My heart sank as I approached the pastor. We were about to have a conversation I knew he didn’t want to have, but it was necessary. 

After several months of cultural definition and visioning, we brought the team together for a strategic planning session. This is where we take the high-level ideas and bring them to the ground level, formulating a plan that will bring them all to life. The guidelines around this conversation are values; we can only plan a strategy that falls within our values. 

Unfortunately, during this strategic session, it became clear that a couple of team members were not on board with the values, as the action items they suggested fell clearly outside of those values. 

In other words – they revealed to the group that they stood outside the new culture. 

As this parish’s strategic guide and coach, my job was to confirm what the pastor already knew: These people needed to go. 

Culture formation is a delicate process. During the initial phases, everyone tests leadership to see “if this is for real.” This “testing” is accurate for any organization but plays out uniquely at a parish. Churches are notorious for keeping people around longer than they should be; we avoid difficult conversations. Team members become comfortable doing whatever they like – whether in how they engage parish culture, strategic planning, or communication. When someone comes in to say, “We are doing things this way now,” the response is often shrugged shoulders as people go back to business as usual. 

Accountability to the culture is the only way to shake people out of this malaise. Accountability requires “brave conversations” with team members that call them to task and identify where they stand outside the vision and values. People are often shocked when this happens because they aren’t used to it. They usually push back, hoping their response prevents another accountability conversation. 

Cultural formation and vision planning are useless without these conversations, though. As a coach, I can’t have those conversations with team members. They aren’t my team; I’m the guide on the journey but not the leader. I won’t stick around forever. People can ignore me. 

The need for the leader to hold people accountable is why I was about to have a brave conversation with the pastor. I knew that he wanted everyone to stay on board. He didn’t want to ask anyone to leave. Unfortunately, it was clear he would need to do so or risk destroying our work, which was fragile because it was new. 

The team members who were planning strategy outside of the parish’s values laid the challenge, and now the leader needed to respond with accountability. His next move would signal to the rest of the staff that he was either serious about culture and vision or that this was just “another idea with no follow-through.” 

In the next two weeks, the pastor had those brave conversations. One of the team members elected to leave. He was frustrated and upset but ultimately decided himself after realizing he stood outside the growing culture. The second team member recognized that she needed to adjust and received coaching to grow. She remains on the team, and the parish is growing because of the pastor’s clarity about who they are and where they are going. This clarity doesn’t come from hoping a plan succeeds; it comes from having the necessary conversations that hold people accountable to the vision and guide them to where your church needs to go.