Structure and Values

Structure and Values

Pastors are almost always keenly aware of their responsibility to be agents of change for the church they are leading.

It may be changing the music style to become more welcoming to the focus group they are attempting to reach, adding a screen for projected words for music, adding stage lighting to make the worship experience more qualitative, moving the offering to the end of the worship service in order to make it a part of the decision time, or any number of similar changes.

These changes need to be made very carefully and deliberately. These changes are structural. We often think that if we change a structure, we have changed the church. In reality, changing a structure may very well just be window dressing. Structures are peripheral to the values held by the church.

Never change a structure without first changing the value that underlies that structure.

Values are those principles of operation that drive the church or the person. Be careful at this point as many times the stated value is not the actual value. Our values are not necessarily what we think they are (or what’s written on the office wall and the website) as much as what we regularly do.

What we do is what we value, no matter what we say we value.

Many pastors (including this one) have gotten to the point in pre-marital counseling where he asks the awkward question regarding whether the couple has been living together before being married, only to hear the couple explain that they really do not believe in living together before marriage, but they have been doing so for two years.

The stated value is often not the actual value. What we do is what we value, no matter what we say we value.

Back to our examples above: Don’t make changes to accommodate or to become more welcoming to non-members, people who are far from God, etc., until the church buys into the value of reaching out to these people. No amount of structural change will effectively overcome the same old values under which the church may have always operated.

The church does not exist for the members who are now present, but to reach those who are not yet followers of Christ.

If the value, unstated, of course, is that the church exists to meet the needs of its members, then you are headed for a collision course. No amount of window dressing, structural changes, can substitute for the changing of the values that drive the structure.

You can talk people into doing things out of alignment with their actual values for a while, two to three weeks, maybe a bit longer depending on the situation. However, they’ll soon revert right back to the way things were done before, unless there is a value change that demands the permanence of the change.

Lasting changes are driven by value changes that lead to structural changes. Too often pastors & church planters change the structure without doing the hard work of changing the value first.

Deal with the underlying values first, so you can make changes that last.