Setting Values For Your Church
An organization’s culture can be determined by its values. Setting values and sticking to them ensures that everyone in your church is looking through the lens of culture when they do the work that moves Ministry forward. In addition, prospective team members will want to learn about the values and culture of your church before joining.
We spoke to Kevin Little, Kids Ministry director, about New Life Church’s core values and how these values shape their daily decisions. I’ll also shine some light on how the core values of Playlister help us serve our partners as best as possible.
Setting and scaling the values at your church
New Life Church prioritizes culture. With over 18 campuses across Arkansas, core values are essential to keeping every team member on the same page about how to work on different challenges they face in Ministry.
Excellence honors God and inspires People
This is one of New Life Church’s core values. We talked to Kevin Litte, their Kids Ministry director, about what this means for Kids Ministry.
“When you join New Life, you’re joining a family. You can expect to see that same brand, similar building setup, and same programming regardless of which campus you go to.”
New Life has several other values that they aspire to operate by every day. When it comes to setting values, you’ll want to have a discussion with your team about what you find important and critical to do the best work at your organization.
At Playlister, each of our founders wrote down potential values for our then-small company. We then met and narrowed them down to a list of just four:
Candor
Idea Meritocracy
Speed for all
Radical Transparency
If these values excite you- be sure to check out our open positions :-)
Living your values
Okay- you’ve got a list of a few words/phrases that articulate your values. Now what? Is it time to just check this box and make a cool plaque listing the values? Not at all. Once you’ve set your values, it’s important to make sure each part of your operation checks out with your values.
Looking at Playlister as an example:
Candor
- While it can be uncomfortable to be completely candid in certain situations, tough conversations now usually prevent harder conversations in the future.
Idea Meritocracy
- At Playlister the best idea should always win. It doesn’t matter who’s idea it was, or how loudly someone may argue. To maintain an idea meritocracy- we rely heavily on candor. Interns are expected to challenge management if they truly disagree with a particular idea and have something better in mind. We also lean heavily on data as the source of truth in discussions. Want to learn more about using data at your church? Here are Jeremy O’Niell’s key tips on gathering and using data at Skyline Church.
Speed for all
- Our average support ticket response time at Playlister is ~8 minutes. All Pro Kits are priority shipped the same day that they are ordered.
Radical transparency
- We send our monthly financials to all employees at Playlister. We ask all customers, not just ones with positive things to say, to review us on G2 so that other churches can listen to their feedback when evaluating Playlister. If an employee at Playlister is underperforming, we let them know in advance so that they know what the issue is and how it could be adjusted before termination becomes a conversation.
As you can see, values only really matter when you live by them. Keep this in mind when you and your team are choosing yours.
Vision will Shift- values never change
As Kevin and I were wrapping up our conversation he said something that stuck with me: “Vision will shift but values never change.”
Vision will adapt as needed to accomplish our goals- just look at how quickly everyone embraced online Ministry during 2020 due to COVID-19. But your values are a different story. These are the principles that you and your team rely on for maintaining excellence in what you do.