Church Climate

What does your church "feel like?" This is the question me and my friends often ask when we visit a church for the first time. Church feel, or church climate as we call it in leadership jargon, is how individuals (both members and one time visitors) are impacted by a church's specific culture. Even though climate is a congregation-wide phenomenon, it starts with how the individual is picking up on what's going on in the church.

And there are plenty of answers to the question, "What does your church feel like?" - some good, some, err, less than good. "Warm," "friendly," "positive," "Spirit filled," "stuffy," "rigid," "cold," and "relaxed" are some of the many, many answers. Less informed answers though, are more abundant: "I like that church" and "something just didn't feel right there" are perhaps more frequent statements that actually refer to church climate.

Church leaders, and especially those in seeker sensitive churches, should be particularly attentive to church climate. A positive climate could help draw outsiders to the church, keep members engaged in the church, or remove obstacles from church health and potential growth. Negative climates could alienate seekers, visitors and even members and stifle ANY potential change in your congregation.

As a church leader, consultant - and researcher - my question, though, is why do churches feel the way they do? Why do churches that, while defining themselves as "friendly," feel so unfriendly to occasional visitors? What do some congregations just feel like home the first time I go there - while I just want to cry (not in a good way) when I visit others?

Leadership research [1] actually answered this question decades ago: climate is the direct result of organizational culture. Where church culture is the shared way of doing things, values and norms of a church, climate is how people actually perceive those things. Where, for example, it is commonly understand that the leadership has to buy into any change (like starting a new prayer group), church members might just feel rigidity and lack of autonomy. Or worse yet, where it is the common understanding that God is a an "all seeing eye" waiting to judge, church members might just feel a climate of criticality and the like.

Church climate then opens up a dialogue for two questions:

1) What does your church feel like?
2) What are the commonly accepted ways of doing things that make your church feel like that?


These may be new questions to some; they may be old, or the may just be different. But leadership research suggests that they just might be a very fruitful start to ways of looking at our congregations from the point of view of folks in the seats, rather than those in the pulpit.



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1. See Schein (2000), Schneider (1975, 1990), Glisson & James (2002)