by Michael Pumphrey

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As I write this, I am preparing to move my oldest son to college.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to raise teenagers into young adults. Just a few years ago, we helped his older sister navigate many of these same transitions, while our other two children are now in the prime of their teenage years. One thing has become increasingly clear: what one child needs from me is often very different from what another needs.

One needs to be challenged while another needs more support. One needs help thinking through direction while another needs the freedom to navigate that future themselves. Sometimes being a good parent means stepping closer. Other times it means having the discipline to step back.

The goal hasn’t changed. I want each of my children to launch into the world knowing they are loved and becoming increasingly self-aware, independent, and liberated to become who God created them to be. I’ve simply learned that how you help one child get there may look very different from how you help another.

Recently, a close family member told me they admired the way I parent each of my children differently. That’s learned behavior, not natural instinct. I’ve had to discover that assumptions developed while parenting one child don’t necessarily work with another. My love hasn’t changed. But how that love needs to be expressed sometimes must.

The values remain. Their embodiment changes. I think something similar happens in our churches.

Edgar Schein, one of the most influential thinkers on organizational culture, described culture as something that develops through a group’s shared learning. We encounter problems, discover ways of navigating them, and over time those solutions become assumptions about how the world works. Eventually, we stop recognizing them as assumptions. Yesterday’s solutions can harden into today’s assumptions, and today’s assumptions can become tomorrow’s barriers.

That’s why I like to think of culture as the soil beneath our feet. We don’t always notice it, but it shapes what can take root and grow.

Churches have plenty of assumptions.

We have assumptions about what worship looks like. What a pastor does. What our buildings are for. How decisions get made. Who leads. Who belongs. What constitutes faithfulness. Even what it means to love our neighbors. Many aren’t bad. Often, they developed precisely because they served us well.

I once sat with a church leadership team that told me they wanted to change. Because strategy is one of my strengths, I assumed my job was straightforward: help clarify where they needed to go and build a roadmap to get there. If the logic made sense and the next steps were clear, surely we could simply begin to move.

I was incredibly wrong.

As change became concrete, resistance took root. People dug in, saying things like: That’s not what we do here. That’s not the Baptist way. I had underestimated how much history, grief, fear, relationships, and identity we carry into change. But I had also underestimated the power of assumptions. Practices that served us faithfully in one season can slowly become confused with faithfulness itself. “This is how we have done it,” quietly becomes, “This is what faithfulness requires.”

Over time, our assumptions can even shape the way we understand God, the church, and our place in the world. Practices inherited from previous generations gradually acquire theological weight. Changing the practice then begins to feel like compromising the conviction. That’s why examining congregational culture is more than an organizational exercise. It is deeply theological work. We must be willing to ask not only what we believe, but what has shaped those beliefs and whether the life we have built around them embodies the gospel we cherish.

Consider something as ordinary as church property. Churches collectively possess enormous amounts of land and building space while our communities face significant challenges around housing, childcare, loneliness, food insecurity, and other needs. I’m not suggesting every church with unused property should build affordable housing or launch another community program. I’m suggesting we become curious enough to ask: What are these resources for? A congregation can deeply believe in loving its neighbors while carrying an unspoken assumption that its property exists primarily for the people who attend there.

We can cherish the gospel in our minds, defend it with our words, and preach it from our pulpits while struggling to give it flesh in the particular places where God has planted us. The incarnation reminds us that God’s love did not remain abstract. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. So perhaps one of the most important questions a church can ask is: What does the incarnation of the gospel look like in our community today?

That question may require examining more than our programs. It may require examining assumptions we’ve carried for decades.

In the previous article in this series, I wrote about understanding our limits. Healthy churches need to know what they can and cannot carry. But we should be careful not to confuse the limits of our present assumptions with the limits of what God might do through us. Sometimes faithfulness means acknowledging a real limit. Sometimes it means becoming curious about assumptions. Why do we do it this way? What are our neighbors actually experiencing? What might loving them require of us now?

Culture is not simply what we declare. Culture is what we cultivate.

And healthy soil takes time.

We don’t change congregational culture by announcing new values or unveiling another strategic plan. We cultivate it slowly through honest conversations, courageous questions, experiments, relationships, grief, trust, and repeated acts of faithfulness.

Perhaps our task isn’t to manufacture the future at all.

Perhaps it is to faithfully tend the soil beneath our feet, trusting that God is still capable of growing something new.

Rev. Michael Pumphrey is BGAV’s director of coaching.

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This article is the fifth in a series of six on leadership by Michael Pumphrey.

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