Q of the Week: Changing the Culture

Growing up in DC and a huge baseball fan, my brothers and I always rooted for the Baltimore Orioles since there was no DC team.  That changed in 2005 when the Montreal Expos moved to DC to become the Washington Nationals.  From that day forward, I changed my alegance to the Nats. Although I still hope for the O’s to do well, I root primarily for the Nats.

In case you do not follow baseball much, you might not know that the O’s are currently the worst team in baseball.  Really, they are.  Even though they have some of the best young talent in the league, they are statistcally the worst team.  They already fired their manager and this past Tuesday hired Buck Showalter to be their new manager.  Again, in case you don’t follow baseball much, Buck Showalter is known around the league for turning teams around.  He turned the Yankees in the early 90s from a mediocre team into a World Series Championship team.  He took the Arizona Diamondbacks from an expansion team to a playoff team.  And, he took the Texas Rangers from a disaster and made them into a playoff team as well.

What am I getting at?  I’m getting at the Question of the Week, just a little slowly.  Buck’s reputation centers around his ability to turn a team around.  He changes the culture of a team.  A team that is accustom to losing starts to win, maybe not immediately but in the first 1 or 2 of his hiring.  That is exactly why the Orioles hired him.  With all the great young talent they have, they don’t want them getting accustom to losing.  They fear that if they continue to lose as much as they have, they will stay mired in that losing culture and never be able to get out of it.  They needed a culture change, and Buck has given it to them.  Since being hired, the O’s are 5-1.  That record probably won’t stay as good this year, but I bet that there continues to be significant impact the rest of the year because of Buck’s presence.

Applying this to Ministry comes the Q of the Week.  The Question of the Week is: How do you change the culture of your Ministry? Obviously, ministry is not like baseball where a program is judged by wins and loses.  But, it is similar in the sense that a culture/environment surrounding a ministry can be either toxic or uplifting.  It can be glorifying to God or embarrassing.

For example, one of the culture changes I had to do was in regards to girls and boys in my youth program.  For years, my program was characterized as an “Guys only Club”.  This was for 2 main reasons: 1. we had primarily guy leaders who spent a lot of time investing in guys and 2. we played and did a lot of guy-centric things.  Because of this culture, we did not have as many girls involved in our program and they did not feel that we cared about them.  What was lacking was a strong female leadership presence.  So, I strived extra hard and went to extreme lengths to recruit strong female leaders.  It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight, but eventually we changed the culture.

So how do you take a ministry that has some toxic aspects to it and turn it into a situation where God is glorified?  Share your thoughts and experiences so we can all benefit from them.