How To Lead A Healthy Tech Team - Culture

What Does Your Culture Look Like?

Once we have settled on the standards and values we have for our team, we need to figure out how to maintain these graciously. Now, remember, we don’t have standards and values as a way to demand compliance, as if we were a feudal lord demanding subjection from our serfs. We have standards to remind our brothers and sisters that we value worship. We value excellence because God is excellent. We follow His example in bringing beauty into a complex world that is constantly looking for ways to demoralize and profane what God has meant for good. We do this by caring for our culture. 

Culture is the values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic. In every social grouping, there is a culture at work. We are either subject to the culture, absorbed in it, or actively participating in setting, establishing, or changing the culture. 

We may interact with multiple cultures. There will be a definite culture in which you work or live. At times in my life, I have worked in a culture significantly different from the culture I lived in or the culture of the church I attended. I grew up overseas as a missionary kid. We were often referred to as “Third Culture Kids,” meaning we were exposed to our parent’s culture and the culture we were currently entrenched in. This inevitably created a “Third Culture” amalgamation different from either.

Whether we have considered it or not, each of us lives and functions within the culture of our church. This culture affects the choices we make, what we spend our money and time on, and how we interact with others sharing that culture. This is where values come into play. We are constantly basing our decisions and practices on what we value. 

Years ago, I was brought in to consult with a church on upgrades to their current sound system. This church was a traditional church whose members consisted of farmers and hard-working, blue-collar people. They were good, salt-of-the-earth type folks. It was challenging for them to understand or grasp why they needed to pay me to advise them on what they should purchase. I couldn’t help but think that these hard-working men leading this church would never consider hiring someone to mow their lawn or landscape their yard. They would work a twelve-hour day and mow their lawn in darkness before they would pay someone to do it for them. It had nothing to do with me or their respect for my skills and background. It didn’t matter enough to them if they got the right equipment or if their volunteers could fully understand and utilize the equipment. They made a decision based on their values. Nuance or musical excellence was not part of their value measurements. 

In Lancaster County, where I live and work, we have a culture of “form over function.” Beauty, for beauty’s sake, is over-indulgent. We fear our neighbors looking at us and judging us by what we have. The Amish and Mennonite culture has seeped into our culture to a pronounced degree. 

Now I am all about humility and not a flashy person. I drive a Toyota Corolla. That is all fine and good, but we serve an extravagant God. Consider the beauty of creation. Matthew 6:28-30 reads, “And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Solomon in all his glory wasn’t dressed as well as the lilies.”

Or consider the seeming arrogance of Romans 1:19-20: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” My paraphrase would be, “You would have to be blind if you saw the glory of God’s creation and still didn’t believe.”

As far as extravagance in worship, look no further than Mary in John 12:3-8, who anointed Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume. A few of the disciples were very selfishly offended by this wastefulness. They even made a convincing argument in questioning how many of the poor could have benefitted from the sale of this expensive perfume. Talk about lousy stewardship!

In Mark Labberton’s book, “The Dangerous Act Of Worship,” he discusses how we live between the paradigm of Exodus and Exile. The Exodus refers to the escape from bondage. God led his people out of bondage in Egypt to the promised land. In many ways, we Americans have lived with an Exodus mentality. Our forefathers fled persecution to come to a land where we could worship freely without oppression. We still tend to see ourselves as just passing through without a need to engage in culture. We are escaping. Exile, however, looks a little different. As God’s people lost sight of their calling, they came to a point of judgment where escape was not immediately on the horizon. The directive looked a little different. Jeremiah 29:7 admonishes, “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” God instructed the Israelites to stay and be changed by seeking the welfare or shalom of their enemy Babylon and praying for God’s mercy. 

Both Exodus and Exile have a consequential impact on our culture and how we interact with it. Labberton writes, “Our unwillingness to live as faithful exiles explains our capacity to chase culture rather than transform it. It explains the sweeping compass of the worship wars that have preoccupied the church for the last decade while national and global problems go unattended.”

If we are chasing culture rather than transforming culture, we will come up empty.

In his book Culture Care, Makoto Fujimura talks about the generative nature of caring for culture. “At the most basic level, we call something generative if it is fruitful, originating new life or producing offspring (as with plants and animals), or producing new parts (as with stem cells). When we are generative, we draw on creativity to bring into being something fresh and life-giving.”

We are constantly looking for warm bodies for our tech booth because we are not committed to a generative nature of culture care that is vibrant, creative, and fruitful. We are not communicating clearly enough how important engaging in excellence and worship is. If our tech staff is bored to death because they don’t know what to do and why to do it, stagnation and decay set in. Mako also says, “A healthy and thriving culture is impossible without the participation of artists and other leaders who are educated intellectually, trained experientially, formed spiritually, and growing morally. Beauty is both a goal and a catalyst for each of these elements.” I love this.

Here’s the good news: as the leader, you get to shape the culture!

Next week, we’ll talk about how you can know when you have arrived.

-Dave Helmuth
(purchase my book, "Worship Fertilizer: (the first hundred)" HERE)

How To Lead A Healthy Tech Team - Culture (Nº 377)