The ’90s Called (Part 3)
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The ’90s called again, and they want their core values back.
In Part 3 of our series, Sean and I discuss how churches can move beyond generic “permission to play” values to define authentic, culture-shaping behaviors that drive real organizational change:
- why traditional church core values often end up as meaningless wall art
- the difference between “permission to play” values and true culture-shaping behaviors
- how to identify and define values that reflect who you actually are (not who you wish to be)
- practical steps for embedding these behaviors into hiring, firing and performance management
- why senior leaders must model the behaviors they want to see in their culture
Plus, we explain why values should be tangible and observable, share real examples of effective culture-shaping behaviors, and provide guidance for leaders who want to intentionally shape their organizational culture through clear behavioral expectations.

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More Episodes in This Series
- Vision Statement – Episode 379
- Mission Statement – Episode 378
- 3 Ring Binder – Episode 381
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host, and of course, I’m joined by Amy Anderson. Amy, last week I mentioned that this conversation about the nineties took me back to some of those memories of top movies. Of the nineties. This week I was thinking about something similar, but recalling some of my top TV shows in that decade. And you remember back in the nineties, if you wanted to watch something on tv, you had to actually be on your couch at a very specific time to watch it.
Amy:
Yes, I do.
Sean:
Typically, you’d have to look kind of at a TV guide or a newspaper. I’d pick up the newspaper to know what time something came on that just feels like a hundred years ago would be so foreign to my kids at this point. When we got more technologically advanced at my house, we actually had a VHS player that had a recording function on it that you could set your VHS tape to record a show at a certain time.
Amy:
It was mind blowing back then.
Sean:
It was, I thought we were so advanced at the time, which is just funny to think about now. But I was thinking about those top TV shows and here are some that came to mind. I looked at a list top TV shows in the 1990s. Of course we had Friends. That was a big hit.
Amy:
Yes, that was a good show.
Sean:
Seinfeld, massive hit. Do you remember Home Improvement?
Amy:
Yes. Tim, with the neighbor, what was it Wilson? No, what is his name?
Sean:
I don’t remember the neighbor’s name. I just remember you could never see him.
Amy:
You couldn’t see over the Fence.
Sean:
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Big hit.
Amy:
Big hit.
Sean:
The West Wing, which I actually didn’t watch in the nineties. I watched it later on Netflix or something. Good show.
Amy:
Well, I can relate. I think all of the ones that you’ve talked through so far, I never saw when they were in their original run. I was having little kids at that time. We did watch America’s Funniest Home Videos, and if I remember right, ER was the one we never missed back in the day.
Sean:
ER, that was the other big one on my list. And then my all time favorite of the 1990s was the X-Files. Do you remember that show?
Amy:
Never saw it. I know. Different season.
Sean:
I don’t know if it’s just me. Actually, my kids have seen a few episodes of the X-Files. They really liked it as well. So it’s still cool.
Amy:
Sully or Gully or something like that.
Sean:
Scully and Molder.
Amy:
Scully and Molder. I was close.
Sean:
Yeah, you were. Alright. Well, we’re in this series that’s kind of highlighted the dated approaches of ministry leadership that we’re still seeing sometimes in church. And this week on the nineties called, we want to talk about the core values.
Amy:
Yeah, the core values. It’s so true. This idea of defining core values, I think is rooted way back when in the nineties, is rooted in a good practice. I mean, you do wanna make it clear for your staff and for your congregation what values you want to see exhibited. But most churches have a list of core values that don’t actually shape their culture. You know what I mean?
Sean:
Absolutely. Okay, so let’s jump right in. Let’s talk about why this kind of decades old approach to core values often fails to create real cultural change in churches.
Amy:
Yeah. Again, I’ll start with some of the terminology or word challenges we have in the church. I think churches often have these beautifully worded values, but they don’t translate into actual behaviors. And when they don’t translate into actual behaviors, then they really don’t shape the culture. That’s what I was trying to say before. And that’s actually I think what we want core values to do. We want them to shape the culture of the church. We want them to reflect this distinctness of that specific church body. But getting back to words, just like mission and vision, I think sometimes it’s confusing as to what the term value means. To some churches, I think they use that term values to state things that they value or care about. Things like mercy, justice, global missions, things like that.
Other churches state things that they aspire their people and their church to be becoming things like Christ centered, prayer dependent, disciple making, living generously would be another example. And then other churches state their values as behaviors that they wanna see in their people. Things like integrity, authenticity, teamwork, and sometimes these are church-wide and sometimes those are staff values. So I think a big part of the tension is that we have to define what we’re trying to define. Otherwise, I think core values basically turn into churchy words that really don’t create or drive real culture changes in the church. And they can be written beautifully, but not really have an impact.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good. Amy. I was prepping for the podcast. I did some Google searches on core values in the church, and what I found is exactly what you’re talking about. So here are a couple of examples. One, church stated that their values were worshiping God. Loving people. And serving the world. Another church said that their values were reach, serve, give, and build, like build the kingdom, invest in the next generation. Plant, churches, that sort of thing. And then I found ones that wanted to use the first letter for each word. So, evangelism, engagement, equipping, expansion, encouragement. So there’s some examples of what you’re mentioning, Amy.
Amy:
It sounds a lot like what I’ve experienced over the years as I’ve worked with churches on their values and let me be clear, none of these are bad lists of values. If we happen to pick your churches not on purpose, they’re not bad. I wanna be a part of churches that are about worshiping God, serving other people, building the kingdom, equipping the saints. You know, it all goes back to the tension of what we’re really trying to define. What is the purpose of defining core values at the church? And by the way, the senior pastors that I’ve worked with, get this. I had one pastor in Cincinnati, Ohio a few years back, he held up this little table tent that had their values on it. And he was like, what are these, what do they even mean? And why did it take us almost a year to come up with them? And in the nineties, I think every pastor knew that they had to have core values, just like a mission and a vision. And they went through some sort of exercise to get a list on the webpage, but why? I’m not sure they knew why.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good. Alright, so let’s move into solutions. Amy, in your experience, what’s the better approach to this?
Amy:
Well, when I work with churches on this topic of values, I break it into two priorities, and I’ll cover the first one briefly, but then camp on the second for the rest of the podcast. First, I do think it’s valuable to define for your church who you want the followers of Jesus in your church to be becoming. In our strategic alignment pyramid, a tool that we talk about regularly on the podcast that guides churches to align their ministry work. The first section we talk about is the foundational section at the bottom of the pyramid. This layer defines your core beliefs. Like what are the things the bible’s crystal clear on. It defines your mission, why your church exists, and then it defines your discipleship outcomes on who you want people to be becoming. And for our longer listening listeners, that term might sound new, and it is, for many years we had titled that that layer of the pyramid making disciples answering the same question, who are we becoming? For recently we updated the wording to call it discipleship outcomes, which by the way, some churches call these values. It means though, regardless of how we do ministry, what our approaches are, these are the attributes that we wanna see developed in the Jesus follower of our church.
Maybe example will help the church that I served at for over a decade, Eaglebrook church here in the Twin Cities defines their discipleship outcomes this way. Follow Jesus. And that’s based out of Ephesians two eight. And this emphasizes that following Jesus as an ongoing commitment, something we need to strive to do every day. They want their people in their, in the church to have that in them. That’s who they’re becoming. People who strive to follow Jesus every day. The second one is spend time with God. That, of course, is embracing those spiritual disciplines. Connect in community, do life with other believers, serve others. We’ve all been given gifts to serve and then live generously. So just the whole stewardship concept of recognizing everything we’ve been given is the lord’s and we’re the stewards of it. And so those five are the outcomes that they wanna see in the people who are following Jesus in their church.
So those are great values defining who we want our people to be becoming. And I think every church should have their version of this, but where I wanna focus on our remaining time on is something that’s probably more important than defining desired outcomes. And that’s because I believe having a strong culture within your team is more important. Your culture, whether it’s healthy or toxic, or any place in between, will do more to impact the fulfillment of your mission than whether or not you have clearly articulated values or discipleship outcomes. So my focus will be on your team and the culture of your team, we call them culture shaping behaviors, and you might call them staff values.
Sean:
So with that as a focus, Amy, what steps can churches take to develop those culture shaping behaviors? Walk us through how a church can implement this.
Amy:
Well, here’s the good news. With very few exceptions, we get this work done within two hours when we work with church teams in our staffing and structure process.
Sean:
It’s great news.
Amy:
Its is. It’s not nine months long like my Cincinnati pastor was belaboring. And churches typically get them installed within their teams in about 30 to 60 days. The process really works. Of course, I will say it helps to have an outside facilitator, but you can do this on your own as well. So the first place that I would start is just to gather your top leaders at your church. These are typically staff leaders, somewhere between eight to 12 people. And these should be people who you wish everyone was like, people that model the staff culture, even if we haven’t named it yet, people that model the staff culture that you’re trying to replicate. And if you’re a smaller church, you don’t have to have eight to 12, you can get four to five, but just you want a conversation around this.
And then at that meeting, describe how top leaders that you want to mimic, how do they behave, what do they do? What do they have in common? And at this point, by the way, all you’re trying to do is create a long list of behaviors that these leaders exhibit. We’re not doing any editing yet. We’re just saying we do. We see in our culture that we love. Write those down. And then once you have your long list finished, then just talk it out. Talk it out, and determine what are the top four to six behaviors that represent the distinct behaviors of your top performers or reflectors of your culture. What do they all have in common?
Some examples of this, they’re never satisfied with the status quo. Good is never good enough. I see that in a lot of the teams that I work with, that they’re, you might call it excellence, you might call it improvement, but it’s all about never being satisfied. They put people first. There’s another one. I was just with a church that had ones very similar to this. People are more important than a task list. This is the kind of church that if you’re walking through the lobby as a staff member and someone stops you, guess what? You stop because it’s about people first. That’s part of their culture. How about this one? They have a great sense of humor. And they do ministry and team from a place of joy.
So in fact, Sean, you and I just served a great church. Different parts of our engagement in Springfield, Missouri, the Well Church. I loved them. I walked them through this activity and here’s the five that they landed on. Let me pull them up here. Resilient. So they said we have grit when it would be easy to quit. And doesn’t that reflect what you saw in that team?
Sean:
Oh, a hundred percent. You know, it’s interesting too, because they’ve been working on this building project for a number of years. And the campus that’s moving into this new building has been meeting in high school and they’re doing a great job in that place, but it’s not a permanent spot for them. They’ve had delays with this building project. They’ve had other things that have gone on, and it’s certainly been frustrating to the team. But man, the way that that team has rallied. That location that they’re in right now continues to grow, continues to see more people come to Jesus in the midst of a lot of frustration just around building, which I know a number of churches have had in the last few years. They have really pulled together and exhibited that scrappiness that you’re talking about. So, absolutely.
Amy:
They’re a resilient crew. The second one they had was team builders. It’s not about the work we do, but the work that we unleash others to do. And again, doesn’t that resonate with the distinctness of their team? It’s not about the work we do staff members. It’s the work we unleash others to do.
Sean:
And this one might be the most distinct from that. My experience with the Well and Pastor Selena there, it actually flows out of, and we see this with these values, these culture shaping behaviors, a lot of times they flow out of the leaders. Selena is one of the best that I’ve ever seen at empowering other people. And specifically at empowering younger people to step up and carry parts of ministry leadership. She’s phenomenal at it. She’s got a gift at it, and she reflects that behavior very well within their team.
Amy:
And what I like about this is if you weren’t a ministry leader who could give ministry away, this is not the team you wanna work on, I mean, this is the clarity it brings. Let me run through the last three here. Teachable. They said, we’re humble enough to know that we don’t know it all and secure enough to ask for the help and wisdom of others. Number four, we’re servant leaders. We see the need, we meet the need. No work is beneath us. And number five, authentic. We don’t hide who we are. And this inspires others to do the same. And Sean, again, I think in their context, they are in a recovery community, and it’s so important that that transparency and authenticity is there.
Sean:
Absolutely.
Amy:
Here’s what I love about these five. That is who they are. That represents who the team is at the well. And really when we talk about values in this form of staff behaviors, we don’t want these things to be aspirational. We want these values to reflect this is who we are, this is how we behave. And when these are done well, it really can impact positively how you hire, even when you have to fire and how you onboard new employees. And the list goes on, the benefits from having these statements.
Sean:
Amy, before we move on to the solution side of things here, I want to take a moment just to thank our podcast sponsor, PlainJoe. With PlainJoe, churches can really unleash the power of their church’s story. PlainJoe has a creative, fun-loving team of designers, architects, specialists. They come alongside churches to help excel in their storytelling and reach people who need the church. PlainJoe has expertise around strategic, spatial and digital storytelling, from brand development to architecture to website design and many other things. And you can actually learn more about their services and their team at plainjoe.net.
Amy, as you were talking about next steps, I think it’s important to emphasize to our listeners that this is not an aspirational list of who we wanna be, right? Because the truth is, these culture shaping behaviors are the reflection of those top leaders in of our organization.
And it starts with the lead pastor of the church. The culture in the church and within your team will reflect how you as the pastor behave and more specifically how you treat other people. But if you find yourself looking at this short list of behaviors and wishing you could swap out a few of those for some new ones, you do have some options. First, it would be the aspirational approach, right? Tell them, this is who we are and will be. But that aspirational approach doesn’t work. Because the culture is what it is. You can’t put words on a wall or handbook and change that. The effective way, again, if you wanna shape a healthier culture, is for you, the lead pastor and some other top leaders to start behaving differently. And this is the good news, by behaving in ways that you want reflected in the team, then you have the ability to influence the culture of the team.
For example, let’s say that you want the organization, you wish that it was more curious. If you wanna create a culture of curiosity, then you as the pastor, have to begin to lead with good questions as you engage conversations. And as you engage that decision making process, right? If you wanna create a culture of continuous improvement, then you need to model being intentional about improving your leadership and your preaching by modeling humility and asking for feedback from other people. In other words, model humble continuous improvement in the areas where you have some control, beginning with your preaching and your leadership. Another example might be if you want to create a culture of collaboration, then you need to invite others into solving challenges and overcoming obstacles with you. And that means you can’t come with all of the answers to those challenges and obstacles. You need to invite others into the process as well. So again, the first thing here is, as the lead pastor, you need to start behaving like the culture that you wanna create among your team.
Amy:
Yeah. Sean, if I can jump in, the other thing I would add as you walk through this activity, we said avoid aspirational. The second thing is work hard to keep what we call permission to play behaviors off this list. It’s things like, we read the Bible, we pray, we follow God’s spirit. And again, these are all good things, but these are all things team members should be doing if they’re on a church staff team. So that’s why I call ’em permission to play. Rather, I want you to focus, listeners, on distinctive behaviors. So a litmus test for permission to play behaviors would be your ability to go assess them in others. So for example, going back to the Well’s list, I can assess if a team member has grit, I can assess. It’s observable if a team member is a servant leader. But if you ask me to assess, do they follow God’s spirit or do they live a life of prayer? Honestly, I would be guessing. So those behaviors, they need to be tangible and they need to be observable.
Sean:
Yeah. Amy, thanks for walking our listeners through how they can define and shape the culture of their team. I think it’s so important for our listeners, if this is something that your team has not yet defined, we wanna challenge you to put a meeting on the calendar to brainstorm with your senior leadership team, your group of leaders around you, five, four or five culture shaping behaviors. And remember, the key is to start with the behaviors you’re already modeling, avoid aspirational, and those what Amy talked about, permission to play attributes. Amy, before we come to a close, can you just say a few words about the next steps? Once a team has done the work of defining the distinct culture shaping behaviors themselves?
Amy:
Yeah. Some next steps. Once you’ve defined your four, five, or six behaviors, here’s a couple of next steps you could take to begin to embed them in your organization. So first, again, for the top leaders, you have to model them. So I would just encourage you, keep yourself and the senior leadership accountable to the behaviors that you’ve defined. Second thing I’d encourage you to do is to teach it. Staff meetings are a great opportunity to teach and reinforce these values. And as the senior leader, you have to keep this desire, these desired culture shaping behaviors in front of your team. ’cause culture is one of those areas that we talk about often that can’t be delegated to another leader. So teach it, right? Take time in those staff meetings to talk about those behaviors. And lastly, I just encourage you to embed these culture conversations into your one-on-one meetings with staff members.
You know, when we assess performance or talk about performance, we wanna assess character chemistry and competence. But if you’ve got these behaviors defined, I would assess culture as well. And there’s two things to do when you’re doing that. One is when you see people living out your culture, well make sure you call ’em out and tell ’em, because what gets noticed gets repeated on your team. And likewise, if you’re seeing someone not living it out, or maybe counter to the culture you’ve defined, that’s when you need to step in. You get what you tolerate. So you need to step in and have kind of a performance based conversation around what needs to change in that person. Don’t let behaviors and attitudes that go against the culture that you’ve agreed upon continue. I just wanna say that sometimes when we look the other way, that’s why I use that phrase, we get what we tolerate.
You have to hold yourself accountable. Because people don’t know what it’s like to be on the other side of them. And we don’t want this to be a blind spot for our team members. So hold your team members accountable for culture the same way you do in role competence, and then executing, you know, how you do executing against performance goals. And that will strengthen your team members. You’ll be developing your team members, and you’re really gonna start to have good strides in understanding what your culture is. So those would be my featured next steps.
Sean:
Excellent. Well, Amy, I have just had so many churches that I’ve worked with that have had confusion around what values are. Should we have values. And you, I think have helped reshape that thinking today. So it’s very, very good. I’m biased, but I think this has been really helpful. Before we wrap up today’s conversation, any final thoughts from you?
Amy:
Yeah, I’ll probably just echo what you just said a little bit. I hope that we brought some clarity to what values can mean for your organization. Again, you don’t win any points for putting lovely words on a wall, or as you said Sean in your handbook, the big win is naming your culture shaping behaviors, and then embedding them in your organization. I think I read this on Harvard Business Review a while ago. I wrote it down and they said, our bodies, our human bodies have an amazing immune system to protect us from bacteria and viruses that can make us ill. When something foreign tries to invade our body, our immune system recognizes it and fights to destroy it. And in some ways, organizational culture is like our immune system. Culture defines what fits and is welcomed in our body. And culture defines what is foreign and needs to be removed. So I love that quote. Doing this work of defining your culture puts a huge tool in your tool belt for finding the right people who will fit on your team and fit within your culture.
Sean:
Well, listeners, we’ve helped hundreds of churches learn to build strong and unique cultures by clearly defining those behaviors that they expect and managing their people according to those. And if a stronger team culture is a focus for you this year, we’d love to talk. You can start a conversation with me today at theunstuckgroup.com/start. Next week, we’re back with our last episode in this series of The ‘90s Called. Looking Forward to that conversation, Amy. So until then, we hope everyone has a great.