pat loughery

This is part 2 in the Strategic Planning for Missional Churches series.

Core Values are the 5 of 6 statements which answer the question “Should or shouldn’t we?” They never (or very seldom, with some alarm) change. They are discovered, not created. They define the corporate culture.

Go read that again – core values are discovered as they already exist; they are not forced upon people. That was news to me – and net it makes sense, because (as I will write more about below), we were confused that our core values were changing, becoming more clarified – and that’s not supposed to happen. Except, however, in the case of a new organization.

Here’s a good exercise from Jim Collins’ book Good to Great which helps you discover core values. Get a small number of people together and ask them which people best exemplify what we hope to be as an organization. Try to pick people outside that gathering of people so that they can be described frankly. Ask each person present to answer the question, and then see which names are repeated. You’ll probably hear a few people named multiple times. Pick those few people (if they are present in the group, send them away for the rest of the exercise. Now, pretend that there are anthropologists – or Martians who are observing your corporate culture without any preconceptions. In order to describe your corporate culture, tell stories about why you chose those few people. Dig deeper than “she’s good at her job”; tell a story about a time when she proved it. Take notes on descriptive phrases and repeated patterns. Summarize the story into a phrase. Repeat this exercise with more stories about the same person, and more stories about the other examples as well. Stop when you have exhausted your stories and examples; stop when your phrases are beginning to appear from the mist.

Core Values must be described in language that makes sense within the culture (for example, if your group would nod their heads when you say “Tenacious like a wolverine”, then don’t just say “Persistence”. Say, “Tenacious like a wolverine”.

You know a core value is being violated when the leaders’ heads explode over a particular action that may just be fine in another environment, but is simply unacceptable in this particular environment.

You Know It’s a Core Value When
It’s a word or phrase that would resonate with your corporate culture – they get it, and don’t have to be taught it.
You would fire somebody for violating it.
You would fire somebody who is productive but not exhibiting it.
You would be willing to lose a substantial amount of money not to violate it.

Let the Core Values bake a while – months at least – before carving them into stone. You may find that they change early in the life of the organization, or they may have been wishful thinking, not what was actually there.

Bringing Your Core Values Alive
This is incredibly important to do, and can be incredibly fun.

Create corporate legends around the values. Tell stories to bring them alive, to remind the old-timers and to assimilate the new-timers into the corporate culture.

Use the core values in recruitment and selection. [When people ask you what kind of church you are, instead of saying “We’re post-evangelical, post-charismatic, emerging, and we serve justice like the mainline liberal churches and …, start with the core values]

Teach the core values as major themes in the orientation process. [In your 101 class, or welcome gathering]

Let your Core Values serve as section headings for the performance appraisal process. [Celebrate community members who exhibit them; catch people for doing good and tell on them]

Everyday Management – without being ridiculously inflexible, relate your decision-making process to your core values. Choose what to do, and what not to do, based upon your core values.

Our church’s history discovering our Core Values
I think one of our greatest successes in the three year lifespan of our church was coming to know who we really were – discovering our core values.

When we began to plan the church plant in the fall of 2002, I brainstormed them on my own, then ran them by my wife and a few friends, mostly other pastors. They settled out this way:

1. We value God’s Word
We love the Bible and constantly strive to apply it to our lives. We also believe that God speaks to us today through the Holy Spirit by illuminating the Scripture and giving spiritual gifts.
2. We value worship
We worship God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit through God-centered, culture-current and participatory worship in contemporary styles. Although musical worship is our primary vehicle, we also worship through the creative arts, and any means that expresses our role as his creative workmanship.
3. We value prayer
We believe that prayer is simply conversation between us and God and therefore is a gracious gift of intimacy. We actively pray in order to get to know Him better in order to depend on God and not ourselves. We commit to praying for those around us and for all of their needs, including spiritual, emotional and physical healing. We believe that through prayer, God changes the course of human history.
4. We value community and relationship
We place high value on relationship with our God and with each other. We believe that it is in relationship with others that we fully become who we were created by God to be. We recognize God’s high value on relationship. Primary applications of this value include participation in small groups, and building up the family.
5. We value fun
We celebrate that Jesus says he came so that we could have “abundant, eternal life.” We get joy by seeing God transform and restore peoples’ lives. And being with joyful people is fun. We acknowledge that pain and struggle happen while living in a broken world, but we continue to believe that God is constantly redeeming our world.
6. We value equipping and leadership development
We will equip each individual in our community by helping them to become what God has created them to be. We aim to mentor, apprentice, train and release Christians to serve in their field of ministry. We will specifically develop leaders to plant churches throughout the world.
7. We value authenticity and character
We believe that being real with each other and with God fosters unity, creates life, and tears down barriers between people. We believe that God is in the business of building our character for His benefit. Therefore, we strive to remove our masks and to be honest with ourselves and others.
8. We value grace and mercy
We love that Jesus’ life demonstrated the Father’s grace (His undeserved blessing and favor) and mercy (His loving compassion and forgiveness) to his people. We celebrate this display of the Father’s heart for us by extending grace and mercy to everyone, especially those that our society considers the lost, the least and the last.
9. We value service
We acknowledge that God blesses us when we serve other people our church community and the world beyond. We believe that we’re only completely being Jesus’ church when we’re serving someone to show God’s love in a practical way. When leading, we will be servant leaders who want the best for the people we serve.
10. We value being naturally supernatural
We are invited to do what Jesus did when He walked the earth: proclaim in word and action that the Kingdom of God, his reign, is here! We believe that the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit are available today, but that we do not need to act weird, stir up emotion, or put on a show in order to experience the power of God. We believe that God acts supernaturally through normal, everyday human beings.
11. We value generosity
Everything we have is a gift from God-our lives, our jobs, our homes, our friends and family. Therefore we freely give away what we have, whether it is our time, service, wisdom, skills or money. We will give in order to bless others. We will be a church that plants other churches in a multitude of cultures.
12. We value discipleship
We believe that we are called to apprentice our lives to Jesus, following him as the way to the Father, absolute truth and abundant life. We highly value the freedom that Jesus brings us as we follow the way of the cross, constantly focused on our relationship with him and becoming who he wants us to be. We pursue mentoring relationships and small groups as means of growing as authentic disciples of Christ.

I still like them, reading them now. However, some of them are values, some of them are elements of a creed, some are more like philosophy of ministry. Believe it or not, I think this is the cut-down list; there were once 15 of them if I recall correctly. That’s good for a white paper, I suppose, but nobody in our church could describe them. they weren’t memorable.

In the spring of 2005, we went into another round of redefining the church’s vision, mission and values (none of them were memorable). Our church could tell me who we were, in terms of what was like us and what was not like us, or what we could and could not see ourselves doing, but there was no common language.

More than that, we had a few memorable conflict events – situations in which one person’s value set bashed through another person’s value set. I spent two hours on a phone call once after one of our guys stepped across the line. This guy is very health-conscious in his eating choices and is exasperated when others don’t do the same. He was then helping out in the kids’ church, and had gotten frustrated with the lack of attentive focus from the younger kids. So he interrogated the children about what they’d eaten for breakfast, and told them that their non organic and high sugar intake was what made them all out of control. During the same time, we had another go-around with him because he didn’t believe we should teach the kids to pray for each other when they were sick, because they didn’t eat well enough for his standard, which meant that they’d just get sick again anyway. I spent hours talking with him about our differences of opinion about grace, prayer, the activity level of children and other fun topics. Needless to say, we dis-invited him from serving in the kids’ church, and not long thereafter his family left the church.

Please understand – we as a community, and I as a leader – we loved this family. We truly did; he just didn’t fit well with where we were going and who we were created to be. He found faith in a very regimented, holiness-oriented church, and he would get frustrated with us because that wasn’t us, and he thought we should be.

This time, though a difficult time for me as a leader, was a crystallizing moment – it helped us put language to why we felt so violated: we extended grace and mercy to people unlike us, and expected as much in return. When this person exhibited legalism toward us and not grace, it violated our core values – our very identity.

In the spring, we studied the book of Nehemiah to learn more about communicating God’s vision and leadership in a time of cultural transition.

During that time frame, again by myself, I found a cut down list of five.

I described them to our leadership core team (then 4 couples), reworded, scrubbed, edited and then unveiled them to the rest of the church. This time we had a simpler list, and a memorable presentation mechanism:

Our core values by which we pursue this purpose and dream are GEARS:
Grace – Grace is given to us by God; we respond by showing mercy to others
Engagement – In mission and in culture; generously serving, spending time with and listening to our neighbors; engaging God in prayer
Authenticity – Real in how we interact with each other, not hiding our successes or failures from one another. Truth-telling as a spiritual discipline.
Relationship – We see God as a dynamic person in relationship as Trinity; we see God’s interaction with humanity as relational. We recognize that we are spiritually formed as we grow together as community. We are relational in style and in evangelism. We pray as the communication of our relationship with God.
Spirit-led – naturally supernatural; led by ongoing presence of God the Holy Spirit in normal ways

GEARS increase the effectiveness of an effort using the same amount of work.

Truth be told, I hate cheesy memory devices. But this one works for our crew, and I think there’s something behind the GEARS image as well that perhaps we’ll discover over time. If nothing else, it gives us an opportunity for a visual description of what we value. People remember that our Core Values are GEARS, adn even if they have to struggle for a bit to remember what the E stood for, they remember it.

These 5 also give us an opportunity to work a bit deeper. For example, Engagement is a HUGE value for us. We are not a holiness-focused church which retreats from society in order to remain purified. We see the Christian life as a constant cycle of worship, spiritual formation, engagement in mission in the cultural context we live in. We do pursue holiness, but for the purpose of mission (and in a relational way). So, for example, we go see movies because movies speak loudly in our culture. [In fact, I was just engaged in this exact conversation with somebody from work yesterday; we got to talk about which movies each of us love to watch over and over for its meaning.] I don’t encourage people to go see absolutely everything out there, but I do go try to see the movies that are generating buzz and becoming cultural memes. I bought Napoleon Dynamite even though I’d seen it (halfway through) once, and I’ve watched it several times since because there are so many people who communicate in Napoleon quotes. We also perform and promote community service as a means of Engagement with our community.

Lately, though, whenever I’m describing the acronym, I can’t remember if we decided that the core value was Spirit-led living, or Service. Or I catch myself thinking that the acronym itself is GRACE, and that maps to Generosity, Relationship, Authenticity, Creativity, and Engagement. So we have to do more self-discovery.

Now, in version 2.0 of the church planning process, we feel confident that we have whittled down some values and direction. We feel like we’re building on a fairly solid foundation, though it will need building up in one corner or a spot here or there. It’s nice to know our identity, even if we’re only part-way (most-way??) there in affixing language to it.

In the next month, I’ll lead my leadership core (now 2 couples) through a modified Mars exercise. Instead of asking them to name the best examples of people who embody (incarnate) these values, I’ll ask them to describe their ideal missionary. We will also tell stories – what moments gave you the most life in our church; which moments seemed least like us (inverting core values). I’ll try to stay out of the center of this discussion and simply facilitate, and I’m curious to see what we can distill.