Daily Innovation, Ministry Insights, and Thoughts from Todd Rhoades for Pastors and Church Leaders
Living it Out: How Your Church Can Be Culturally Current
Imagine for a minute that you walked into your doctor’s office and it was like walking 35 years backwards in time. You say to your doctor, “how come you don’t make the place more modern?” His response, “I don’t have time. With all the patients I see every day there is not enough time to be making the place fashionable, besides it’s not the decor that matters, it’s the medicine.” You shrug and concede the point, more because it is not worth arguing than because he is right...
You enter the examination room and see equipment from 35 years ago too and begin to wonder. How current it this place? In the course of conversation you wonder if your doctor reads current journals, attends modern medicine seminars, keeps updated on best treatments and understands the pathology of certain diseases. You ask, “Hey doc, how do you keep current with what is happening in medicine today?” His answer is familiar but getting weaker each time you hear it. “I don’t have time to keep current; with all the patients I see there is just not enough time in the day to stay current. Besides, I still help people with the medicine I know.” You mutter under your breath, “but wouldn’t you like to do more?”
I hope it is clear that I am really not talking about a doctor and his office but a church and it’s community. The church must begin to move rapidly towards the 21st century if we are going to bring a timeless message to people that God loves. Let’s face it church is not culturally in line. No where lese do people sit in rows to sing songs, hear a 35-55 minute lecture, give their money away while being asked to volunteer to help. Even church people know what we do is weird; they are just more tolerant and accustomed to it.
I heard a Christian leader once say, if 1957 ever rolls back around, the church is perfectly poised to make a difference. I have been to churches where the music was off the charts great and the preaching was from circa 1957. I have seen churches that had music from 1957 and the preaching was 21s century. How does a church, a pastor or a leadership team stay culturally aware in language and events? At the church where I pastor we are striving to build a Sunday Service that is roaring into and fully aware of the 21st century. Here is a grid that helps us keep our services current.
Our service must be BIBLICAL. Meaning our goal is to impart the truth of Gods Word into the hearts of people that God loves.
Our service must speak current language. We are trying to tell the story of God in the language of the people. We seek to do this in such a way as to show how God’s story intersects with their story. God’s Word is always relevant. It is unchanging and powerful, but if it is spoken in a different language its impact upon the hearers is lost. We ask these questions about our services. How do people learn today? It is not enough to just preach, we need to know how people learn. We need to know how to engage people from their chair, to make them think and to make them feel. How do people speak today? I think words are changing. Words that dripped with meaning no longer strike in the hearts of hearers. We replaced the phrase, “relationship with Christ” with “friendship with Christ.” The word “Relationship” today carries with it the romantic tension of our culture and friendship doesn’t. We replaced the word “intimacy” with “close connection” because intimacy carries so much sexual meaning in our culture. Video is the language of our culture, tech is the language of our culture, video games are the language of our culture. I just did a series entitled, “What Television Taught Me About Family” because the television is a part of the language of our culture.
Our service must strive for excellence. I know that this thought gets people up in arms sometimes, but the bottom line is if you cannot sing, you shouldn’t lead music. If you cannot speak well, you shouldn’t be up front speaking. If someone cannot do the job well then don’t ask them to do it. Let’s not do crummy in the name of nice. Excellence does not mean perfect, it means high quality people doing a high quality job. This applies to the following elements of our services. Greeting, ushering, music, communication, printed materials, technology, and décor must strive for high quality performance. If we want excellence we must train for excellence. We teach people how as well as what and raise the bar high for what we expect. Our volunteers love it! Excellence also means people using their gifts, talents and passions together.
Our service must be relational. For many people this is one of their only contacts with God’s people during the week. So we strive to make the service relational. Food and drink are a welcome part of what we do, we even provide it. We use humor as a part of our services because humor helps people drop their guard. Dropped guards help foster better relationships. We keep our atmosphere casual, we use a variety of people up front so it is not just pastors talking and we use ministry tables every week to keep people informed of what different ministries are doing. Each table is manned by a real person.
Our services must appeal to men. Women are so amazing and wire into most things we do in church, however men do not. So we design our services in such a way as to help men like them. This meant we altered some of our language in worship and preaching. We never use the word intimacy because only in church does it mean something other than sex to 99% of the people who hear it. We eliminated a few songs from our play list, not because we are homophobic but because there are better ways to communicate friendship with God. We do not decorate with flowers or fluffy banners. Why? No man I know decorates his office that way. By the way in a country where 38% of the church is male, ours is 50% and over 40 guys serve every week in Children’s ministry, set-up, tear-down, ushering, greeting and other key ways. Guys love our church and their wives thank me every week.
Our service must communicate the Gospel. We are sometimes accused of being a seeker church because so many people have received Christ at our church. But the truth is that people receive Christ at our church because we ask them to. Our messages are not usually gospel presentations but God presentations. That means they are designed for spiritual growth and maturity not outreach. What we do at the end of every service is ask people if they would like to start a friendship with the God we just sang to and spoke about. 45-48 Sundays a year at least a few respond.
These are not the whole answer for how a church should function and for many of you reading you do much more and better things with your services. In a paragraph I cannot describe the fullness of how these values express themselves in our services but I can tell you that our folks are growing in Christ. Our church is growing by reaching un-churched and de-churched people and helping those people become fully committed followers of Christ. Sunday Services are not the only tool we use but it is the biggest and most influential tool we have, so we make it our best. I hear pastors say they do not have time to stay current culturally. I read where pastors are behind the times and more unaware of the things people actually face every day. With the enormous job of being a pastor and the incredible value pastors have upon the lives of people, staying culturally current is necessary for effective ministry in the 21st century. Here are a few more suggestions for pastors and leaders.
For the pastor who does not have time to get to know culture, here are a few suggestions.
•Find someone in your church to help you with your language and research modern day illustrations for you. Give them your text and topic and let them help.
•Develop a team who assembles the services using the above grid or a different one and be a part of that team. Have them meet once a week with you.
•Record your messages and listen to them in your car or office and ask how you could have said that better or if your words were 21st century.
•Have people fill out a specific evaluation on your music or atmosphere or preaching.
•Dedicate 20 minutes a day to extra cultural reading. This is sometimes done on-line, in a bookstore, in the daily paper, waiting for a doctor, or some other place.
•Subscribe to some online blogs like MMI where you can interact with people from different backgrounds.
It is the responsibility of leadership to take an amazingly timeless and relevant message and translate it into the language of the 21st century. To not do so is to be treating people with 35 year old medicine. I do not think knowing culture is about knowing Brittney, Brad or K-Fed, but it is about seeing who in culture influences the decisions, language and choices of the people we serve. It is about understanding where people who show up on a Sunday have been all week, who spoke with them, what pressure they faced, and how they have been asked by the world around them to deal with that pressure. Knowing culture is about understanding people’s perceptions and language in such a way as to gain access to for the grace and truth of Christ. It is about partnership with the Holy Spirit of God in knowing the times and knowing what God’s people are to do. 1 Chronicles 12:32 reminds us that the men of Issachar knew the times and knew what Israel was supposed to do. We need pastors and church leader like this. The alternative is to let the world remain convinced that Jesus is irrelevant when we know he is not.
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About the author: Leonard Lee a regular commenter here at MMI. He is also a church planter and a veteran of over 25 years of ministry. He is married to his best friend and they have two awesome kids. He currently pastors Bayside of Central Roseville and loves to hunt, fish and play.
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This post has been viewed 1456 times and was added on December 11, 2006 by Todd Rhoades. Filed under: Leadership Issues Vision, Values & Mission Ministry-Specific Help Evangelism & Outreach Share this post with a friend right now! View reactions to this post at other blogs... You can really help us out by subscribing to our free RSS feed with your favorite feed reader, or here at Bloglines. Also, you can add us to your favorites at Technorati.
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My name is Todd Rhoades, the 'behind the scenes' guy here at MMI. I'm also on the team at Leadership Network (although that doesn't mean that they endorse everything I write here). In my past life, I was the developer of a of a website called ChurchStaffing.com. I hope you'll enjoy your time here and tell all your colleagues about MMI! 
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Post Your Comments:GREAT! Leonard! write a book. I’ll buy it!
[•Find someone in your church to help you with your language and research modern day illustrations for you. Give them your text and topic and let them help. ] Earl Creps chapter on reverse mentoring helps here. I’ve worked even harder to foster my friendships with people young enough to be my kids because of this.
BTW, I only fill the pulpit in our church one or two times a year (my duties are worship arts related) but I love when I get to do it. I talked about the incarnation this last weekend, and per your suggestions (even though I hadn’t read them yet) I did not use the word “relationship” at all. I stuck “friendship” in there instead. (How was I to know it was because Leonard told me too?). Also, I hate to say this, but stop using the word Christian. Use “Christ-follower” or “Follower of Jesus"… and MEAN IT!
I have one more thing to add to your list of suggestions. ACTIVELY seek out and place younger and younger people on your decision-making teams, on your worship and arts teams, etc… ENOUGH of us 40-somethings and above making all the decisions, plans, and strategies!
I have one. Make a point to get out of your office several times a week. Hang out at a coffee place for awhile and get to know some people in your community that don’t attend church at all.
Pick their brains about their perceptions of church ministry.
Great article. I definitely agree with the comment about younger people on your planning team. I am amazed by how many Pastors who still do all the planning for a service by themselves. Gather a creative team and get input. Definitely represent a range of ages. But in the end shoot younger. Just like the comment on shooting for men cause women are much more adaptable. write a book!
These are good ideas. The challenge for the smaller church pastor is to stick with quality. I was at a guest speaker with one church where one woman led the choir, played piano and the organ. Depending upon the hymn she would hobble over to the instrument she selected to accompany the choir. She was probably a good pianist and fair organist 20 years ago but… this is a small country church. I suspect that she was the only “quality” pianist in the congregation of 50.
For a small church pastor, it takes time to implement such ideas. The relationships can be quite strong and are established long before the pastor arrives. When I arrived at my present work 11 years ago, we had several positions that were unfilled. And I was challenged by a few key leaders to get them filled. I put the monkey back on their backs simply asking who they would recommend. They could not come up with any who had the time, commitment, or skills to do it… but they hated to see the positions unfilled. So I asked if we could just do a few things well until we grew a bit and found some quality folks.
AHA! That’s why Peter’s response was so passionate.
Leonard, your article reminded of me of something that happened a couple of Sundays ago. A woman walked by a Bible study classroom and heard a young person use a word she deemed “highly inappropriate” - especially in a church.The woman didn’t understand that the culture in which this young person had been raised & still lives in is/was one that uses cuss words like water coming from a hose trying to put out a fire. The woman had been raised being at the church every time the doors were open - the language to her was worthy of a good mouth-washing. The fact that this young person was a female made it even worse. Thankfully the woman was stopped before she had an opportunity to “speak her mind” to the younger female.
Thanks Leonard. More than I can say......
Wow! What a great article! Please write a book, I would buy it. We must be culturally relevant so unchurched and dechurched people will even bother to listen to the timeless message of the gospel. Would that every church would take this to heart...what an impact! I believe God is doing a mighty work in the world today, and if the established church does not catch up He will leave us behind.
Thank you Leonard,
You are very articulate and make excellent points. Add my voice to the growing choir singing “Write A Book!”
In a quiet, but effective, prophetical story, your introduction highlighted the problem with many of our churches. We don’t value reaching the lost enough to change. I felt a bit like David being outraged at Nathan’s story. What kind of doctor would...oh, we do it every week!
I often say if we are trying to build a bridge between the faith community and the unbelieving community, we should make it as short as possible. Detours through 1957 worship experiences are great if you are going to a museam, but not if you want to connect people with the gospel.
I have also wondered by we consider it “nice” to let people lead singing who are obviously not gifted at it? If they think they are good, we are aiding in their self-deception. If they know they are bad, they are probablly wondering why we don’t care. Either way, the result is not good for the church or the person.
Have a great Christmas…
In Jesus,
mdd
Thanks all for your input and comments, I appreciate it greatly. I will add this to the list of other books floating around my head until God sees fit to give me an opportunity to write. Until then we will keep plugging away. Great thought about adding younger people to our teams as well. We have a second band in our church, all teens, and they are being developed though mentoring into an awesome worship team, not just musicians but lead worshipers. It is very cool. Since I pastor a new church, 2 years old in February, 07 I sometimes have a “cannot wait to see what God does in ten years with us,” mentality. I’ll pray for you and you pray for me.
Have an excellent Christmas,
Leonard
There is a huge danger in “speaking the language of the culture”, that is when that language changes the meaning of our doctrine. We focus so much on touchy feel-good relationships today, but our language is changing to a point that we will no longer even recognize our doctrine or our belief. I realized this one sunday when I talked to a number of people in a big mega church who all thought they were ‘christians’. They spoke of a “relationship” with God. but on further discussion found out they had never repented of sin, didn’t understand what a subsitition death or propitation or justification was all about. In fact many of them continued to live in sin with their girlfriends, attended all sorts of other cults groups, and other seriously questionable activities. One couple in the praise band were SWINGERS! why? because the church got so good at speaking the language of the culture that it watered down all meaning an it began to interfere with speaking the gospel. Remember, Jesus did NOT come to speak the language of his culture, he came to bring a message that was COUNTER-cultural.
Oliver,
The experience that you report about this “big mega church” has nothing to do with speaking the language of the culture. I have had some experience with mega-churches, and once again, your experience doesn’t match mine with any of them. (You have a pretty interesting set of experiences, brother...)
Jesus brought a message that was certainly counter-cultural, you are so right, but he used images and metaphors that made sense to the culture, and he spoke the language of the culture. He talked of farming to those who knew farming, he used business metaphors, searching in the home for something you’ve lost, et cetera. Jesus was the ULTIMATE expression of speaking the language of the culture. He did it VERY well.
The words we use do not in and of themselves change the “meaning” of our treasured doctrines.
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