Culture will Eat Your Mission for Breakfast: Watch Out for This...

In this episode, Todd Rhoades discusses the disparity between a church's mission statement and its actual culture, emphasizing that culture ultimately prevails over mission. He shares insights from his book 'When the Church Falls,' analyzing leadership and church failures, their common causes, and how to prevent them. A key message is that culture is defined by daily actions rather than aspirational values, and toxic cultures emerge through gradual compromises. Rhoades encourages identifying and addressing tolerated cultural issues to align church culture with its mission.• Church culture often contradicts its mission statement.• Culture is determined by practice, not aspiration.• Toxic church cultures develop gradually through compromises.• Leaders should evaluate and name cultural issues that shouldn't be tolerated.• Rhoades offers resources and assessments for understanding church risk levels.

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Transcript

The Veneer Of Health

SPEAKER_00 0:08

The church website was absolutely stunning. It was beautiful. The mission statement was absolutely inspiring. The weekend worship was tight. On paper, a healthy, growing church. But behind the scenes, staff whispered in the parking lot, meetings with HR got canceled out of fear. Everybody smiled on Sunday, and the hallway was lined with closed doors and silent attention on the weekdays. The mission statement said one thing. The culture said something else. Make no mistake about it. Culture always wins. Hi there. My name is Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffing.com. Hope you'll check us out at chemistrystaffing.com. And we're in the middle of a series based on the new book, When the Church Falls, and we're talking about leadership failures, church failures, what we can learn about them, because there's been a lot of them, to be honest. What can we learn about them? What do they have in common? And then what can we do to help make sure that doesn't happen to us? That doesn't happen to our church. And today we're going to talk about mission. Okay. And like I said, mission, culture will always win. When your mission says one thing and your culture says something else, the culture is always going to win. All right, so here's how I describe mission. Mission is what you preach. All right? Mission is what you preach. Culture, on the other hand, culture is what you practice. Let me give you some examples. You can say, you can say that you value humility, but if senior leaders never admit mistakes, then your real value is more likely pride. You can say that you value family, but if your staff are punished for prioritizing their kids, your real value is output. You can say that you value accountability, but if nobody really feels safe to push back, then what you really value is more likely control. Culture is not built by aspiration. It's built by repetition and by permission. And toxic culture rarely on one day just announces itself, right? It seeps in one quiet compromise at a time. People laugh less, staff disengage emotionally, meetings become performative, uh, and the best people quietly leave. You've seen it, I've seen it, it happens all the time. And the crisis really happens when that culture over time disintegrates. And crisis really reveals, and when a leader falls or a church has a split or some kind of a really bad situation, crisis usually comes out. That fall usually comes out of what's been formed over a long period of time. It's very seldom. We talked on Monday about we see the headline and we think, how in the world did that happen? It just happened so suddenly. No, it really didn't. It happened over time, and that comes out of crisis. And crisis reveals what's really been formed. And how your church reacts when pressure hits, that's your true culture. You may think you know what your church values, but crisis actually exposes what's been shaped and what hasn't. Peter Drucker said, it's one of his most famous quotes, he said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And in the church, culture eats mission for lunch. Right? A gospel-centered church should feel like the gospel. If your church preaches grace but practices fear, something's broken. Scripture is packed with one another command. So we better love one another and bear with one another and encourage one another. Those weren't just for the congregation, they were for the leadership, true, as well. So, what kind of fruit is your church staff culture bearing? Bottom line is your culture will always eat your mission for breakfast. So let your culture prove your message. And when you don't mind your culture, that's when the falls happen. If you look at all of the major, if you want to say megachurch, we'll say megachurch. Megachurch falls, right? If you look at the reports that came out of what actually happened there, it started in their culture. And it didn't happen overnight. It happened sometimes over years. Not months, years. Sometimes over decades. So here's your action step for today. As we start to pull all of this together and start to see some of the as we look at all these different church and leadership fails, what do they have in common? Culture breakdown is a big this it's a big one. So here's your action step for today. Ask your team this week, would you describe this place the same way I do? Identify one thing in your culture that's tolerated. It's been tolerated over time, but it shouldn't be. And name it out loud. Alright, this is a series based on a brand new book that I wrote. That's called When the Church Falls. The subtitle on it is What We Can Learn from Leadership Collapses and How to Prevent the Next One. And this is a passion of mine based out of a personal experience I had early in my ministry career, where I was really close to a leadership failure, a pretty massive leadership failure. And I had to work my way through it as a young pastor. And it was incredibly difficult. It formed me, and it caused me to really be passionate about making sure that this doesn't happen at other churches like it did and other pastors, like it did to me when I saw my friend fall. But every time every time this surfaces, and unfortunately, it has surfaced a lot of times over the years, and more and more it seems. Every time I know of a leader that falls, and I know some of the people that have fallen, it's devastating to me personally. It's devastating to the church, and I just want to I want to dig in and say, uh, not to pile on, but to say, how can we prevent this from happening? And yeah, again, that's what this podcast series is about. That's what this book is about. I've also uh you can grab a copy of the book if you'd like. I'd appreciate that. When the churchfalls.com, when the churchfalls.com. But I've also created an absolutely free assessment. There's actually two assessments that you can take to kind of see your risk level. One is if you're a pastor or a church staff member, the other is if you're a board member or an elder at your church to see how your church is and what kind of risks you have there. You can take that absolutely free of charge. Just go to when the churchfalls.com and look for the assessment there. And if you need help walking through this, either your church or you as a pastor or a church leader, reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, more tomorrow. We're going to continue our series. Hope you'll join us back here then.