Church Unique

How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement

Will Mancini

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470435342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

Written by church consultant Will Mancini expert on a new kind of visioning process to help churches develop a stunningly unique model of ministry that leads to redemptive movement. He guides churches away from an internal focus to emphasize participation in their community and surrounding culture. In this important book, Mancini offers an approach for rethinking what it means to lead with clarity as a visionary. Mancini explains that each church has a culture that reflects its particular values, thoughts, attitudes, and actions and shows how church leaders can unlock their church's individual DNA and unleash their congregation's one-of-a-kind potential.

PART ONE

RECASTING VISION

A PUMPKIN FARMER WAS STROLLING through his rows of beautiful green leaves at the beginning of the season, as the acorn-size pumpkins were starting to add dots to the landscape. He glanced down and noticed a clear glass jar. Curiosity got the best of him, so he took the jar over to one of his pumpkin buds, threaded the small pumpkin on its vine inside the open jar, and left it sitting there in the field.

Months later, with the experiment long forgotten, the farmer was walking his land, greatly satisfied with the large beautiful pumpkins that covered the patch. He rediscovered the glass jar, totally intact, and was startled to see it completely filled up with the little pumpkin that grew inside. The thin glass barrier had defined the shape of the orange mass within. The pumpkin was only one-third of the size it should have been.

The problem for this little pumpkin is the same problem for most churches today. Rather than growing to their full potential from their unique DNA, they conform to the shape of an external mold or model. These “glass jars” create invisible barriers to growth and predetermine the shape of community for churches across the country.

Part One shows us the jars we must break so that we can celebrate the organic, God-given shape and culture for each local church—and, most important, your local church. Visionary leadership today seems to be about more “jar-sharing” than about DNA-discovering. Therefore, it’s time to redeem vision by recasting it. In other words, we need to rethink what it means to be visionary, to see it in a different light. Once vision is assessed and reestablished, missional leaders can break the mold, one church at a time, by leading their people into God’s unparalleled future for their church.

1

UNORIGINAL SIN NEGLECTING UNIQUENESS

In the life of faith each person discovers all the elements of a unique and original adventure. We are prevented from following in one another’s footsteps and are called to an incomparable association with Christ. The Bible makes it clear that every time there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God’s creative genius is endless. He never, fatigued and unable to maintain the rigors of creativity, resorts to mass-producing copies.

—Eugene Peterson

JACOB, MY THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD SON, recently enjoyed an energetic two-hour plane ride with his new friend Matthew. At some point in the get-to-know-you-moments they swapped signatures. Evidently Matthew thought that Jacob’s signature was a little boring. So every ten minutes I was interrupted by another napkin crossing the aisle for my review. Each napkin contained five new examples of carefully scripted signatures—Jacob Mancini. “Which one do you like best, Dad?” my son enthusiastically inquired. Changing the slant, restyling his J’s, and mimicking the sophistication of a doctor’s script, my son was enthralled with finding his right signature—an impressive one. With his mounting frustration, I searched for just the right words to free my son from his overanalysis. “The right signature,” I confidently asserted, “is the one that comes most naturally.”

Today I visited one of the largest churches in South Carolina: a downtown, red brick, white-columned, Southern Baptist church immersed in the distinct accents of Southeastern culture. Tomorrow I will spend a day at the first Protestant church established in the city of Houston, an elegant mainline nestled in the cultural center of the museum district and the world’s largest medical center. This weekend I will be in a suburb of Phoenix, working with an Assemblies of God congregation whose pastor preaches to seven thousand while wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Each of these churches has its own signature—a way it does ministry most naturally. Every week I am confronted with brute force that local churches are unmistakably unique and incomparably different. God doesn’t mass-produce His church.

Infinite Uniqueness

Let’s not dismiss the infinite creativity of our ingenious Lord when it comes to the thumbprint of the local church. How much does God delight in creative uniqueness? Consider the snowflake. No two snowflakes that have ever fallen in the history of existence are identical. How is that possible? It is God’s handiwork; each complex snow crystal has an almost infinite number of discernible crystal variations. As these extremely sensitive flakes blow about in the wind, the ever-changing conditions lead them to grow in different patterns. The final design is a reflection of these growth conditions.¹

Consider what God does when fifteen people come together in His name. How much uniqueness is in those fifteen individuals? How about a church of a hundred people, or a thousand? Is it possible that the uniqueness of these groups far outweighs the uniqueness of a small water crystal blowing in the winter wind? Wouldn’t each church, however small, carry a unique collective soul, because each church is a different subset of one-of-a-kind saints? Doesn’t each locale present its own growth conditions that affect the pattern and development of God’s people? If every snowflake that was ever created in the universe differs, is it so hard to conceive that every one of the more than three hundred thousand churches in North America is unique?

These questions drive us to the essence of recasting vision. The starting point for vision—for thinking about our church’s future—is not deciding where we want to go or exploring what is working for other churches but understanding how we are unique.

Uniqueness = Culture

What is the uniqueness I am referring to? It is not simply about worship style or programs offered; it is something more significant yet subtler at the same time. It is something that is often overlooked: a culture that is unique to a particular church. Culture is the combined effect of the interacting values, thoughts, attitudes, and actions that define the life of your church. By nature, it is a little difficult to define because the term represents a broad, intangible concept. George Barna offers an expanded definition as “the complex intermingling of knowledge, beliefs, values, assumptions, symbols, traditions, habits, relationships, rewards, language, morals, rules, and laws that provide meaning and identity to a group of people.”²

Robert Lewis and Wayne Cordeiro describe this complex intermingling of culture as “the most important social reality in your church. Though invisible to the untrained eye, its power is undeniable. Culture gives color and flavor to everything your church is and does.”³ Another common definition of culture is the “unspoken rules of how things get done.” As each church expresses its life and ministry slightly differently, the outcomes are ultimately influenced by its culture.

There are as many illustrations of culture as there are groups of people, whether a nation, company, church, club, or high school. For three years, I participated in a local Indian Guides chapter with my two sons. The program, sponsored by the YMCA, builds a small community of fathers and sons around personal achievements in an outdoor context. The culture is nourished by tribe meetings, awards system ceremonies, and special clothing. Each week, we grabbed our patch covered leather vests and headdresses. Every campout, we couldn’t wait to watch the medicine man jump over the raging campfire. Everything we did was laced with Indian language, starting with our very names. Because my two boys were Straight Arrow and Red Eagle, I thought it would be cool to be Running Wind. (Eagles and arrows both need wind.) Overspiritualizing my name got me in trouble with some other dads who interpret “wind” a little differently! When you boil down Indian Guides, it is all about stepping into the microculture that multiplies the values, thoughts, attitudes, and actions of Native American culture. The experiences we shared have transformed my skill and appreciation for observing and respecting nature. A walk through the woods is now an expanded experience.

Just like Indian Guides, your church has its own culture. But without such obvious features as headdresses and teepees, your church’s culture and how it characterizes its own uniqueness can be difficult to discern. This is especially true for the inside observer because the culture itself is so all encompassing and intangible at the same time. Again, Lewis and Cordeiro speak to this issue: “Church culture is foundational to the life and witness of every church. Unfortunately too many church leaders fail to recognize or understand the implications of this reality”⁴ (italics mine). In Part Two, we walk through specific steps to discern culture in the process of articulating vision. But for now, let’s remove some of the enigma of culture by considering sources of uniqueness for a church. For the questions posed here I add short illustrations from my consulting experiences:

• Leaders: What are the unique strengths of the leader(s) in your church? Think of the unique strengths of biblical leaders—the faith of Abraham, the humility of Moses, the courage of Joshua, and the vision of Nehemiah. For example, when I think of David Saathoff at Bandera Road Community Church in San Antonio, Texas, I think of a leader with an unusual ability to replicate the value of lost people into other leaders’ lives.

• Gifts: If each person has unique spiritual gifts in your church, what does the collective gift mix look like? When I worked with a church plant in the San Diego area, I was struck by the significant presence of the gift of mercy that permeated the core team.

• Heritage: What kind of heritage do your people share? Is it multifaceted, or do they share many family ties? What does a common ethnicity say about your church’s DNA? A traditional Baptist church in the Dallas area with around five hundred members in attendance had more family ties than any church I have encountered. They were also facing significant decline. Are these blood connections a liability or a possibility for a new home-based evangelism strategy?

• Experiences: What shared experiences do your people have in common? When I consulted with a church outside of Ft. Lauderdale, the leaders realized for the first time that most of their people came to Christ after the age of forty; this was a result of a season of brokenness in their lives. They began to see themselves as wounded healers, with a special ability to touch one segment of the adult population.

• Tradition: How does the denominational background, or lack thereof, have an impact on your uniqueness? At First Presbyterian Church of Houston, the “thoughtfulness” of the confessional heritage seeped its way into every aspect of their vision and began to focus their outreach strategies.

• Values: What values drive decision making in your church? What unique convictions do your people share? A megachurch pastor once interrupted a strategy session I was leading for an “urgent” care need that I did not think was that important. Later we articulated their crown-jewel value as “Each individual matters.” It wasn’t until then that I began to appreciate how this five-thousand-member church adapts, unlike other megachurches, to live out this core value.

• Personality: If you were to describe what makes your church distinct from every other church, what would you say? I work with two Methodist churches on opposite ends of the spectrum in the same city. First Church of Pasadena emphasizes awe and reverence, while Gateway Community emphasizes authenticity and approachability.

• Evangelism: How do your people talk about the Great Commission? How does your church nuance it? Bannockburn Baptist in Austin decided they were not going to measure the Great Commission one person at a time, but rather one family at a time. Their tagline is “Inspiring Generations.”

• Recovery: What sins and sin patterns have your people been delivered from? What patterns of worldliness are they most tempted by? (Consider how the epistles deal with concerns unique to varying locales.) One church has identified its corporate grace as helping people with sexual brokenness.

• Motivation: Is there a deeply motivational rubric behind how your church sees its mission (for example, community, service, prayer, or worship)? When Chuck Swindoll planted Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, Texas, they articulated their mission around the big idea of “joy.”

The list could go on, but this begins to show the intricacy of any church’s originality. Few churches understand their own uniqueness or even think about it systematically.

Lost on the Way to Your Own DNA

This chapter’s title, “Unoriginal Sin,” refers to the common habit of neglecting what makes a congregation unique and gravitating toward adopting programs and mind-sets that work elsewhere. Leaders today have not clearly discerned the uniqueness of their church. Like a child who playfully delights in the falling snow, oblivious to the intricate beauty of each flake, church leaders are missing out on the special beauty of what is right in front of them. Somehow, they have lost the way to discovering their own DNA.

“Thinkholes”

The most important question is, Why do leaders miss the matchless thumbprint of their identity in the local expression of Christ’s body? I see six common hazards that stand out across the landscape of church life. Because all of them affect thinking, I have called them “thinkholes.” A thinkhole represents the quicksand-like dynamic where, at certain times and places, vibrant thinking gets sucked beneath the surface to suffocate and disappear from view. Can this strange term represent a common reality? Absolutely. Vacuums of thinking can be found all around us. In American culture, 50 percent of adults will never read a book in their life yet log hours of daily “amusement” (“a” = without and “muse” = thought) through television. ⁵ This simple instance illustrates a silent epidemic at work all around us. The reality is that most people don’t think; they only rearrange their prejudices. Real thinking can be disruptive to the status quo and requires a great deal of courage.

Along the great race of leadership, thinkholes are the obstacles, barriers, and danger zones that keep us from thoughtful self-knowledge. Let’s examine six kinds of thinkhole that blanket the church landscape.

MINISTRY TREADMILLS. The first thinkhole is the ministry treadmill. The treadmill is set in motion when the busyness of ministry creates a progressively irreversible hurriedness in the leader’s life. The sheer immediacy of each next event or ministry demand prevents the leader from taking the time required for discerning the culture and defining the DNA of the church.

Most leaders in this environment find it impossible to devote even one day a month for a seven-month process to explore their church’s culture. This process is exactly what I recommended to one pastor, who ...