Howard's Blog : Ethos

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

In the air tonight

When I was involved in training teachers we used to talk about the "hidden curriculum". This is not the on the page content of urban models or coastal erosion that you intend the students to be learning but the off message content that is learned as unintentional by products of the school experience.

The hidden curriculum provides students with regular unplanned lessons on topics such as authority and power from teachers or inequalities in social networks from their peers. It seemed to researchers that the students learn their strongest lessons from the hidden ethos of their school.

14 years of full time church leadership has taught me that this is true in church. A church's intangible ethos shapes the spiritual formation of a church and its people, far more than any explicit sermon content, or any vision statement, lists of values or statement.

I have heard and delivered loads of training about the importance of vision, about how to wordsmith a memorable mission statement, and about drilling that down into a coherent strategy; but actually what people articulate about your church is rarely what you have worked so hard to craft. What they tell you is what is really in the air, the ether, the ethos, the true spirit and character of your community.

In Manchester I would ask people on our participating membership day, what made them decide to belong to Hope Church? They would use ethos words like friendly, real, authentic, honest, warm, loving, and accepting. Those were the words we lived not simply wrote or spoke. I assume others that checked us out but didn't join would have other less positive words, we probably lived those words as well but you rarely get to find out the darker side of your ethos.

So as I set out on pioneering Godfirst Church, it would be easy to craft a compelling vision statement - I have done it before - but actually starting from scratch gives me time to look in the mirror (James 1:23) and examine who I am, because we all really know that what the leader lives, who you are, and what really matters to you is the real message everybody who breathes the air of your church will be learning.