Culture is such a broad topic that it is frequently misunderstood the be the physical features of a society. Some may read that I advocate for matching a church culturally and think that I’m talking about being flashy and entertaining. That isn’t it at all. I’m thinking more about the intangibles of the community. What are the demographics and psychographics of the community, and how can we structure ourselves to best match them. How does the community relax? What do they value? What are the heritage traditions that hold the community together? What is the education level? Knowing this information will be key to being culturally relevant.

Here’s an extreme example: I remember watching the video The Peace Child about an amazing story about missionaries that worked diligently to reach a tribal people. The video ends with some clips from the current situation in the tribe. I was shocked to see that ‘evangelism’ involved building a church building, complete with pews and a pulpit in a community that had no structures other than some thatch roofs and no furniture. It also involved getting tribe members who wore simple loincloths to put on nice button down shirts and slacks to go to the worship service.  It is completely possible to teach people about Christ without having to change their culture to do so.

Granted, most of us don’t have to worry about tribal evangelism, but the differences in culture between the inside and the outside of church can be significant. Does your church culture value outsiders? Most would say it does, but can a person that has never been in your building before know where to go? Do they know the schedule? Do they know why we stand up for some songs and sit down for others? Can they find the bathrooms? If not, you can assume that you haven’t created a culture that welcomes others. Instead, you’ve created a culture that says only insiders can know what is going on (high context culture).

The issue of worship music and sermon type comes into this as well. You need to pay careful attention to the education level of the community around you as well as the use of speech and language. If the community has a low education level and a low discourse level, you shouldn’t use the King James Version of the Bible, sing “Night With Ebon Pinion” or “Here I Raise My Ebenezer”, or focus on sermons that lecture or use Greek to communicate. You’ll do nothing but alienate the people you are trying to reach. However, if your community is known for Shakespearean theater, music majors, and classical studies doctors, you may find that using the above mentioned items to be intellectually stimulating for people.

Being culturally appropriate will go a long way to removing barriers to participation. If coming to church requires people to learn a new culture, they’re more likely to stay in their comfort zone rather than suffer the necessary culture shock to belong.

I was first introduced to the concept of organizational complexity by way of Mike Armour’s work on System Sensitive Leadership (links in the sidebar and the resources page). While the book doesn’t directly address organizational complexity, it does introduce us to the work of Clare Graves, a psychologist who developed the theory of emergent, cyclical, levels of existence. I’ve talked about these levels before and how they manifest in church life. Mike Armour covers this concept in detail. I’d put this in my list of must read books for church leaders.

One of the leading concepts in Clare Grave’s work has to do with complexity. While the different systems of thinking/existing are neutral as far as value goes, different levels of complexity will support different activities better than others. Some levels of complexity will not support some activities at all. For example, system 1 is all about survival. When you are trying to find where your next meal will come from and where you will sleep that is warm, you do not have the supporting structure to allow for innovation and creation. Similarly, system 3 is dominated by the strongest people. A “might makes right” if you will. If you’re not the strongest, the system will not support creative or developmental activities that meet your needs.

One of the presuppositions of the levels of existence theory is that problems generated at one level of complexity require a higher level of complexity to generate a solution. For example, system 4 developed as a response to the “might makes right” principles of system 3. System 4 is governed by law, rule, policy, and tradition rather than strength. Consider the world response to Hitler. After the allies overpowered the Nazi army, they responded by setting up a world body to enforce laws and rules to prevent that type of militaristic expansion from occurring again. System 4 provided great safety and protection from the bullies of system 3, which created an environment for system 5 to develop, which is focused on innovation, creativity, and individual accomplishment. You may recognize some of these general categories in church: the bullies that fight to get their way, the traditionalists that prefer the safety of familiarity, and the innovators that always want to try new and creative things.

Some of this may sound confusing, so here’s another way to illustrate the issue. Fighting with each other takes a relatively low level of complexity. Organizing an army takes a higher level of complexity. Equipping that army to fight in an age of digital warfare requires an even higher level of complexity. Developing nuclear warfare (only 7 or so countries have done so) requires an even higher level of complexity. Dealing with the effects of nuclear war and nuclear proliferation requires an even higher level of complexity.

An appropriate level of complexity is necessary for a church to be successful. Typically, complexity gets hung up over issues of power and territory. A small church that is led by a patriarch family, for example, will not survive past about 50 members if the patriarchic family is not willing to give up control. A medium size church that is led by a group of volunteer/laity elders or deacons will not thrive past 350 or so if they cannot relinquish control and leadership to ministry leaders/staff. A much rarer scenario has to do with the transition from 350 and up. Between 150 and 350, the church functions best if leadership is shared across a broad spectrum of ministry leaders that lead specific programs that they are passionate about.  When churches prepare to move past the 350 mark, the authority of the church has to re-centralize into a corporate model with professional staff that can coordinate the efforts of the church. Once the power has been shared among many people, it is very difficult to get it re-centralized again.

There is another interesting pattern as we progress through levels of complexity. Levels of complexity tend to oscillate between being group focused and individual focused. Compare these charts on church size and general system complexity:

The one issue that I have found inconsistent with Gravsian systems is the presupposition that the right solution to problems is a higher level of complexity. The issue I have is that sometime the problems are caused by too great a complexity. In these situations, reducing the complexity of the scenario also solves the problems. For example, a program oriented church divides the responsibilities of ministry leadership among ministry leaders that are passionate and concerned about their areas. In one particular church, there are separate ministries for greeting people at the door, for welcoming visitors at the welcome center, for helping people get to classes, and for ushers (those helping people find seats in the auditorium). This works fine up to about 350 members, however as the church surpasses that point, managing the transitions between each ministry becomes quite a hassel for the number of people they are dealing with. In this scenario, the best course of action is to integrate the separate ministries into one, essentially re-centralizing them into a corporate structure. This may be the only way to guarantee a consistent experience between each group. It definitely reduces the complexity of trying to coordinate the movements between the various ministry teams.

Boy, that was a long blog post. For those of you who made it through, what do you think? Next post will address culturally relevant systems.

I should get the next post up today. I look forward to your comments as we discuss some of these items.

One area of organization that we tend to overlook, though, is the fact that churches change over time. People come and go, world issues change, technology develops, sociological approaches to gathering, sorting, and evaluating data evolves. We frequently have people that visit our worship services after being gone for several years say things like “this is nothing like I remember it”. The reason for that is pretty simple. It is nothing like you remember it.

Over time, a church will completely reinvent itself with small, incremental changes. While we recognize that different churches that exist simultaneously require different organizational systems, we fail to realize that churches that change (basically different churches separated by time instead of geography) also require different organizational systems.

Inflexible systems of church organization and leadership, then, can cause the church to become unhealthy because they fail to adapt over time to the new needs of the church as it changes. As churches change in size and complexity, the required elements for church health also change. Not being able to adjust to a new system leaves the needs unmet and creates opportunities for conflict and immaturity.

Arlin Rothague has identified four sizes of church with different needs and motives:

These are not optional, per se, but instead are representative of needs at various levels of size. A family size church can be led by one or two family leaders because the church is probably made up of one or two families. When we get above 50, though, we have to start looking at one person to coordinate the activities of the church. That works until about 150, when we have to expand the leadership team and include volunteer leaders in specialized areas of leadership. That works until about 350 when the demands on the leadership positions become too great for volunteers to handle and specialized skill and training are required to be most effective.

It is impossible to support a Corporate Size church with a Program Church system. It is much more impossible to support a Corporate church with a Family church system, however many of our churches operate in such a manner with a matriarch or patriarch that we have to tiptoe around or pay homage to. Churches may grow into a larger category without changing their organization system, but they are unable to maintain that size without making adjustments. One of my favorite things to say is “You will become the size you behave”. If a 500 member church acts like a 200 member church… they will be.

To help churches be flexible as they are making plans, decisions, and building ministries, I encourage them to ask the question “How long will that work?” If you have an invitation song where people respond to the front to submit prayer requests, how many can you logistically handle before a bottleneck forms? How big can we get and still use a single key for the building that has to be signed out after hours? How many members can we have and still expect them to get a yearly visit from church leaders? Asking the “How big can we get and this still work?” question will go a long way to helping churches work flexibility into their planning.

What do you think about flexible church systems? Is this concept foreign to you? What issues are your churches dealing with where flexible system issues are contributing factors.

Some of the feedback outside of the blog was that some were getting the impression that I was saying the church shouldn’t have or didn’t need elders. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that will become obvious as we make our way through some of the material. Shepherding has a major role in a healthy church system that focuses on care of the individual (Jethro II).

However, I would like to say that what I’m going to suggest may challenge your perception about roles within church leadership. For example, many have the presupposition that elders are in charge of the church, that they’re the bosses and that they should make the final decisions. Why is that? Where does that presupposition come from?

This week I’m working as a trainer/instructor at Abilene Christian University at the residency session for students that are working on their master’s degrees in conflict resolution and reconciliation. Part of my role is to debrief students that have just participated in a mediation role play. Yesterday, one of our role plays had to do with a disagreement between a young-buck youth minister and an established church member who had served as youth ministry leader for eight years prior. In our debrief session, one of the participants asked why a mediator was working the case instead of one of the elders since the elders oversee the minister, they hired him and can fire him.

My response was a question. Why do the elders hire/fire? What is it about their scriptural role in the church that dictates that they should be involved in that process?  His response was simple: It’s the way we do it.

He’s right. It is the way we do it (have done it). However, much of what we do organizationally has little to do with scripture. Just as the elders supervising the minister, some things have just become the way we do things. If that’s the case, shouldn’t we be in a position to analyze the way we do things and choose a more effective and appropriate method?

My co-minister shares a story with me about this that I love. Someone was asking about whether it was scriptural to use funds from the church treasury for some purpose or another. The response was golden: We invented the church treasury, shouldn’t we make it work for our advantage instead of against us?

What is your response to what I’ve written here? Let us know in the comments.

I’ve already said that I don’t believe there is any one system that is appropriate for every church to use. Initially I made the mistake of trying to take whatever was successful at other churches and use it for my local church. I’ve seen others do this as well. It’s really sad to see. Much time and energy is expended by people getting others excited about the “new thing” that’s coming. They get buy-in through many different avenues: classes, announcements, sermon series, etc. They ask people to credit them with their trust as they put this new system together, and initially they will. However, as with anyone that defaults on a loan, when we let our people down when the “new thing” doesn’t succeed, we damage our credit worthiness. Eventually, people quit buying in to the next “new thing”, and churches begin to plateau and stagnate.

I have also witnessed leaders that understand this principle (or who are at least aware of it) use it as a reason to not try new things. I was presenting a leadership meeting on church health principles when after a break someone said “we were talking about it in the hall and decided that these things worked for other churches because they were built around them, but they probably won’t work for us”. Dismissing something out-of-hand like this is just plain narrow-mindedness. Yes, we should beware of any system that says something like “Step 5: find 12 leaders to function as middle managers for your ministries. Jesus used 12 apostles, you should, too.” Specifics like this may not transfer, but general leadership principles can translate across multiple systems.

So, what are those universal items? Here’s a list of what I look for. It’s my list, so it may be lacking in some things. It’s just what I’ve found in my experience in looking for an appropriate organizational system for churches.

An effective church organization system will be/have:

• Flexible
• Appropriate levels of complexity
• Culturally appropriate
• Power neutral
• Focused on individual care and development (Jethro II principles)
• Fluid and permeable (hat tip to Matt Dodd for helping me come up with the words)

I’ll address these in future posts. For now, tell me what you think of the items on this list. What do you think they mean? What would you add?

“There would be no need for the Holy Spirit if we could become holy in our own strength, but God has sent him to our aid because we can’t. We derive our existence from the Father; the Son, the “Word”, reveals the truth to our minds, and the Holy Spirit makes us holy

It is when the Holy Spirit has worked in us, making holy what was before unclean, that we can go on to receive God’s righteousness in Christ. That is to say, it is not our holiness, but his, given to us through the power of the Spirit as he works in us, and it makes possible that true and deep understanding of God’s ways and purposes which we call “wisdom”.

So the believer is intended to make progress, to grow. The Father gives natural life to everybody, but his purpose for us is so much more than that. He wishes us to go on to share more and more fully in Christ’s righteousness, understanding, and wisdom. Eventually–as the Holy Spirit cleanses and purifies us–all the stains of human sin and ignorance are removed and the being made by God becomes worthy of God.

Then, and only then, is human destiny fulfilled. God gave us life for this purpose–that we might be perfect, as he is perfect.”

At this church, however, I found some very curious items in their material, particularly about their teaching on heaven. Here ’tis:

Heaven is for all people who become angels by living according to the Ten Commandments.

I’m familiar with lots of different teaching on salvation and heaven, but this one was a new one to me. While it only made me ponder at first, this note on heaven made me reconsider what this one might mean:

Marriage love between a husband and wife can become spiritual and continue to eternity.

Interesting. What do you think about these quotes?

Now, it is easy to take that statement and turn it into some commercialized approach to church where we try to sell Christianity by meeting all the interests and marketable desires of individuals. Let me clarify that the things that Jethro II is most concerned with regarding the individual are those things that are in the best interest of the individual, and thus the organization. Since the overall health of the system depends on the health of the individuals, it makes sense that a system focused on individuals would focus on their health.

So, what do we mean by health? This is where we can get into a disagreement over what role the church should play in the life of the individual. Obviously, we should be concerned with spiritual health, but what about physical, social, psychological, or financial health? I would propose that we would be concerned for all of these above, considering that the health of the individual is made up of these categories, and others, in much the same way that the health of the organization is made up of the individuals. We’ll explain more of that later.

When viewing the organization, Jethro II assumes two things. First, the purpose of the system is to provide care to the individual. Even in the original Jethro model of management, you can see that the care of the individual is drastically improved by multiplying the number of caregivers available. While Jethro I focused on the reduced workload for leaders, Jethro II sees the decentralization of leadership as an opportunity to provide higher quality care to the individual through the use of more caregivers.

The second assumption that Jethro II makes is that through caregiving, individuals will grow and develop and eventually become caregivers themselves. While Jethro’s model focused on identifying trusted leaders that were ready immediately, Jethro II realizes that the best leaders may not be developed, or even born, yet. By making sure that every individual receives care, individuals can be moved through the system and can take ever increasing roles of leadership and responsibility in coordinating the care of 5s, 10s, 50s, and 100s of people.

Now, we know this system needs more meat on the bones than just this. Designing a system that focuses on individual care could easily dissolve into a hug fest or would perhaps resemble a family of monkeys grooming themselves. How do we take these principles of Jethro II and put them into motion so that some semblance of organization occurs?

We’ll cover that soon. Until then, what do you think about Jethro II?

This is very similar to the theory of human motivation known as Theory X. While Theory X goes a little to the extreme in its viewing employees as lazy and as being motivated to only do as little work as possible, the similarities are still present between Jethro I and Theory X. Jethro I assumes that it is up to the leaders to get the work done and that without top-down management things won’t work correctly. “Trusted people” have to be appointed to positions of responsibility since “regular people” can’t be trusted to do the work. We set up criteria for who can be included in activities and who is allowed to perform certain tasks (i.e., can a non-Christian pass a communion tray).

On the other side of Theory X is Theory Y. Theory Y recognizes the contribution of the individual to the system and the importance of the individual to the overall health of the system. Theory Y views individuals as a vital resource to not only contribute to the operation of the system, but it recognizes the potential future that those individuals hold and how that potential could positively impact the organization. Thus, individuals are to be cared for and nurtured so that the organization can benefit in the long run.

Theory X is losing popularity and is only used by the most incompetent of leaders as a primary system of motivation. After the description of Theory Y in the 1960s, more and more leaders have moved to this type of an approach to leadership. However, it has taken a long time to catch on in churches. Unfortunately, working the logic on the previous statements also means that churches display the most incompetent forms of leadership.

I could go into a comparison between Theory X and Theory Y churches, but I’ll save that for a later date. The purpose of this post is to explain some of how we identified the deficiencies in Jethro I and what that led to. As Theory Y became prevalent, and the role of the individual in society became the preeminent focus rather than the needs of the group/organization/society, the deficiencies in Jethro I started to stand out, particularly the underemphasis on the individual. This coincided with a tendency to try and organize ministry and involvement around “giftedness”, which when done incorrectly is just a guised Jethro I.

So, in response to the deficiencies of Jethro I, Jethro II was developed. Jethro II uses the same basic features and concepts of Jethro I (hence the similar names) with just a few significant changes.

Before we describe them, what do you think the significant changes are?