Culture

It is my experience that the culture of a group of people is far greater than the sum of its parts. Now by culture I don’t mean the group’s level of sophistication. I’m not talking about its art, its combined knowledge, or its cultural anthropology. What I am referring to is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize a community. Thus, a group’s culture is more than the combination of individual personalities in the crowd. It involves their interactions with each other—their relationships. One may have a bond with another, but how is that relationship affected by the introduction of a third, a fourth, and/or a fifth person.
Interestingly, I’ve found that the larger the group, the more likely it becomes that a certain hierarchy will naturally begin to appear. And such a perceived pecking order may be determined by the simplest or the most complex of means. Things as diverse as money, beauty, position, power, and personality may affect one’s place in such an unsanctioned caste system. It is an extraordinary sociological pattern. But it is so much a part of who we are that we seldom notice or acknowledge its occurrence. However, when it is pointed out, we recognize it immediately.
For example, the wealthy get listened to. The beautiful hang together. Smart people get together to talk about smart stuff. While the shy, the plain, and the average give mental and sociological assent to the perceived worth of the perky, the beautiful, and the exceptional. And the higher up the ladder one goes, the more influence he or she wields in the shaping of the future attitudes, values, and practices of the larger group. In other words, the people at the top of the heap have the most influence on the culture.
But what if a culture could be established that would do away with the natural order of things? What if it were possible to begin with everyone in the group at the same level of influence and worth? What if money, beauty, position, power, and personality were no longer forms of measurement? And what if the poor, the plain, the lowly, the weak, and the introvert were valued as equals with them? And what if it were possible to maintain that kind of altruism? What would that look like?
I think it might look like the church that Jesus intended for us to be—without hierarchy, rank, or privilege. It might look like a people who are united despite ethnicity, socio-economic status, or gender. (Galatians 3:28) And that might lend itself to producing a citizenship which embraces everyone, regardless of their status, influence, or behavior.
What would a church be if everyone looked like priests, all with equal access to God? And what if everyone in the community were equal partners in leadership and had an identical empowerment for service? And what if the community’s meeting spaces looked more like real life places than specialty buildings constructed exclusively for the use of “Christians?” But that’s getting away from culture…sort of.
This is the premise upon which Agora was started. It was and is intended to be a foundation of love, mutual respect, and understanding.
We have found that everyone has a story. And that we have no right to judge someone if we don’t know their story. And then once we know their story, we have no need or desire to judge them. This is the power of authentic relationships. True relationship not only brings judgmentalism to an end, it also takes away the power of gossip. Because we are all invested in one another.
When a community shares attitudes, values, goals, and practices, a culture is formed. But if that culture is to be perpetuated, it must faithfully carry out its values and practices, embrace new members, and thoroughly train its progeny. That also sounds like church.
Thus, for the above reasons and some others we will enumerate, I have found that an effective ecclesiology begins with a culture, more than a doctrine.

The Plan

On Sunday, October 31, 2004, Pastor Phil gave us the whole day to make a presentation to the church at Carbondale. On Sunday morning, we announced my resignation and provided the people a dialogue about the next generation. Our primary text came from the Old Testament book of Judges. It is an accurate description of many who live in our city today. “After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel.” (Judges 2:10) We talked about the need to reach to people in our church-rich city who would never walk into a building full of “Christians” any more than a robber would go strolling into a police station.
That night, we talked about how we might strategize to accomplish this task. At the time, I had formulated a few ideas. By that I mean, I had read some books. So I shared some fancy power point pictures and diagrams that I had probably copied from either Ed Stetzer, Ralph Moore, or Frost / Hirsh. And we told the people of Carbondale that in the coming days they would all be invited to go with us—anyone who felt so led.
By January of 2005, we had already begun to meet weekly with a launch team that had been assembled. We also held Q & A meetings at Carbondale every Sunday night in January one hour prior to the evening service for anyone who was curious about the new endeavor. Carbondale also sent us to a church planting “Boot Camp” that helped us to clarify our vision, our mission, and our strategies.
Now, if I had it to do all over again, we would have taken a lot more time to plan and to prepare before a launch date. But we didn’t know any better. So, on Sunday morning, February 6, at 10:00 am, we gathered for the first time in the Zarrow Regional Library meeting room right across the street from Carbondale. It was, all in all, rather inauspicious. I probably sucked. I often do. But we had a couple of things going for us.
First, we had already answered “yes” to the big question: “At the end of the day, did God call us to do this?” So, there was that. But second, out of the 40 or so people who had decided to come with us, there were more than a handful of us who were determined to figure this thing out.
So maybe that’s another thing we had going for us. We never claimed to know for sure what to do or how to do it. What we found out was that we had a group of people—some of them any way—who were willing to suspend expectations and to dive into this grand experiment together. What we had was an assortment of folks who would become a community which was willing to help us develop the culture, the values, and the praxis that would become Agora.

Who Will Go with Us?

In spite of our assurance that we had to do this, we still felt a lot of apprehension about how to proceed. We had read a couple of books on planting churches, but we had never done it before nor had we been a part of a plant. So, wouldn’t that be like reading a driver’s manual and then jumping right into a car and assuming that I can drive? I knew one thing: we would have to have help.
First of all, Pastor Phil had given us permission to present our vision to the entire church and to invite anyone who shared the vision to go with us. Not only was this a gracious gesture, it was nearly unheard of within the circles in which we ran. But before we were even ready for that we still had some work to do. We had to figure out what this new community would look like and why. We needed more training. And we needed some people we loved and trusted to help us dream and plan and to go with us to help.
It didn’t take us very long to deliberate as to whom we would ask to come alongside us. Two couples immediately came to mind, and once we had Pastor’s permission, we asked them to pray and to consider taking this leap with us.
I have to say that I don’t know what I would have done if either of them had said no. I was so convinced that they were the ones that I probably would have had to rethink the whole thing if either of them had said no. Thankfully, neither of them did.
David and Iva Gilliam had been friends of ours for more than a dozen years. We had been through a lot together and had served together in two different churches. David has a Christian Education degree as well as a Masters of Divinity diploma. Iva is an extremely talented musician and singer and one of the kindest, most capable people I know. Besides, we really love them. And you want to share this kind of experience with people you love and with which you like spending a lot of time.
Inexplicably, Dave and Iva said yes.
Now the Gilliams are pretty close to being our age. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just that we also felt that we needed a younger influence from the very beginning of this journey. If we were going to relate to the emerging generations we needed some of the indigenous on our team. So, the next couple we were compelled to invite was much younger.
Michael and Candace Marshall were leaders in the young adult department at Carbondale. I had gotten to know Mike in the ministerial training program that we had helped to start. Like the Gilliams, Mike and Candace had a definite call upon their lives and had demonstrated their abilities and their love for people. Now we were six.
Having these four people in the boat with us made the terror of it all minimally tolerable. Their yeses gave us impetus. But now we had to prepare to tell the church family about our plans, and see if anyone else would consider going with us.
O, wait! What was the plan?

Business as Usual

We had a ton to be excited about. We had survived the tornado. Our square footage was twice what it had been before the destruction. And in spite of what the “experts” had told us, we were debt free. Plus we had grown from a church of about 450-500 to more than 800 and were still growing. It was heady stuff.
People would ask us, “What is the secret to your success?”
All we could say was, “Okay, you start with a tornado…”
We didn’t have a clue.
Most of you probably don’t know this, but when “preachers” get together—and when they don’t—they talk to and about each other. Sometimes they like to act like they’re happy for your success. (They may be.) But they also ask goofy questions like, “How many you runnin’, Doc?” It’s a question about church attendance, which translated means: “Tell me you’re not doing better than I am!” Followed by the moniker “Doc” which translated means, “You and I both know you don’t have a real doctorate, but in case you earned one when I wasn’t looking I’m sure it’s not the kind that helps people.”
Anyway, when you’ve had explosive growth, humility is important. Especially when you don’t have a clue what caused it. The news of our success was about as welcome to the preacher party as a hooker.
But success is a blessing and a curse. Here’s what we found out. It takes a bunch of effort to meet the expectations of 800 people. And it takes a lot of staff. And it takes a bundle of “ministries” and programs. And, it doesn’t take long to become totally exhausted.
Here’s a little something I’ve discovered. I’ve discovered that when I’m exhausted, I have a tendency to begin to contemplate the cause of my exhaustion. Something like this:
“What in the world am I doing?”
What I was doing was what was expected of me, or so I thought. Was I trying to compete with other churches our size? Was I trying to grow the church through my own effort? Nobody had asked me to do it. I just didn’t know any other way. It seemed it was just “business as usual” in the modern church.
But it wasn’t long before I began to question “business as usual.”
All of the church growth materials we had read instructed us to create vision and mission statements, something we had never done. Now I understand why that is necessary. When you hit the wall, it really helps to know why you’re killing yourself. In other words, when you know your purpose, it puts everything into perspective. I can survive almost anything if my purpose is important enough.
It was not.
In fact, I don’t think I knew what my purpose was. We never got around to writing down, let alone publishing our vision. So, whatever mission I had made up in my own head was not worth this. This wasn’t “mission impossible.” It was mission imperceptible. The best I could figure, our reason for being, my reason for working 6 and 7 days a week was to perpetuate the machine.
That was not enough.