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!

Effective movements know who they are.

There’s something missing in the leadership atmosphere of denominational life these days. Name your faith tribe—it’s true in every corner of North America. That “something” is an overwhelmingly clear, unquestionably compelling, big idea of why the “collective” exists. It’s the esprit de corps of “what makes us unique.”

In Steven Addison’s book, Movements That Change the World, he identified this uniqueness as a movement’s “founding charism”:

Christianity is a movement of movements—monasticism, evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism, to name a few. These movements can find expression in movement organizations such as mission agencies and denominations. . . . . Each new movement has a unique contribution to make to the kingdom—its “founding charism” or gift of grace.

The beauty of the founding charism is often best seen at a movement’s start—when it’s in the air and you can’t help but breathe it in.

If you could have asked one of Jesus’ 72 disciples, “What are you doing?” how clear do you think their answer would have been? If you could have talked to someone who experienced the early 1900s revival at Azuza Street, how magnetic would you have found their response to be?

Now it’s your turn. Why do you belong to what you belong to? What is your denomination about  in 10 words or less? Go ahead—grab a dinner napkin and write something down.

As you think about your response, allow me to share a few guidelines to shape your “napkin sketch” answers.

Guideline one: Don’t answer with glittering generalities. If you tell me that your denomination exists to glorify God and make disciples, that’s great. But so does every other denomination, association and church-planting network. Go deeper and get more specific. Don’t be a restaurant whose only vision is to “serve food.”

Guideline two: Don’t let personal passion be your only criteria. The thing you write down—as passionate as you may feel about it—may or may not be what makes the movement unique. The “uniqueness of us” comes before and informs the “passion of me.”

Now, why are these questions so critical?

A denomination’s founding charism is like a new car or a new pair of shoes. Through rugged use and unintentional neglect, the vivid awareness of our reason for being fades away. Eventually, leaders engage in things like strategic-planning processes that add layers of objectives and goals to the equation. Then we add more denominational structure and programs. Then this, then that.

As the organization matures, complexity eclipses clarity. Before long, the half-buried treasure of our movement’s identity is completely lost beneath the surface of our conscious focus and energy.

The safeguarding of the movement’s primal impulse is key to the movement’s ongoing existence. Without it, activity is amoeba-like. A movement without a crystal-clear DNA would be better called a mush-ment.

Ultimately, the decision to move with clarity or to mush around “doing denominational stuff” comes down to a choice: Do we live, work and play with the large calling of God guiding our way? Does the church universal need a faith expression like ours anymore? Should we call it a day and disband?

These are bold questions. And our day demands a courageous response. It’s courageous to move ahead with bold vision. It’s likewise courageous to acknowledge that an association or denomination has fulfilled its purpose in its time.

(This post is an excerpt from an article I wrote for EFCA Today, the magazine of the Evangelical Free Church of America)

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?