A healthy culture is hard to create and sadly easy to lose because culture decays over time. What may have been healthy gradually atrophies without maintenance, repair and restoration work. That’s especially true in a church culture.
It’s why we see so many clashes between Jesus and the Pharisees and other religious leaders in the gospels. What had been a culture concerned with serious study of scripture, a passion for evangelism, and a desire to take seriously the call to be a Holy God’s Holy people had atrophied over time to become compassionless, legalistic, closed, and resistant to challenge and change.
The Pharisees are a mirror for the church, just as Israel are. A warning to us of how quickly a healthy gospel culture degenerates over time, a picture of what we might become. So what are some of the non-negotiables of a healthy church culture?
Grace over Guilt
Guilt can get stuff done, at least initially. We all know that. Parents use it, managers use it, and preachers even sometimes rely on it. Showing people what they have left undone or have done and how far short they feel can motivate them to change, at least short term. But guilt is not grace because it does not bring lasting change.
Seeing again the staggering glorious nature of God’s grace – the cost of our totally undeserved salvation – affects the parts of the heart that guilt cannot reach. It isn’t the temporary stab but truly transformative of our hearts and minds and souls as it causes us to love the God who so lavishly has loved us. We need cultures where Grace is taught and preached and applied and re-circulated from one member of the church to another to another in conversation after conversation after conversation. We must create and maintain cultures that prioritise grace over guilt.
Humility over Pride
Humility and meekness are underrated by the world. They are seen as weakness and door-mattery, all to easily jumped on and taken advantage of. And so we don’t show weakness, we are loath to say we don’t know or don’t understand or are struggling. Or to ask for prayer. Or to listen well to someone else’s viewpoint that is different to ours. We are slow to cede influence or position.
Pride, boastfulness, strength and independence, they are the characteristics we prize. But they isolate. They value the individual over the collective, revel in my ability not my need. In fact they blind us to our needs and make seeing weakness hard and confessing to a failure or sin impossible.
But humility is what holds a church together. The humility to be meek, to prize another’s gifts, to value another challenge about my heart and life and sin, to listen well and gently even where we disagree so I understand your perspective without having to wrestle you into submission to mine.
Pride will never create a culture that can be multigenerational, multi-ethnic, and multi-theological over even secondary issues. Humility is necessary, it values, it listens, it loves, it is willing to not think to highly of itself and encourage others to use and develop their gifts.
Community over individual
Our kids growing up loved (some still do) Lego. The beauty of Lego is not in the individual brick but in what they can be joined together to create. As brick is added to brick they become part of a larger more beautiful whole. That is what the church was created to be.
But the danger is that we prize the individual over the community in a way that is antithetical to the gospel. The gospel unites the divides into a greater whole. It sees the individual transformed so that we love others more than ourselves, silence our gifts so others can use theirs, love others so much we use the resources God has given us to meet their needs.
A healthy church culture will always take community over individualism. It will apply the Bible not just individually but to the community. Not in a way that squashes the individual or relegates them to being just another cog in a bigger machine, but in a way that values every part of the body and what it can bring to the greater whole on the greater mission to the greater glory of God.
We need churches that call us to community, challenge us as we drift back to individualism, and where that community is concretely expressed day by day by day.
God over Government
Here’s my last one for today. In Matthew 22 Jesus utters a reply to the Pharisees that is a mine of wisdom: “Give, then, to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God that things that are God’s.” It is short pithy saying but it is packed with dynamite.
Jesus calls believers to give their due to the government. But to recognise that the government is an authority given by God and under God’s sovereignty. That means the government is an authority we respect but it is not the ultimate authority. We honour God as we obey the government where we can – taxes, speed limits, laws etc… But when the government mandates something contrary to God’s will, we obey God.
We belong to God. Made in his image and redeemed by the death of his precious Son. This needs to be part of our church culture, especially as the hostility to the gospel and the Bible ramps us. We need to recognise this and have it as a fundamental belief and part of our church DNA. We are elect exiles, this world is not our home, and its kingdom is not our kingdom. We seek the welfare of the city but we are citizens of Jesus’ kingdom, and that means we will be counter cultural, we will stand out, and we will at times be slandered for it, even when we do good.
This needs applying closely to our work our home our place in the community. God over Government not everywhere, but where it is a choice of social rhetoric or biblical truth there can be only one choice. Where it is a case of government mandate or God’s holy will we can only take one stand.
How are our church cultures? Where is it necessary to do some repair work? Where is it necessary to challenge? Where is a rebuild required? Because culture is easily lost.
Al Gooderham 