Developing Church Mentalities

Our church, like many others, is working to broaden its self-understanding, particularly in terms of how we engage the particular community we live in. We want to  move from an internally-focused, isolated church to one that is at work transforming the community around us.  We feel an intensified calling to serve our community, and to work towards meeting the various needs we see around us.

This is an extremely complicated transformation on two fronts—Structures and Mentalities. Structures and Mentalities are twin issues, and leaders ignore one or the other to their great frustration. A leadership that effectively changes the structures of the church but doesn’t develop the matching mentalities creates tension and dissatisfaction.  On the other hand, a church that works towards developing external mentalities while dragging its feet in creating matching structures necessarily will produce frustrations as people struggle to live out the mentalities they’ve developed within old structures that were built for other purposes. The two have to be addressed harmoniously. and effective strategic thinking encompasses intentionally addressing both sides.  I’ll deal with what I mean by structural work in a separate post, but today I want to tease out what I mean by “mentalities”, and think about the challenges they pose to churches.

Communities of people naturally develop communal mentalities, or ideas and ways of thinking that come naturally to members of the group.  In terms of the church, some of those mentalities involve how people think about service, responsibility, wealth, leadership, and identity.  There are mentalities and expectations for everything from how nice the church building ought to be to what kinds of roles the ministerial staff should take, and how the offering should be divided up.  Church mentalities exist on several different scales, such as general christian culture, within movements such as evangelicalism, particular denominational traditions or regional subcultures, educational funnels, national tendencies, and at the local congregation level. Each of these levels exists in varying degrees and combinations within church members, and it can make a pretty powerful stew when it comes to people smashed together into one local church body.

There are other factors for how we develop mentalities, such as our familial connections, the habits of our peers, and even our consumption of media.  Leaders need to acknowledge where people come from, who they hang out with, and where their radio dial is parked, because all of those get thrown into the mix in determining the sort of mentalities people develop. Churches themselves add to the mix through all kinds of communication forums such as classes, small group discussions, what ends up in the bulletin and on posters in the halls, the content of worship music, and the act of preaching.  What often happens is that churches don’t intentionally think about what kinds of mentalities they are developing, so that across all those different forums they communicate lots of different mentalities, some of which are blatantly contradictory. Additionally, much of that communication is so accidental and unplanned, that often the mentalities are contradictory even within individual venues themselves.

One final layer of complexity is that every church has families who have lived for several generations within the same denominational tradition or even congregation sitting next to families who have transitioned into that particular faith tradition within a few months or years. That means that they have almost certainly absorbed nuanced mentalities in what it means to be church. Churches that fail to do their part in intentionally and strategically planning the mentalities they want to develop are indeed planning to fail.

What do we do with all of that complexity? I think there are several ways leaders can work towards developing certain mentalities within their church.

1. Use different levels of leadership. Every church has different levels of leadership, from people who are making big picture decisions to people that leading particular classes and small groups to people who are influential among their peers. Understand that each of these levels of leadership shapes the mentalities of the church in important ways.  Begin to have as many conversations with as many of those leaders as you can, in as many formats as you can, about the mentalities you are leading towards.  Every conversation you have holds the potential to multiply your mentality developing efforts.

2. Think through your communication formats. What are you already doing that holds the possibility of influencing the way people think?  Where can you reinforce your teaching, and where are you undermining those messages?

3. Use Common Language. Reinforce the mentalities you are working to develop by being specific about key language that represents those mentalities.  Develop a code that resonates with your people, and reminds them every time they utter it or hear it that this is the sort of mentalitiy that represents the vision of the church.

4. Recognize your current mentality inventory. What sorts of mentalities are already in place in your church? Think through several assumptions you think people have, and whether that is descriptive of a mentality shared by some, most, or all of your church, currently.  Develop a mentality inventory that describes where you are in the current moment, recognizing that it might be different both from the past of the church and the leaderships vision of the future.

5. Beat the drums over and over again. Once you’ve begun to chart a path, this is not a place to be timid.  Be bold, be repetitive, and keep working the different communication forums with as consistent a message as you can manage. Don’t try to cover the church with a set of mentalities, but to saturate it.  You don’t win here when everybody’s heard the mentalities, but when they own them.

The next post in this series is an initial set of mentalities for a church engaged with the community.