mission. This implementation of missional theology is accomplished through organizational culture. Creating a missional culture within a church starts with the pastor, founder, or church planter, making missional leadership the means for embedding culture in an organization. The unique function of leadership that distinguishes itself from management and administration is this concern for organizational culture. Leadership begins the culture creation process, and at times must also manage and sometimes change culture.
The first question to ask is how do church leaders actually get their message across? The simplest answer, but not complete answer, is that they do so through their own charisma. Schein defines this as “that mysterious ability to capture the subordinates’ attention and to communicate major assumptions and values in a vivid and clear manner.” Although charisma is an important mechanism of culture creation, it is not always a reliable mechanism for embedding or socializing members. There is a necessary need for there to be alternative tools or methods for leaders to create culture.
In Schein’s book, Organizational Culture and Leadership, he devotes a section to the creation of organization culture. Here he provides six primary directives for leaders with the primary purpose of creating culture. He follows these primary directives, with six secondary mechanisms that reinforce and articulate the primary tools. It is important to understand that both the primary and secondary mechanisms only function as tools for leaders to teach their organizations how to perceive, think, feel, and behave based on their own conscious and unconscious convictions. These culture inducing elements all interact together and tend to reinforce each other, but only if the leader’s own beliefs, values, and assumptions are consistent. Consistency therefore becomes vital for embedding culture. As culture is being developed, most of the socialization process is embedded in the organization’s normal working routines. It is NOT necessary for newcomers to attend special training and indoctrination sessions to learn important cultural assumptions within the church because they become quite evident through the daily behaviors of the leaders. They are implicit and learned more commonly through an undercurrent of culture rather than through direct, didactic methods.
As mentioned, above Edward Schein provides six specific primary directives for culture creation. The first is what leaders pay attention to, measure, and control on a regular basis; the second is how leaders react to critical incidents and organizational crises; the third is how leaders allocate resources; the fourth is the deliberate role modeling, teaching, and coaching; the fifth is how leaders allocate rewards and status; and last is how leaders select, promote, and excommunicate. I want to show, how taking culture creation within the study of organizational theory, and how this theory is applied to the missional organizational model. I will use the first embedding mechanism of what leaders pay attention to, measure and control on a regular basis, as my example for merging these frameworks.
This is the most powerful of the tools because what leaders believe to be most true will be the things that they systematically pay attention to. If a leader is aware of this process, then being systematic in paying attention to certain things become a powerful way of communicating a message, especially if leaders are completely consistent in their behavior. So how does this translate to the missional church and its leadership? Missional leaders will not measure the success of their church by church growth in terms of attendance numbers, but by the number of members who are being equipped and “sent out” to local communities and the world. They will understand that growth without missional engagement ultimately is reduced to the weekly warehousing and managing of organizational volunteers. Also, missional leaders pay attention to how closely their congregation demographically resembles the community in which it is planted. Missional leaders understand that its primary attention and focus is given to their own back yard and community. In summary, missional engagement of members will be the chief measurement and focus of missional leaders.
Along with these primary tools, Schein provides secondary mechanisms that serve to articulate and reinforce culture. These six secondary mechanism are as follows: the first is organizational design and structure; the second is organizational systems and procedures; the third is the rites and rituals of the organization; the fourth is the design of the physical space, facades, and building; the fifth is the stories about important events and people; and the last is the formal statements of philosophy, creeds, and charters. It is important to note that these are cultural reinforcement and NOT cultural creators. These are secondary because they work only if they are consistent with the primary mechanisms discussed previously in this presentation. However, when they are consistent, they begin to build organizational ideologies and as a result formalize much of what is informally learned at the onset. Another way to conceptualize these secondary tools is as cultural artifacts. These artifacts are highly visible but may be difficult to interpret without insider knowledge obtained from observing leaders’ actual behaviors.
An example of bringing these visible cultural artifacts into the missional framework is through organizational design and structure. Taking this concept into the missional church has direct implications for its organizational structure. The church has a rich organizational tradition of denominations that utilizes a specific lexicon and includes terms such as “laymen”, “pastor”, “clergy”, “priests”, “pastors”, “ministers”, and “missionary”. These words imply a distinct hierarchy and identity construction that qualifies what roles church members of churches can and cannot have. The missional leader deconstructs this idea of hierarchy and uses language that places everyone on the same level, eliminating the privileging associated with position. The missional leader will become a crafty words smith that is mindful of the lexical baggage that is associated with certain words, in order to accurately describe and articulate the individual’s role and qualification to engage in the mission of God. This deconstruction of hierarchy through language reminds members that there is no special training, title, or experience that equips people to live on mission. Rather the missional leader is relentless to identify all members as equipped and called to missional living through organizational design and structure.
In conclusion, Schein’s primary and secondary mechanisms allow a glimpse into what culture creation might look like within the missional church. All leaders will embed culture whether they intend to or not. This is why the field of social science and organizational theory is an effective and necessary lens for understanding the church as an organization. Church leaders across denominations must identify themselves as cultural architects. If missional leaders will choose to identify their churches as organizational structures and to see themselves as cultural architects, then they have the potential to create missional individuals at the structural and organizational level. This organizational structure then not only serves the church, but then also becomes a direct reflection of the nature of God, as a sending God, who has sent his church into the world, to accomplish His mission. There is too much at stake to ignore the power that missional leadership has to shape organizational culture in their churches.
