How Can We Create a Better Church Culture?

When Christians begin to recognize the necessity of vulnerability and accountability, we should also be striving to make the Church a safe environment for these practices. In this video, Sam Allbery explains the necessity of creating a Church culture that is safe and empathetic. Creating this safe culture allows for healthy conversations that result in honesty and freedom. The body of Christ truly should feel like family. When the Church lives out of such a family dynamic as brothers and sisters in Christ, the love of God transcends our every interaction.

Being a Safe Space
Expressing Empathy
Living as a Family

There’s a lot that churches can do, and that Christians can do to help believers struggling with this issue. One of the most important things is making it easy to talk about. And I think for pastors that means we remember it’s a pastoral issue and not just a political one.

How Can We Create a Better Church Culture?

If we only ever talk about it as the stuff going on out there in society that’s awful, it’ll make it very hard for church members to say, “Actually, this is something I’m feeling as well.” So we’ve got to make it easy to talk about. We’ve got to create a culture in our churches where we’re able to share the things that we find perhaps most shameful about ourselves, the temptations, the feelings we have that we are not proud of but know we need to share and need help with.

So I think a key thing is creating that culture, giving permission, having a sense of expectation that this will be an issue that affects us as well and let’s try to help one another with this. I don’t think you have to have experienced this particular form of temptation to help others who are wrestling with it. I think the key thing is being safe to talk to someone who will express a certain level of empathy as a fellow sinner, as a fellow struggler with some kind of sexual temptation.

The Church Is a Community

And I think another key aspect will be, for many of us, we’re going to have to face the prospect of long-term singleness. And so in our churches, we need to create a culture again where long-term singleness feels viable. So the church is a place of family, of community. It doesn’t just kind of revolve around families and couples, that kind of thing. So that the single person who is looking perhaps at decades to come of singleness can feel as though they do have moms and dads, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters through their church family. That is going to be a key thing for them.