The core values of a new church help form the foundation of who and what the church is about. They help clarify the new church’s practices and interactions and help explain why the church does what it does. When trying to distill values in general into a few core values, churches may find it helpful to consider four kinds of values: biblical, missional, personal, and cultural.
Biblical values here are often specific to calling. God may speak strongly to one church planting team in about a clear biblical mandate to serve the poor, call another to radical justice keeping or generosity. He may speak to a church planting leadership about a mission to all the peoples of the earth, and another about a mission to earth stewardship, or a simple call to consider others more highly than self.
Missional values are strategic to the mission of the church and help the church establish best practices. They include values such as reproducibility, indigeneity, readiness, or flexibility. One church helps every member maintain passports so that they can travel overseas on mission at any time God speaks.
Personal values help church planters make decisions about how they will work. A church planter with the value of a balanced personal life or a strong family life, for example, may also carry a value or shared leadership in order to accomplish the work of the church wile maintaining a stable home life.
Cultural values help church planters listen to their communities. A cause- oriented community requires a church to listen to what is in the community’s heart. A community that is indigenously multi-ethnic may not be comfortable in a church that serves a single ethnicity.
Sometimes, corresponding values show up in more than one category, and when they do, it is wise to pay special attention. For example, over fifteen years ago, a group of friends decided to plant a church. They represented several ethnicities plus mixed racial families. They had a strong personal value for a multiethnic church, even though in those days, that was considered impossibility.
The group was attracted to the beauty of the biblical reality that someday, every knee will bow and every tongue confess Jesus as Lord. That became their primary biblical value. The neighborhood in which they wanted to plant was racially and ethnically diverse, and the community liked it that way, so there was a corresponding cultural value. In addition, the friends shared a missionary calling to the peoples of the earth.
Multiethnic, multicultural ministry became embedded in every fiber of that new church. It was reflected in staffing, in what was served at the refreshment table, in children’s books and toys, and in many other ways. It became a real core value, and not simply an acrostic that looked good on a website or was easy for new members to memorize. What do you and your leadership team really value, and how does that translate into the core values of your new church?
