Will Mancini

Right now, everything you do or don’t do is guided by a set of underlying values. The same is true for your church. Culture-savvy leaders understand how to mold the invisible stuff of values to shape, like clay, the atmosphere, attitudes, actions and automated responses of their teams.

What if we were to x-ray the intuitive movements of  great values-based  leaders? What would we see?

What if we were to  make even more conscious our intentions towards culture-shaping leadership? What core practices would come to the surface?

Here are seven:

#1 Articulation: The first step of culture-shaping is to identify, name and define. That’s what it means to be human- bringing meaning through how we label and distinguish within the created world and within the world we want to create. You can’t mold in the real world what you don’t hold in the mental world. So, what are you holding? What are your top 3 or 4 culture-shaping aspirations?

#2 Imitation: You teach what you know, but you reproduce what you are. Your life is broadcasting and multiplying a values set. How is that values set being consciously transferred by you, even though the receiver may not know it?

#3 Mechanism: If you lead a team or an organization, you have the authority to create a shared experience or a roll-out a new process. Think of a mechanism as an event or process that clarifies, restores, aligns or attunes your people with an existing shared value. Think of this as a wake-up call that shakes up business as usual.

#4 Collision: Oftentimes values get clear and concrete at the very moment they are violated. Or it may be a time of testing or crisis that brings a “near violation.” Look for collisions in the past and potential ones in the future to rehearse and strengthen values. As a leader don’t be afraid to name when you missed a values-based decision or needed a realignment yourself. That may be the most important impression you ever leave.

#5 Decision: Consciously run your decisions, big and small, through the filter or your values. Most importantly combine this with “imitation” and walk through a conscious decision-making process with your team using your values. What decisions are you facing today? What are your biggest decisions in 2012?

#6 Question: Dialogue is one of the leader’s greatest tools. And dialogue works best with questions, not answers. Ask questions to clarify, to meddle, and to rethink. Pose questions for your team to answer. Specifically bring bold questions that force new thinking around the same values.

#7 Celebration: The most often cited culture-shaping activity is celebration. People repeat what’s rewarded. Make sure you take time for this. If this is one of your perpetual weaknesses, assign someone on the team to plan the moments that mark your church’s progress. Life is too short not to celebrate!

Kent Shaffer at Church Relevance shares some good stuff. I appreciate the fact that they do what they do to serve the Church. And he has learned the “big official list” gets lots of attention in the church leader space. When it comes to his blog ranking lists and conference lists I am usually one of the first to read and share.

With that as background, I have to say that I’m a little confused by Kent’s recent post that shows, in his opinion, the “Top 77 Church Logos of 2011” and I thought I’d respond with a few thoughts.

Let’s start with this—the statement I like most in Kent’s post is this one: “…a good logo communicates the unique qualities of its brand.” The way we say this at Auxano Design is that your logo should communicate vision visually. Of course, it can’t communicate everything about your church, but it can serve as a visual front door that matches what people will experience once they step through that door.

Now, I’ll move on to my questions.

1. 77 top logos? Really?
I’m not sure that a list of 77 anything is all that helpful, other than as a gallery that we can all peruse and say, “Those are nice.” Especially within the context of communicating vision visually, certainly there are some among that 77 (or beyond that 77) that are more effective at communicating vision and deserve to be examined more closely. I’ll single out a few from Kent’s list below for this reason.

2. Where are the stories?
When the list has this many entries and there is very little context of how these 77 were chosen, I want to hear the stories of these churches. Why did that church choose this specific logo? What about their vision or unique calling is communicated through this specific design? There are some great looking logos on this list that could possibly be communicating things that aren’t connected to vision and mission, but there’s no way to know that without the background story.

3. Why do unused concepts make the top 77?
If the true essence of a great logo is that it communicates vision visually or, in Kent’s words, that it “communicates the unique qualities” of a brand, how can we include unused logo concepts in the list? That serves as a signal to me that the list is more about what looks nice rather than what communicates the uniqueness of a specific congregation. Therefore we have reinforced the classic problem of church design: slapping together pretty pictures without meaning. (Read Picasso’s Missing Subject, my contribution to the Outspoken book on church communications.)

Those are probably my initial three questions about Kent’s list. From his list, however, I’ll pull out a few to examine more closely…because I think they are more effective.

Christ Church (Fort Lauderdale, FL)

From a brief look at their website, Christ Church seems to have done a good job of choosing a logo that connects with their unique way of communicating their vision. They talk about being a “gathering of people coming together to leave a personal and eternal ‘fingerprint’ on the world around us.” This type of language can form the foundation of a unique way of interacting with the world, inviting people into this kind of life. I love it. And their logo, which is a cross made of fingerprints, communicates the personal nature of this invitation and how each person can make a contribution to it. Great stuff.

Harvest Church (Mobile, AL)

Here’s a great example of communicating vision visually. While I don’t necessarily think that this is the most beautiful logo on the list, it communicates well. Their tagline, which is almost directly pulled from their mission statement, is “discover your destiny.” Their logo communicates that this is a journey (with the roadway image) and the sun-like shape at the top (illustrating the destiny piece). Not only that, but the roadway has a subtle “H” in it, in case you missed it. Again, not my favorite from a pure aesthetic point of view, but it connects directly to their mission and communicates it well without a ton of effort to explain it, which makes it stand out to me.

The Foundry (Houston, TX)

Of course I’m going to mention one of the logos we designed at Auxano, right? I won’t repeat it here, but I already shared a short case study on this church and their logo here.

New City Church (Phoenix, AZ)

I love the way this logo connects with the way New City talks about their mission. Listen to this, pulled from their website:

“Cities are the intersection of art, politics, and business. New City exists to engage culture where it’s created, weaving the story of God into the story of Phoenix. The desire of the church is not simply to gather on Sundays, but to meet you where you live, work, study and play. The green section in the New City logo represents an oasis among urban streets. Likewise, New City believes that following God breathes new life into our culture. We believe we can actively change our world by shifting the priority set from money, success, and fame to worship, community and mission.”

I couldn’t have articulated it that clearly, but their logo certainly communicates intersection and city, and the colored section makes you want to ask, “What’s different about that block?” The answer they offer: it’s an oasis among urban streets. That’s a great logo and a great mission.

What about you?

The real question that I want to raise is this: what does your logo communicate? Does it say something unique about your church, inviting people to find out more? Then, whether it made Kent’s list of 77 or not, it’s a top logo.

Thanks, Kent, for your time in searching out great logos and keeping the conversation going about how we can, as the Church, use design to effectively communicate vision visually to our congregations and to the world.

John Piper has a lot to say to church leaders. But he often doesn’t address vision casting directly. This video doesn’t necessarily present new ideas, but it is nice to hear the fundamentals of vision expressed from different Christian leaders. It’s also a great snapshot of a “church unique” mission statement.

I received the heads up on this video by Bill Mancini (my Dad) on the Auxano team and some of staff at Concord Baptist in Knoxville who are working through Church Unique.

Last week I was completing the Vision Frame with a church in California. They could feel the removal of what one pastor  called their “invisible walls.”  It’s an interesting comment given the fact that its a very effective church.

What is an invisible wall? It’s something your eyes can’t see that keeps your team from working better together.

• Mistrust
• Missed time
• Misalignment
• Misunderstanding

Every week brings a fresh truckload of glass bricks for your team to stack.  Busy week after busy week leads to busy semester after busy semester. No one has ill motives. No one intends to build a wall. But the walls go up without conscious notice.

The good news is that it’s NOT rocket science to take down a wall. Haven’t you noticed it’s easy (and usually fun) to tear stuff down anyway? What we need are some sledge hammers to take down this hard-to-see  barriers.

Weekly, I watch leadership teams tear down their invisible walls.  Keep in mind, I am talking about effective teams, not broken ones.In Auxano’s clarity process, teams feel like a team at a whole new level. Even though the meeting room looks the same, the real albeit unseen barriers have been removed.

How do you demolish those walls? Try these five things.

• Give permission to identify walls.
• Beyond permission, shape  a culture of authentic dialogue by how you give and receive feedback. Telling people that you are open to honesty and “push-back” isn’t enough. Permission has not truly been given until it you have done. Keep in mind if you don’t receive it well, you’ll shut down the sharing next time around.
• Schedule time dedicated to strategic conversations. Most teams don’t create enough space for important, non-urgent dialogue and decision-making. At Faithbridge over the years, the team has regularly “parked” (sometimes monthly) conversation topics for scheduled “strategic-stuff-only” meetings.
• Schedule margin in the calendar for “drop in” conversations. With the speed of ministry, it goes a long way to touch base for no “necessary” reason. It says you care. It says you are available to listen. It provides an opportunity to remove a glass brick, instead of adding one. Yesterday, I challenged a staff member pretty hard in a consulting meeting. Today I stuck my head in her office to check in and mentioned, “Hey, I pushed you pretty hard yesterday and I just wanted to acknowledge that it might have been a little too hard.”
• Make one bold feedback question a standard part of your team culture- “Have I done anything lately that has diminished the trust in our relationship?”

What other actions would you add to demolish invisible walls?

It was great to be at the Right Now conference in Dallas today. Here are the resources I referenced during my speaking:

6 Elements of Compelling Vision

• Here is the Vision Casting Spider Diagram: Articulating Vision Proper
• Recommended Exercise: Listen to Dr. MLKs “I Have a Dream Speech” with this tool

The Future of Church Strategy

• If you have an iPhone or iPad download the free Leadia App from Leadership Network
• You can purchase FLUX: Four Paths to the Future. There is a chapter on 3 K
• Here is the  Vision Frame Overview and other related Vision Frame links.
• Check out the Vision Frame of RIGHT NOW

The FREE Church Unique Visual Summary

• Go here to download this 52-page graphical summary.
• It can be read in 10 minutes!

If you joined me at Right Now today:

• Consider subscribing via e-mail to my blog.
• Use the search box to hunt for relevant stuff.