Customer Reviews

Culture Shift: Transforming Your Church from the Inside Out (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series)

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This book is about how to think, not what to think. It is a great book that helps pastors and leaders see the importance of setting the culture rather than trying to do patchwork quick-fixes on the church. Because culture has a way of communicating itself, if culture is not changed, things would slide back to what they were, and may continue to deteriorate.

Your culture is the lens through which you view your life. If you change the lens, you change your outlook. Change the culture, and everything else changes, including the future. Changing a culture is an inside-out approach that transforms the place. Transformation can never be brought in from the outside. Transformation is inside work, and every church already possess the elements that can bring it about.

Because culture shapes the church, and leaders make the culture, this book helps leaders work through cultural issues in their church, and to find ways to change and incarnate the godly culture that they would want. In this book are also questions and suggesstions that guide the reader into looking at how things are, working out where you want to go, and areas to focus on to take you there. In general, a church that goes through a culture shift would likely go through the following (pg. 183-4):

1. Identify and believe God's promises about your church's potential.
2. Model kingdom culture personally.
3. Enlist allies to champion the culture shift.
4. Focus on "what we're becoming."
5. Compare the vision of the future to present reality.
6. Outline a specific, doable pathway.
7. Help it filter through the church, and learn from feedback you receive.
8. Stay focused on transformed people, and on those receptive to change.
9. Make heroes of people who best represent the kingdom values.
10. Celebrate every success, and give God the glory.

I read this book at the same time I read Albert Mohler's book of the same title as I research how to transform and recreate culture from different perspectives this summer/fall. Mohler looks out at the culture Americans live in from an intelligent Christian perspective. Here, although Lewis, Cordeiro and Bird pay lip service to transforming the community, their primary concern is with transforming the culture of the church from the inside out. That's how you eventually impact the community!

I appreciated the repeated emphasis that you don't just add another quick fix, patchwork approach, plug-n-play program, etc. to what you're already doing, but that you look at the people, giftings, talents, passions, and values God has given you and move from there: "The church will become what you are right now"--leaders are the carriers of the spiritual culture (92). I also appreciated some of the coaching lines and tips: "You're doing an A-plus job, but may I share an idea that would raise it even higher? (117)

Some statements I took issue with included the following:

Lewis and Cordeiro seemed at times a little too eager to point out they were doing men's ministries like Promise Keepers before there was Promise-Keepers (137), unleashing the church before others were unleashing the church (130) or doing church completely from a small group approach before others had transitioned to this paradigm (p. 170). In 2,000 years of church history these things have never been done before?

I also found myself wondering if there was a trace of a paternalistic attitude when it comes to doing cross-cultural missions (page 185) and if a good cross-cultural missiology course would be in order (this is something I have to be careful about myself). In helping to launch a seminary in a largely unreached country, their solution was to require students and professors to learn English so they could be exposed to new possibilities, ways of thinking, etc. from the West (126). Although there's some good stuff, an incredible amount of non-relevant, non-contextualized, non-internalized Christian material (books, music, preaching and teaching) has been mindlessly introduced to countries around the world (China would be one place where I have heard complaints from national Christian leaders) and it's everywhere in Taiwan where I work now too. Rather, what this seminary probably needs to do is go back to the bible and to their cultural roots to contextualize approaches to ministry that God's Holy Spirit wants to bless in their unique cultural context (from the inside out... this was the overriding emphasis of the book but maybe dropped for a moment here).

Finally, although I do not disagree I did wonder about the following: "Anyone can discern within seconds of contact that [a visit to a new church] "This is a healthy place" or "Something's not right here." It may take you weeks to figure out why, but the signs are everywhere." (page 188). Having been in a couple of hundred churches for missions conferences in recent years, I'm not sure this is always the case, but nevertheless still good food for thought.

While this is one of the few books I have seen written specifically for the church, it misses the mark on what culture really is and how deep culture run in any organization, whether church or business.
A book I had to use for a graduate level course on culture & change was Edgar Schein's book Cooperate Culture Survival Guide and one of the things he says repeatedly is not to oversimplify identifying, diagnosing, and changing an organziation's culture. This book and its author's make this exact mistake.
Unfortunately in our Christian culture we give far too much authority to authors based purely on their experiences within their specific church. Often time they lack the research & academia aspect that gives secular book far more credibility. If you are really looking to understand how deep and powerful an organization's culture is, start with Schein's book and go from there. An organizations culture controls us far more than we control it.

The aspect of Culture Shift that I did appreciate is the importance placed on God's role in the entire process. Transforming a church's culture needs to begin with discovering what God's unique purpose is for each church and that can never be understated. The author's to a good job of reinforcing this point.

This book was eye-opening for me, and gave me a fresh new prespective on the life of a church. We need to focus less on self and on the future of the church to bring life and vitality to the church.