Core Values That Create Culture
The Pastor's Key Role in Shaping Church Culture
As a pastor, you have huge influence over your church’s culture—whether you realize it or not. Your actions and attitudes send big messages that shape your congregation’s values, behaviors, and priorities. In other words, you are the lead “culture creator” at your church. More so, the actions and attitudes that you allow to be lived out by your congregants are what ultimately shape your church culture.
This means you have an important responsibility. The culture you develop can either help or severely hurt your church’s main mission—to reach people in your community and guide them into life-changing relationships with Jesus Christ.
Defining Your Target Audience
First, get very clear on who exactly God is calling your specific church to reach. Every community has different types of people—families, teens, professionals, artistic types, struggling groups, and more. Spend time in thought and prayer discerning the particular segment of people your church is best positioned to connect with.
Once your target audience is defined, you can then shape a culture that feels welcoming and relatable specifically to those people. Without clarity of who you want to reach, churches often unintentionally drift into an insider culture that caters to longtime members rather than removing barriers that keep unbelievers from seriously considering the message of Jesus. You must guard against letting culture slide away from outward evangelistic focus.
Cultivating an Environment Optimized for Your Mission Field
Your main job as cultural architect is to develop an environment specially designed to resonate with the lives of who you are trying to reach for Jesus. Study Jesus himself—he harshly criticized religious leaders of his day for creating conditions that made broken and seeking people feel alienated rather than welcomed.
Think through every decision and element of your church experience, no matter how small it seems— from worship style, to artwork on the walls, to how visitors are greeted on Sunday mornings. All of these things communicate subtle messages that either align with your missionary aims or distract from them.
Something as minor as the paintings and décor chosen for the church lobby can build unintended perceptions about whether your community feels modern and relevant or only cares about traditional preferences. You must carefully engineer a cultural environment suited for your target audience to hear the gospel message in a way they can truly respond to it.
Core Values Guide the Entire Church Culture
The set of 4-7 core values you preach and embed into your congregation should act like a compass to orient every ministry, communication, and relationship in the church toward the true north of outward-focused evangelism.
Values centered on themes like grace, diversity, authenticity, vulnerability, empowerment, unity, or radical generosity can foster an environment where pre-Christians sense they are safe to check out Jesus, not one where they feel judged or merely tolerated.
The values you champion from the pulpit week after week inevitably materialize in the everyday attitudes and behaviors exhibited by members of your church community. You must foster the particular values best suited for your mission field to feel drawn into God’s kingdom rather than repelled by it.
Celebrating Stories That Reinforce Desired Values
An underutilized way to solidify the culture you want to see is to intentionally celebrate the right kinds of stories and testimonies happening within your church community.
Consistently highlighting dramatic stories of lives recently transformed by Jesus reminds people of God’s miraculous power on display in their midst, fueling faith and expectation for the Holy Spirit to still move today. This helps cultivate an environment hungry for God’s supernatural work rather than skeptical toward it.
Likewise, publicly celebrating members who embody your core values like servanthood, generosity, compassion, and grace encourages more people to increasingly model those behaviors. Who you spotlight and cheer from the stage communicates what kinds of actions truly earn honor and status in your kingdom-focused culture. There’s an old saying: “What gets recognized gets repeated.” OR “You elevate what you celebrate.” The best way to demonstrate for the people in your church the way you want and expect them to behave is by catching people doing it right and bringing public attention to those stories.
Measuring Concrete Cultural Indicators
Finally, humbly monitor and measure real indicators—not just articulated values—of how your church culture actually shows up. Do first-time guests report truly feeling authentically welcomed into real community? Are the people you aim to reach beginning to attend and stay engaged?
Is spiritual and numeric growth occurring? Tangible cultural fruit and evidence will reveal where realignment is still needed between the ideal environment you envision versus current reality.
Like an expert archer carefully balances each feather on an arrow to hit the bullseye, you must continually adjust elements in your church culture to calibrate toward welcoming your target demographic into God's kingdom. Lost souls hang in the balance of a culturally healthy and outwardly focused church body.