An Expert’s Tips for a Healthy Christian Workplace Culture
A healthy Christian workplace culture is not always easy to attain. An assistant pastor described the ministry culture he used to work in by telling me, “My former senior pastor isolated the staff from each other and kept each of us dependent on him.”
Have you ever worked in an environment like that? How about one where the team leader was prickly and unapproachable? Or one where people used what they knew of you to control you. Or one where a staff is divided into warring factions?
There are lots of ways to describe unhealthy team cultures—toxic, crushing, dysfunctional, draining, demoralizing—cultures that drive people away from you and pit them against each other. But how do you build the opposite?
That’s the same challenge that God faces as he mobilizes his people for mission in this world. God’s people are not always on the same page with him or with each other. If he lets that situation continue, it will keep his church immature and his kingdom from advancing.
BEYOND A HEALTHY CHRISTIAN WORKPLACE CULTURE
What are the steps to a healthy Christian workplace culture? God steps in to address it, but he does something that’s easy to overlook because it’s so incredibly mundane. He talks. He takes the same words that you and I use all day long in ordinary conversations, but he uses them to draw people to himself and to each other.
In one sense, any time God speaks, you can learn something about building the kinds of healthy cultures where ministry thrives. Let’s take what Jesus says to seven churches in Revelation 2-3 and see what we can learn from his approach.
If you recall, he’s talking to people that he has already bought with his blood and brought into a relationship with himself. But something has weakened their relationship with him, and he’s not ok with that. Here’s how he goes about calling them back.
