“Culture eats strategy for lunch”
C1 Overview
Ecclesial Culture
Ecclesial culture refers to the set of customs, beliefs, practices, behaviors, and traditions associated with a particular religious community and how they express and live out their faith. This includes the shared values and norms that guide its parishioners’ behavior and interactions within the church. Most often, this ecclesial culture is not taught, but caught from the lived example of the community’s clergy, staff, and volunteer leadership.
Many Families of Parishes will engage in thoughtful visioning for a better future and document that in a vision statement and mission statement. However, they fail to attain that vision because the day to day behaviors and actions of that Family leadership did not change to embody this future vision. The everyday behaviors, attitudes, and language we encourage, tolerate, and reward serve to define and reinforce the lived ecclesial culture of our Families of Parishes.
“Vision is ‘I have a dream,’ and culture is ‘this is how we march.”
— John Maxwell
Culture management, therefore, is not just important for big companies, but also for small organizations and especially for Families of Parishes that are seeking to migrate from a maintenance mode to one of mission. To form and send disciples into the world and fulfill the great commission, our Families of Parishes must purposefully define and manage the evolution of their ecclesial culture. This is the goal of Phase 3 of Beacons of Light: to help Families of Parishes
understand the importance of their ecclesial culture (C2 Kickoff);
give them tools to assess and purposefully change their ecclesial culture(C3 Assessment and C4 Culture Definition);
and provide discipleship formation for clergy, parish staff, and lay leadership to support an ecclesial culture of discipleship (C5 Discipleship Formation).
Each of us is called to actively participate as a member of a parish, the Universal Church, and our local Church. Parishes continually deepen the bonds of communion with other parishes.
This is not to say that all Families of Parishes will or should have the exact same ecclesial culture. A Franciscan Family of Parishes will likely ‘feel’ different than a diocesan, Jesuit, or Dominican Family of Parishes. Most churches have a unique culture that grew from their long history of pastors, leadership, ethnic culture, local norms. As a Family of Parishes brings together these churches and defines a new ecclesial culture that better meets the missionary goals of the Catholic Church, they should seek to retain those strengths of their existing church culture(s) to better welcome their local community while nurturing everyone in their discipleship journey.