podcast image size (4)

Fresh Content Each Week

New content to help you lead an unstuck church delivered to your inbox on Wednesday mornings.

We know your inbox is probably full.

We want to make it easier for you to find the right content-the articles, podcast episodes and resources most relevant to where you are in your leadership.

  • Protected: Order – August 7, 2021 @ 01:25 AM

    Podcast Episodes

  • Articles & Blog Posts

  • Protected: Order – August 7, 2021 @ 09:59 AM

    Quarterly Unstuck Church Report

Your staff culture shapes your congregation more than any set of values you’ve ever put on a wall.

People absorb values from watching how the people leading them actually behave. And whatever they’re seeing, they interpret as “the way we do it here.”

If culture development stops at your staff, you’ve only done part of the work. Because the culture on your staff team is going to shape your congregation, whether you push it out there on purpose or not.

We’re wrapping up our series by talking about what happens when you cascade your culture to your congregation. Paul and I cover what Sun Valley built, how it works, and how it turned into their leadership pipeline.

  • Investing in Your Culture
  • Leadership Cohorts for High-Capacity Volunteers
  • Pushing Your Culture Down

Your culture in your church is already forming. The question for you is, and we've been asking this through this series, are you the one forming it?[episode 472] #unstuckchurch Share on X There is so much blessing on the other side of churches taking their culture seriously, not just on their staff, but pushing it down into the congregation. [episode 472] #unstuckchurch Share on X If their ministry's contingent upon them as a staff leader, they're gonna be a bottleneck and a lead to the growth. [episode 472] #unstuckchurch Share on X
tyndale

This Episode Is Brought to You By Tyndale House.

If Jesus walked into your church right now, would people recognize him? We’ve created a personalized Savior who exists primarily to meet our needs, bless our lives, and guarantee our spots in heaven.

But here’s the problem. That Jesus would be unrecognizable.

In the book The Missing Messiah, bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark More will help your church rediscover the Jesus based on Scripture, not on culture. Plus, check out the six-session companion study guide with free access to streaming videos.

Learn more at missingmessiah.com.


Get the Leader Conversation Guide

Opt-in here and get access to the Leader Conversation Guide for this episode and to the full archive. Emailed each Wednesday.


Share Your Thoughts and Questions on Social Media

We use hashtag #unstuckchurch on X @unstuckgroup and on Instagram @theunstuckgroup. 


Write a Review—It Helps!

Your ratings and reviews really do help more pastors discover the podcast content we’re creating here. Would you take a minute to share your thoughts? Just open the podcast on iTunes on your phone or computer, click Ratings & Reviews, and leave your opinion. Or leave us 5 stars on Spotify.


Transcript

Sean:

Hey, listeners, before we jump into today’s content, I need one minute with those of you leading multisite churches. Every year we put together an Unstuck Church report focused specifically on multisite churches, and we’re building this year’s report right now. We’ll look at the trends, but the real value in the report is actually the comparison. We put healthy, thriving multisite churches side by side with churches that are stuck so that we can show you what the data says and which practices make a real difference in your church. The goal is actually to help you make better decisions. 

So here’s where you come in. We need your numbers. Takes you about 15 minutes, and the deadline for submitting this is October 30th. And to sweeten the deal, because I’m not above bribing you for your information, one leader who submits will win a $500 Amazon gift card, and the next 40 leaders to submit will get a $10 Starbucks card. That’s just our way of saying thank you to you for your time. So honestly, the best move is to pause right now on this episode and go to theunstuckgroup.com/survey, theunstuckgroup.com/survey, and submit your information now or before October 30th. Thanks for helping other church leaders. Now, let’s get to today’s episode.

Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, managing director here at the Unstuck Group, and this is the final week of our series, Getting Practical on Developing Culture. I’m here one more time with Paul Alexander. Paul’s the XP out at Sun Valley Community Church in the Phoenix area, and an Unstuck consultant. Paul, today we are wrapping up the series with our fourth week on the topic of culture. And I think culture has been kind of a buzzword in church leadership, but I’m hoping that through this series, we’ve made it a lot more clear and practical for church leaders.

Paul:

Man, I sure hope so, Sean. I mean, there’s no need for church leaders to be confused about what culture is or how to be intentional about building a healthy and high-performing team culture at their church. And if listeners go back and listen to all four of these episodes, they’re gonna find real tangible, actionable steps. They can do just that.

Sean:

So everything we’ve talked about so far has been about the staff team, how we define these behaviors, how we live them out, how we hire around them, manage to them. And I think that’s the right order to go this way. You can’t give something away that you don’t have or haven’t developed yet. But if it stops at your staff, you’ve only done part of the work because the culture on your staff team is really gonna shape the congregation, whether you push it out there on purpose or not. So today we’re talking about what happens when you cascade it, what Sun Valley built around this and how it influences their culture, how that works. And the thing that I find most interesting about it, all of it, how it turned into a leadership pipeline for you guys. So really, really fascinated to get into that.

But before we do, let me say thanks to our podcast sponsor, Tyndale House. Tyndale House is releasing a brand new book called The Missing Messiah by bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore. This book and the supporting study guide and videos that go along with it can help your church rediscover Jesus based on Scripture, not based on our cultural understanding of him. So you can learn more about the book if you just go to missingmessiah.com. 

All right, Paul, let me start with a thought, and you can tell me if I’m overstating it or not, but I’d argue that your staff culture shapes your congregation more than any set of values that you put up on the wall because people don’t absorb values from reading them on our website or just seeing them in big letters. We do a lot of big print letters on the wall. They actually absorb them from watching how the people leading them actually behave, how your staff handles conflict, how decisions get made, how people are treated when something goes wrong, which is inevitable when we’re doing ministry together, whether your leaders own their mistakes, your congregation is reading all of that as it’s happening. So whatever they’re seeing, they interpret that as success or they interpret it as that’s the way we do it here. And then that is what gets replicated in your small groups, it gets replicated on your volunteer teams, it gets replicated in your meetings. Do you agree with that idea at all?

Paul:

Yeah, absolutely, Sean. Again, I’ll come back to a simple example I gave in another episode. When you think about Tesla, who comes to mind, right? Elon Musk. When you think about Meta, it’s Zuckerberg. When you think about Amazon, it’s Bezos. Any organization over time, takes on the personality. And what I mean by the personality, the values, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors of the leader. So like it or not, believe me or not, the culture of the church always begins in the heart of the leader. So this is why the Scripture says and teaches things to us like out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. It starts in the heart, right? That’s where it is. The Scriptures also teaches he who walks with the wise will be wise. He who walks at fools suffer harm. You become who you hang out with.

This is evident in junior high. I’ve got a little 13-year-old junior high boy right now. You go to the lunchroom in a junior high, the first week of class, and you can see all the little groups and cliques kind of forming. Oh, they look like me. They talk like me. They dress like me. And they’re trying to find their people. This is true in stores. People walk into a store and they’re wondering, is this my store? Are these my people? Is this my place? All that is culture. And so, he who walks with the wise will be wise. He who walks with fools suffers harm. You become who you hang out with. And the senior pastor and the senior staff of the church, that’s who your staff and that’s who your church is gonna become like over time. So you are building a culture for better or for worse by intention or neglect every single day in your church.

Sean:

Every church that I talk to, Paul, they know they want a healthy culture at their church. I’ve never once had a pastor tell me that I can remember, culture doesn’t matter to me. But a lot of times during the conversations, what I learn is that very few of them are actually investing in it. There’s no budget allocated towards culture. It’s not on anyone’s job description. It’s more like everybody’s job, which we know that doesn’t work, just get everybody the same thing. And here’s the principle, I think, for anything that’s important in organizational life, what gets resourced gets done. And you can tell what an organization actually values by looking at where they spend their money and where their hours go. Not what they say their priorities are, but what they actually fund. And if culture isn’t getting staff time, getting budget, getting space on our calendar, then I think it’s just an aspirational goal.

It’s not something we take seriously. And I’m not saying that to guilt anybody. I’m only saying it because I think it’s fixable in that sense. And it doesn’t take much, but it does take something from us. And I would add to that, every church I know also wants a healthy leadership pipeline. But even when we work on developing a clear path for leadership in our church, culture usually feels like the missing piece in all of that. And the risk is we have a bunch of capable people on our team that don’t match how we operate, which really hurts us when we start to look at internal hiring. So Paul, have you run into any of that either at Sun Valley or with the churches that you’ve worked with?

Paul:

Yeah, for sure, Sean. And I think this is important before I say what I wanna say. This conversation we’re having, this is not just like Fortune 500 company business world stuff. This isn’t just for like big mega churches or big multi-site churches. This is for every church. And in fact, I would say it might even be easier for a church of a thousand and under to get this right faster. Because there’s less creep and scope and geographic distance and things like that to deal with. 

Sean:

Right. 

Paul:

So you’re talking about resources, and I think funny thing about money is that it’ll do whatever you tell it to do. And it’ll show you what’s important to you after it’s left your hands. So in other words, you can choose to spend your money ahead of time on anything you value. That’s called a budget. Like when you and your wife get together in December and January and you build your budget for 2027, you’re putting a value statement on paper about how you’re gonna spend your money. And then you can look back on how you actually spent it. Those are called receipts. And receipts always speak louder than budgets because receipts show you what you actually value, not just what you claim to value. And so as a church, you can look and say, “Hey, where are our resources going? Are we resourcing our team culture? What are we putting our effort, energy, and resources towards?” So how much money did you spend on building a healthy and high-performing staff team culture at church this last year? And again, I don’t think it needs to be some crazy, unobtainable financial reach for your church.

Start where you are. 30 years ago when Lisa and I first got married, we started out on our marriage. We could not afford like a really nice day at a really expensive restaurant. You know what we could afford, Sean? Like the Burger King dollar whopper meal on Tuesday night.

Sean:

Romantic.

Paul:

Super romantic, man. A VHS movie rental from Family Video because we couldn’t afford Blockbuster because Blockbuster was like a dollar more, you know? Just because we couldn’t afford some expensive meal at a really nice restaurant didn’t mean we didn’t go on dates. Church leaders do need to get their head around just because they may not have a bunch of money and a bunch of resources to throw at this doesn’t mean you don’t address it. You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg to start getting this right in your context. And my hunch is you may even have some really competent business leaders who attend your church who are trying to do this in their companies that they’d probably help you do this at your church.

Sean:

That’s good. All right. Well, I wanna get to solutions pretty quickly today because I love what you guys have developed for your team at Sun Valley. Now, I want listeners to hear it. I’m not sure that everyone has thought about this as an option. So will you walk us through the leadership cohort program? What is it, and how does it actually work for you guys?

Paul:

Yeah, okay. So I’ve already described that when a new hire joins our team, they go through a crash course on our culture the first couple of weeks of their employment. They’re watching five- to 10-minute videos on every single one of our leadership distinctives, and they’re using that leader guide and that participant guide to have a conversation with their supervisor. Okay? So great crash course for our culture. And then each of our director-level staff and above, we actually require them to lead what we call a leadership cohort every single year with high-level volunteer leaders using that exact same content. So we’re doubling down on that content, using it in different ways. So what that means is, practically, they’re personally reaching out to volunteer leaders in their ministry. So if they’re a youth pastor at our Queen Creek location, they have relationships with all our volunteers in the student ministry there, and they’re personally reaching out to them. They’re inviting them to a behind the scenes, invite only look into our leadership culture at Sun Valley. 

Most volunteers hear that, their ears perk up and they’re like, “Ooh, invite only? Behind-the-scenes look? You’re thinking of me?” That’s encouraging to that volunteer. And they’re in. And they run it like short-term small group. They do it different ways. Some of them buy lunch for that group of eight to 12 leaders after church on a Sunday, and it goes eight weeks and they cover one distinctive per week. Some go through it in a month, and they double up two distinctives a week. We have a Slack channel for all of our staff because we’re across multiple locations. Yesterday, literally, this is ironic, we’re having this conversation today. Yesterday, the children’s director at one of our locations over in Chandler, she posted a picture of all of her volunteer student ministry leaders, and she took all of our juniors in high school and juniors and seniors in high school through the exact same content. She took a picture of them. They had just graduated leadership cohort. So they’re using it for like student leadership development now. 

Sean:

I love that. Yeah. 

Paul:

I never thought of that. And they’re just taking it and using it and going with it. Super proud of them, right?

Sean:

That’s great.

Paul:

So whether they do a meal or not, eight weeks, four weeks, I don’t care, man. If they meet on campus, they meet in a home, that’s not the magic of it all. The magic of it all is they’re having conversations with highly competent volunteer leaders every single year. And there’s some really good stuff that comes out of those conversations that we’ll share in just a minute here.

Sean:

Two things that I really love about this and what you’re doing. First thing is it costs nothing to create this. You’ve already built the materials for the staff onboarding. The cohort program kind of reuses those tools. So the investment in all of this is actually pretty low. And if you’re a church without a ton of resources, you probably have a laptop to put some of that together, right? The second is the requirement piece of what you guys do. You’re not saying we encourage our directors to do this. It’s expected. It’s part of the job. I think that’s the difference between having a program and creating a culture. The things we just encourage happen when there’s margin in our schedule, which if we’re honest, that’s never. But when it’s an expectation, of course it happens. What are you guys actually trying to get out of these cohorts? When you set this up, when you were thinking through all this, what were the outcomes that you were aiming for?

Paul:

Yeah, super good question. So like the secret sauce behind the scenes, the content in and of itself, spending time with volunteers, all of what we already described is good. But let me help you understand the why behind the good. There’s a couple of really big wins we’re looking for by requiring these cohorts every year. Number one, it forces our staff to become experts in our culture. It forces our staff to become experts in our culture. When I was a freshman in college, my senior pastor asked me to teach the junior high Sunday school class at my little church, wooden pews, choir robe, the whole thing, man. And he gave me the curriculum. I think it was like a David C. Cook magazine curriculum or something like that. And I was supposed to use this curriculum to teach this junior high Sunday school class. And dude, you could better believe all week long, I’m studying that curriculum. Like I gotta know the word of God just a little bit better than those junior highers, you know? And that junior high Sunday school class came along, and I had to actually teach the lesson and do the activity and all of that stuff. 

When you have to teach content, it forces you to engage with that content at a deeper level of knowing and understanding. So when we say, “Hey, man, if you’re a director-level staff member or above at Sun Valley, you have to facilitate one of these cohorts every year.” It forces our staff to engage in that content at a level and to understand it and know it at a level that they otherwise wouldn’t just by going through a crash course for two weeks when they first join our team or by hearing our senior pastor do something at an all-staff gathering that’s really inspirational.

So one, it forces our staff to become experts in our culture. Number two, it forces our staff to spend time with high-capacity volunteers. So our staff aren’t inviting all of their volunteers to these cohorts. It’s not an email or a mass text goes out to every volunteer that’s on their volunteer roster. It’s a personal invitation to volunteers who are leading other volunteers or they’re leading teams or they’re leading small groups. Our staff see leadership gifting in them and are using this cohort as a way to invest in them. And so they’re calling them up into something greater by even acknowledging, “I see you, and I think you’d be great in this conversation. I think it’d bless you, help you, and I wanna invite you to the conversation.” So it forces our staff to be around the right kinds of volunteers, if that makes sense.

Sean:

Yeah.

Paul:

You know, there’s different kinds of capacity the scriptures talk about that are gifting that are given in different measure to different people. And I really want our staff spending time with high-capacity, high gifting, competent volunteers so that way they can entrust the ministry to the church to help the church actually be the church. ‘Cause if their ministry’s contingent upon them as a staff leader, they’re gonna be a bottleneck and a lead to the growth. 

Sean:

Right. 

Paul:

They’ve gotta maximize and multiply themselves through other leaders. Number one, it forces our staff to become experts in our culture. It forces our staff to spend time with high-capacity volunteers. And number three, it pushes our culture down. These cohorts act in a manner to actually push our culture, our language, our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors down. There’s always light bulb moments in those cohorts, Sean, where volunteer leaders are like, “Oh, that’s why we say it that way.” Or that’s why we do it that way. That’s why Pastor Chad says this, like, all the time. He’s not risking repeating himself because he has nothing new to say. He’s actually trying to build a culture, you know, and get us going in a particular intentional direction. 

And then finally, number four, we’re constantly dragging the magnet through the sand in these cohorts. And so this is what I mean by that. The people who get invited to these cohorts are genuinely incredible people. They’re leading small groups. They’re leading other teams of volunteers. They’re super high-capacity people. And so they’ve already demonstrated the ability to lead and have spiritual authority entrusted to them. So while this is a way to invest in them and continue to develop them, it’s also a way for us to identify potential new staff team members. They don’t know that when they’re being invited to these conversations, but our staff do.

So people we wanna invite to join our staff team at our church are oftentimes in these cohorts. It’s common that coming out of these cohorts is a name or two that will actually add to a wishlist of people who attend Sun Valley that we’d love to have them come on staff at some point. 

Sean:

That’s good.

Paul:

Each of our campuses have like a top 25 wishlist of people who have been through cohorts and are like, “Oh, man, Sean, if we ever get the chance to invite them to a team, we need to.” And so when there’s a vacancy on a team, that’s the list they go to first when it comes to recruiting. And there’s already relational trust. They’re already part of our church. They’re already leading. They already understand our culture. I mean, imagine the onboarding expediency of all that’s just, it’s incredible.

Sean:

Yeah. That part is so important, and I wanna make sure that nobody listening misses this. Who you’re inviting to these cohorts is really intentional. So these are people who have already proven and shown evidence of leadership ability within your church. You’re not just inviting everyone. This is not an all-call. This is not a, “Hey, if you’re interested in serving as a greeter on the weekend.” This is people who have already shown those evidences. And I think this is so key because in ministries, sometimes we get tripped up on thinking that everybody’s a leader. If we go back to Scripture and we look at the way the body of Christ is designed, not everybody’s a leader. Not everybody can be the arm, right? We’d be a really weird body if we were all the arm. 

So some people aren’t wired up that way. And this is an environment where there will be some people in your church, they never land there. And that’s okay. That’s the way God created them. But I love the intentionality about who you’re inviting to these environments because it allows your staff, like you said, to focus in on equipping leaders for ministry. They’re not just training volunteers, they’re equipping people who already have leadership potential. Love that. 

So Paul, I’m thinking about, as part of that, your staff are going through and your expectation for them is leading these cohorts so they really understand the culture, they’re really embedding in this. How has this improved your hiring process? And I’m thinking too about, you just mentioned identifying even some potential new staff coming out of these cohorts. How has this affected your hiring process and who you’re identifying and what all that looks like?

Paul:

Yeah, 100%, Sean. So when Chad and I do new staff orientation once a quarter, I’ve mentioned that a couple times in this series. I always ask the room, you know, “Hey, how many of you guys attended Sun Valley before you worked at Sun Valley?” And it’s genuinely common, 50 to 75% of the hands in the room go up. 

Sean:

That’s incredible.

Paul:

And they’re like, I attended here before I worked here. So think with me for a minute. We didn’t have to move any of them here. There was no relocation package. They were already here. They were already a part of our church, so they’d been sitting underneath the teaching of God’s word in a way that we do that and understood theologically who we were. They were already volunteering and leading, and so they understood what we expected of leaders.

They had already been through a leadership cohort going through this culture, and so they were already familiar, like this is just normal for them. So imagine the expediency of them integrating to where they’re actually onboarded quickly and producing and moving the ball forward. I’m not spending a bunch of time helping them understand what it’s like to live in Arizona. And the cultural differences between that and the Midwest or New England or something. Yeah, man, it’s saved us time. It’s saved us money. It’s saved us heartache and moving somebody here and realizing it’s not the right fit. I love it. And I love the idea that this reinforces this biblical concept of us equipping the church to be the church. And empowering people to lead within the scope of the space God has called them to and brought them to.

And candidly, I’m not gonna get into all this right now either, but I’ll just tip my cards on it a little. We have some people that have come from the marketplace that are legit, really good leaders. They got paid a lot of money to do a really big job at a really big company. And they got to a point in their life they were like, “Yeah, I got the money I need. I wanna go make a difference with my life.” You know, or they don’t have golden handcuffs yet. They’re still 20-something years old, and they’re figuring it out. And they’re like, “Man, I’ve always wanted to do ministry. I think this might be what God’s calling me to.” But they have great, you know, maybe they got an MBA and they’re 28 years old, or maybe they’ve got some great work experience in some wonderful company.

And they know how to work. They know how to get things done. And so in the church world, sometimes we struggle with those kinds of ideas, but we can add them to the team. I can get them the biblical training and underpinning they need. If they got the right competency, the right culture, all those kinds of things. And so that’s what we’ve done. We’ve solved that a different way. So we have a lot of marketplace people. They join the team, and we get them the Bible they need.

Sean:

I hope that every leader that’s listening catches onto that idea right there. These cohort graduates turn into a great pool to track with when you’re thinking about new staff roles. And here’s a pro tip. Plan your organizational structure for where you’re going as a church. Doing that will give you a headstart on which staff roles you’ll need to hire for. And then when you run these cohorts, you know exactly what am I looking for? I know I need this staff role in two years, in three years. Who am I looking for? What’s the type of gifting that we need? So, Paul, now you’ve created a trained group of people you can invite into ministry. It’s really a beautiful thing. How has all of this work changed your organizational culture over time? What’s different now?

Paul:

You know, all of what we’ve been talking about in this series, Sean, I wouldn’t say that it’s changed our culture so much as it’s helped us to clearly understand it, communicate it, and actually replicate it. So functionally, foundationally, if you rewind with me 15 years ago, 16 years ago when I came on staff here, even then, foundationally, we have the same culture today as we did then. We just have the capacity to articulate it clearly, recruit to it, train to it, evaluate it, and replicate it across campuses. That’s where we’ve grown.

Sean:

Love it. All right. So if you’re listening, you’re hearing all of this and you’re thinking, “We need to do that.” Here are just a couple of ideas, I think, for you to utilize to get started. And it’s important to remember, this isn’t something you’ll be ready to launch next week. This’ll take a little bit of time to pull together, but our culture development playbook, that is a resource as part of this series can help with that. So first thing is develop your materials. If you’ve been doing the work from the last three episodes, as Paul and I have talked through this, you might already have a lot of what you need for this. Whatever you built for staff onboarding, a lot of that can work for your cohort curriculum. If you don’t have materials yet, I think you need to do three things. You gotta develop something to teach from, something participants can work through, and then some discussion questions to go along with it. So focus in on that and developing that for your cohort. 

Second thing is just schedule a pilot group. Just get one cohort pulled together and find a leader. And honestly, for your first one, it should probably be you. It should probably be your executive pastor because you wanna feel where it’s clunky before you ask anybody else to run it. Pick eight to 12 volunteer leaders and personally give them an invite. That personal invitation, Paul talked about this, it matters a lot. Being asked by name to join something like this, that’s really meaningful for a volunteer, and I think that’s gonna set the tone for the rest of the cohort. And then just run it. Note down what worked and what didn’t work, and then start making it better. Iterate on that for the future, and you’ll start to see results. 

Paul, those are a couple of ideas that came to mind for me. What else would you say churches need to do to get this started?

Paul:

Well, dude, I think you’re there. I think listeners have a lot of real, tangible stuff they can go do with this, I hope. But I just say it’s just not rocket science. This is absolutely doable. I think your idea is brilliant, and we did this. So when we started rolling this content out and I wanted to test it, does it work, you know? I asked each of our campus pastors, give me your best couple of millennial leaders at the time. So this was, gosh, 10, 12, 13 years ago. And I met with them like one time a month. And so it took me eight months. Look, it was a big commitment. But one time a month, and we’d read a leadership book together. We’d go through the content that I wanted to test. And these were really competent, highly compensated leaders from the marketplace. There was one gal, she was over sales and marketing for like three different Harley Davidson dealerships here in the Phoenix market. Like, super sharp people. And I consistently heard feedback from that group over that time as I was testing this content. My own company hasn’t invested in my leadership development like my church is doing right now. I just think there is so much upside to this and so much blessing on the other side of churches taking their culture seriously, not just on their staff, but pushing it down into the congregation. There’s a lot of untapped goodness here.

Sean:

Well, Paul, we have covered a lot in these four weeks together. What’s one thing that you hope that pastors take away, not just from today’s conversation, but from the whole series?

Paul:

Yeah. So I think I’ve said this a couple of times over the last couple of weeks, so people are probably getting sick of hearing me say it. But you already have a culture on your staff team, and subsequently a culture at your church. And it has been built over time by intention or by neglect. And church leaders, you owe it to yourselves and to your churches to go back through this series and actually do the work we’ve been describing in these four episodes. We aren’t describing best business practices here. The church is not a business. The Bible describes us as the body of Christ. We do not exist to make shareholders happy or to run in the black or to distribute corporate quarterly dividend checks. There’s so much more at stake to what we’re called to, guys. Eternity literally is at stake for people. That is not an exaggeration. So the church you’re serving at right now deserves to have leaders who are gonna do this kind of work for them and to build a healthy and a high-performing culture at their church that people want to be a part of, and it’s actually worth replicating.

Sean:

That’s good. Back four weeks ago, we started with Lance Witt’s idea from his book, “High Impact Teams,” that culture is the unspoken rules of how things get done, and that somebody has to speak those rules out loud. And that’s really what we’ve talked about through this whole series. How do you speak them? How do you write them down? How do you teach them? And then how do you embed them in your team and your church? And I’d like to point out that none of this requires building a new building. It doesn’t require hiring a new staff member. It doesn’t even require more budget. It requires leaders getting clear about the culture that they want to choose before it’s chosen for them. Your culture in your church is already forming. The question for you is, and we’ve been asking this through this series, are you the one forming it?

So if this series has named something for you that you’ve been feeling on your team, start with the “Culture Development Playbook.” It’s in our resource hub, and it’s built on what Paul and the team at Sun Valley have actually done. It’ll walk through everything that we’ve covered, defining your behaviors, embedding them, building them into your hiring and reviews process, and then cascading them into your congregation. So we’ll link to all of that information in the show notes.

There’s also the Unstuck Teams assessment in our resource hub. I wanna mention that. That’s a great tool as well. If you wanna read on where your team’s health actually is before you start any of this, that’s a good place to begin too. And if you’re looking at your team and you’re sensing this all sort of runs deeper, that it’s really about how your staff is structured and who’s in what seat. That’s the work that we do with churches every week through our staffing and structure review. We’d love to help you define your culture and then build it into how you hire and manage your team. So you can start a conversation with us just by going to theunstuckgroup.com. Paul, thanks for doing this with me. This was really good. Next week, we’re back with the start of a brand new series. Looking forward to that. Until then, listeners, have a great week.

It requires leaders getting clear about the culture that they want to choose before it's chosen for them. [episode 472] #unstuckchurch Share on X

Sean Bublitz

Since 2017, Sean has served on the lead team at The Unstuck Group, including roles in consulting, sales, and operations. Previously, he served at Community Christian Church (Naperville, IL) and Granger Community Church (Granger, IN) in weekend service, arts, and senior leadership roles.

0 responses to “Culture that Cascades from Staff to Congregation – Episode 472”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.