 Okay. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for connecting to the class. I'm sure the others will come in in a bit. Okay. I've started the recording for this class, so this lecture will be recorded. Let's take a moment to pray, and I'm sure the others will join us as we proceed. Okay. Good. Somebody please lead and pray, and then we will get started. Loving Heavenly Father, we just come into your presence, Father God. Thank you for this wonderful morning. Thank you for this. Thank you for your hands of protection over the week of Father God Jesus. As we gather here for the class of Father God, I pray for a pastor. I pray for others who joined the Father God Jesus. Help us to put everything we practice in our church, in our organization, what we learn of Father God. Let us be a good professional and minister for your kingdom of Father God. We pray, see, we honor your name. In Jesus' name, we pray this prayer. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you. All right. So this week, we are focusing on this topic of culture, organizational culture. We started this topic on Wednesday, and we will develop it further today. So I'll just quickly review some of the things we mentioned on Wednesday. And these PDF documents are available in the coursework section. All right. Just to quickly review, when we say culture, we're talking about culture, and we're talking about culture in the context of the organization. And of course, again, if you're talking about church ministry, lots of effect, we can also talk about the culture of the congregation or the church. Here specifically, we're talking about the organization first. So when you say the culture of the organization, whether it's a church organization or some other Christian ministry organization, let me just make sure I let people into the class and don't want anybody to be held outside. Okay. So let me say the culture of the organization. We're talking about these beliefs or jointly held beliefs. We're talking about certain values and the practices that people with the organization have. Some of the behaving and thinking the way people think and the way things are done within the organization. Now, not all of this will be necessarily documented. Some of these are like unspoken things. They're just accepted. We just practice some of it. Of course, we know that we say core values. Those things will be documented. Those things will be formally communicated. Some of this could be informal. Some of the practices behaving and so on. And we also said that in a large organization, there could be even subcultures. Sorry, that are specific to certain departments or certain groups within the organization. So that also can happen. We said culture can change over time, whether it's your internal change or external change. So culture is dynamic and it can change. And so why is culture important? Well, it affects how people, what is the experience of people within the organization, how they feel within the organization. Therefore, it affects productivity, how people are able to perform within the organization. It also affects how the congregation itself or the people are served because how the people or the culture that's embodied or embraced by the organization will determine how they serve people and how they take care or do the ministry, basically. And culture also can protect the organization from negative influences. If you're maintaining a healthy culture within, when there are negative influences coming in, it protects the organization. We mentioned what shapes the organizational culture. And just quickly reviewing what we did on Wednesday. Very important is that leaders model it. So people will see the leader and they will follow. So at various levels, right from the team leader to the heads of various areas of ministry to the pastors to others. We need to model it and the people will follow that. We talk about stories, stories of a powerful way of communicating who we are and what we are about and why we do certain things. There are rituals and practices that how whatever you repeat consistently, it shapes thinking, it shapes behavior. The culture can also to some measure be formally communicated. Whether it's in the orientation or training or through repeated things like posters and graphics and things of that, you know, you're constantly communicating. This is what we're about. And also when you affirm and reward people for doing things that align to the culture, behaving in a certain way that reinforces that within the organization. So we just talked about APC as a church, you know, our core values and we try to communicate it through this graphic. You'll find it in different places. But most importantly, like I said on Wednesday, you know, if we embody this, then people will begin to understand, hey, this is what the APC is about. And this is the culture, you know, we are going to maintain within the organization. And this is where we stopped. We were just doing a contrast, you know, this on the right hand side column is, you know, attitudes and behaviors that are actually toxic in nature. They're unhealthy. They're not good for the organization. They're not good for people in the organization, whether it's among the leaders or whether it's among the staff, people are working in the organization. And in contrast to that, you know, what would add what attitudes and behaviors will, you know, are good for creating and maintaining a healthy culture. So we need to contrast or understand these things. So we're going to go forward from here. I will shift over to the part two of this document on culture. So here's a little chart that kind of captures what I put in a table. It captures it in this little chart here. You know, they're contrasting styles or behaviors or attitudes, you know. So I will just quickly run through it just to, you know, our minds will say, like, you know, there are two opposites here. And we make a choice as to what kind of a culture we want to have in the organization in relation to these kinds of behaviors. You know, you could have a top-down or you can have a participative when it comes to decision-making. We can be rigid or we can be flexible in the way we work. We can be cold or we can be very caring about people. We can be disjointed or integrated. That means, you know, we could work cohesively or we could work in silos very separately. You know, what are we focused on? Are we number focused or are we quality focused? Are we looking for excellence or just looking for big numbers? So that's, you know, the different mentality here. Are we hierarchical or are we flat, you know, as an organization? Are we micromanaged or do we give people autonomy to make decisions and do things on their own and make their own decisions? Are we reactive or proactive? Do we wait for something to happen then respond or do we go forward and make things happen? Are we secretive or are we honest? Do we share information? Are we supportive and communicated in those things? What do we, you know, here's again a challenging thing. Do we try to protect relationships or do we tell the truth? You know, what is more important for us? Are we indifferent? Are we curious? Like we just turn away or are we go research, search out? Do we create trust or do we destroy trust? And there's not a complete comparison list, but they're just, you know, something to say. Look, if you want to have a healthy organizational culture, we could choose, you know, we have to choose between certain behaviors, certain attitudes, certain ways of doing things. And depending on what we choose, we are going to create that kind of a culture within the organization. Now, what is interesting here? And I'm just, Jim Collins is, you know, regarded as a management guru and somebody who's done a lot of work in the area of organization and management and so on. One of his recent books, I mean, it's not too recent, it sounds silly years ago, you know, it was a book good to great. I was trying to help organizations understand that, you know, it's not sufficient to be good. We've got to move to being great as an organization, what you do and so on. And in his research of just helping organizations move from being good to great, there were certain characteristics that he highlighted. And these are just an outliner summary of things he put forward. Now, understand, this is not a Christian thing, it's just general management kind of information. But a lot of what he's saying here seems to kind of reflect, what are, you know, what we would say are really godly or Christian values or ethics or things like that, you know. So he's just speaking from very general management perspective, but it's very interesting that these are qualities that are, you know, the Bible encourage many of these are things that are, you know, things that are encouraged in scripture and put forward for us. Yeah, but I just, we just run through this list. Just, and I look at it this one, you know, a management perspective from an organizational perspective. So what helps organizations become great organizations? There is curiosity, there is this, you know, and again, talking about people, right, that they are willing to go out there and investigate, research, explore, pioneer. People are rigorous, but they're not ruthless. So there's a balance here. They do, they work with rigor, with a lot of diligence, but they're not, you know, ruthless. There's a culture of discipline. So there are people of discipline, people taught in action. So there's discipline to the sole process within the organization, which helps organizations become great organizations. There is humility in leadership. There is determination in the way people work. There's of course positioning that is the right people and the right jobs doing the right thing. So that's important. There's unwavering faith. They have the sense of belief that they can, they can accomplish, they can be great. They can do outstanding things. There's this, let me just make sure that people and I don't want people to get hit outside. All right, everyone's in. Somebody's been trying to come in. I don't know. Okay. All right. All right. Good. Samuel's in. All right. So going back here. So, yeah, so there's this, you know, unwavering faith that there's been a sense of belief that it can be done. We will do it. There's also honesty. That means, look, these are the facts. This is what's happening here. We're not living in denial or not in, in pretence that what is happening is the way things are, but it's a, it's an honest recognition of facts. And because only then you can address what is happening, whether inside the organization or outside. They, of course, leverage technology. They are, they, they espouse core values. This of course is dependent on the organization, what they're doing, et cetera. They have these well expressed and well espoused core values that help them become great. And they understand what they're really good at. You know, obviously they recognize they cannot be good in everything, but they can be good in what they are good at. So they are, they, they're the key differentiating competencies. And that's what they focus on. They understand enough. This is from a business point of view, but they understand what are the economic drivers, what are causing, what's, you know, what's happening out there presently in terms of the economy and things that are driving the economy. So that's from an organizational point of view. There's focused passion. So these, these are people working with great passion in the organization. They are focused on goals rather than just doing things as bravado, as, you know, just demonstrated things, but look, we've got to specific things, goals based on clear understanding. And then at a leadership level, decisions are based on dialogue and debate and our talks, recent analysis, meaning it's a very evidence based, very data driven, open discussion type leadership, you know, that is very realistic in nature. So basically, you know, this is the summary of the things that he put out saying, look, this is what's going to, this is the kind of culture. A lot of this has to do with culture, the way people behave, the way people conduct themselves in the organization that is going to help the organization become great, you know, to go from good to great. And you can see a lot of these things that we have put out here, that has been put out here, kind of relate to the Christian faith or what we would say, you know, as people of faith, you can do these things, right? It's very, very interesting. Okay, so I just wanted to highlight that. So, you know, it's always good to pause and reflect and say, you know, how much of this are we practicing as an organization? So we can actually go through these lists and say, you know, in our Christian organization, you know, whether it's a church or whatever, how much of this are we following? Can it be said about us, you know? And so it's a good, kind of a checklist or self-evaluation kind of thing, right? So having understood that culture, even though it seems like it's very intangible, it actually can be captured and understood, evaluated, and improved within an organization, you know? So it's not something that's, oh, well, we don't know how it happens or we don't know how to influence culture. No, we understand. We know that we can recognize it. We know it's a healthy culture. Is it a toxic culture? And we know what are the determinants of a good, healthy culture in an organization. So we can actually do some things to evaluate it, right? So I'm just presenting here two ways to go about it. One is like what I'm just referring to as a general assessment. You know, now you can do it like a very formal way, like ask people, talk to people and so on, or you can just do it by observation, you know? So how would we get a pulse of the culture within the organization? Well, one is by doing a general assessment, by asking some questions. And I've just put down some questions that we could generally ask to get a sense of what's really happening. Where is this organization at? For instance, a question like what stories experiences do people remember about the organization? So if you just generally ask people, especially those who've been there for a while, what are your most favorite stories about this organization or the experience of this organization has gone through? What are your stories? What will they say? You know, somebody's been there for five years. What will they say? Because those are the unspoken things that are actually in the minds of people that are guiding a lot of their actions, their decisions. You know, usually they don't go and check up a rule book in order to make decisions. But there are these stories, these experiences that they have seen the organization go through. And it's somehow in the back of their minds as they make their decisions or go about their work. So that's an interesting thing to find out. Another question would be, how do you perceive leadership? That means what is the leadership of this organization all about? If you were to give me three top things that you see in the leadership, what are the other things? Well, they're very demanding or they're very controlling or they're very dominating or, you know, are they inspirational? Are they courageous? Are they risk-taking? Are they, you know, what would they say? What are the kind of words they would use to express what the leadership is? Now, why is that important? Because we said earlier that leadership is influenced largely by what is being modeled by leaders at various levels. And the people who are working with them, with those leaders, they don't imitate. You know, hey, the leaders are dominating. They themselves are beginning to dominate others. The leaders are very controlling. They will go and control other people. But if the leader is encouraging or supporting, they'll be supportive of others. They will know that, hey, this is what I have to follow. Because what is being modeled is what they will be not only influenced by, but they feel they would be held accountable to that same standard. You know, so that's another question to ask. Another way, another question we can ask when we want to get a pulse or feel of the culture is prevailing culture is, you know, hey, what are the rituals? What are the practices people are excited about? You know, and they would say, hey, we enjoy, you know, birthday celebrations. It's a big deal, you know. Somebody's birthday, we cut a cake, we have something. So then it's like, wow, that means people are celebrated. People are, you know, people are, you know, appreciated and they're celebrated in this organization. What else? You know, what are the practices, things that happen here? Oh, you know, when a project is done well, you know, that's announced and we share the, we share the excitement of a success. Okay, that's wonderful. So things like that, you know, practices. What are things that are repeated over and over again, which people are excited that gives a clue or insight into what the culture is like? How do people behave? So if you ask somebody a question, hey, how do people behave here? Are they open? Are they friendly? Is there a sense of team spirit, a sacrifice show? Or is there fearless feedback? I mean, do people talk easily with each other and give feedback straight in the face? Or are people afraid? Are people afraid to express ideas? Are people, you know, can, you know, people just keep quiet and, you know, so how do people behave here? It gives an understanding of the culture. How do people feel about the organization? Are people really excited? They're like, man, this is the best place to work. Man, I'm just so glad I'm here. What a privilege it is. Or, man, I can't wait to leave. The moment I get another good opportunity, I'm out of this place. You know, how do people feel? It gives an idea of what's going on. Are people inward looking or outward focused? And this is especially true about a Christian organization. You know, are we all talking about us, me, ourselves, or are we looking out for them? How are we going to help them? How are we going to reach them? How are you going to, you know, for a church would be like, how are we going to reach new cities? Are we going to reach new places? How are we going to reach our city? You know, what's going on? Are we inward looking? Are we outward focused? It gives a sense of what people are. Are people risk-takers, entrepreneurial, innovative, or are they risk-overs? They don't want to do anything new. Are they willing to try new? Is this the organization? Encourage people to do something different. Try something new. Or is the organization always rained in, said, they don't do this, man. We've never tried it before. Don't do it. Or we don't know what will happen. Like, so are they risk-overs? So are they overly cautious? You know, so you can ask people and you get a feel. What's happening? And of course, you know, we've talked about this. Is it a lot of top-down approach or is it flattened free? Are people able to go make their own decisions and so on? So, you know, so this is one way of getting a feel of what's going on, you know, in the organization. Just talk to people and you'll get a feel. Okay. And then, you know, when we feel that something is wrong, something is not the way we want it to be, then obviously we can take action. For example, if you feel like people are not entrepreneurial, they're not innovative, they're not trying out new things. But hey, we want a culture that people are going to try out new things, are going to take risks. But right now it's not there. They're very cautious. They don't want to take any risk. Then, you know, we want to ask the next thing is ask the question, why is it like that? And then what can I do to move people to that? So when you ask why is it like that? Maybe it's because we have to put too many controls. You know, before you can spend this money, you have to get five approvals. You know, it has to go through five different committees. Only then, obviously people are not going to be taking risks or trying new things because it's too laborious a process to try out something new, right? Or maybe the company is in a state of where it's, you know, the organization is a state where they're saying, hey, we've done everything. We're there. We don't want to try anything more. So that's an attitude change that needs to be done. You know, so sometimes it's a process change. Sometimes it's just an attitude change that needs to happen. So once you recognize what is the cause of the problem, then the next step is, okay, let's change it. So you tell people, hey, from now on, we are simplifying the process. All you need to do is get one approval and you can go and try something new, right? So it makes it pretty simple. So we've changed the control now. It's just get one approval. You can go do it or how did it change? Hey, guys, we are being left behind as a church or as a ministry. We are becoming irrelevant to the people we are serving because we are not trying out anything new. So we have to become relevant. So there's a change in our perspective, a change in attitude. And so we say, okay, guys, we've got to go do these new things because the people we are serving have moved on. They're not in the backyards. They're out there maybe engaging in a totally different way. So this whole change has to be intentional. It's not going to happen by accident, the change in culture. But the change in culture will then determine whether or not the organization is going to be able to impact, be effective in serving its people. So that's one way of evaluating organizational culture. A more formal way, of course, is by doing a questionnaire. And this is a question I just pulled off from one organization here. It's the Lincas World of Work. So we can set up a little questionnaire like this and get people to respond. And it gives us a sense of where are we on the teamwork side? Are we on the individual side? Are we decentralized? Are we very top controlled? Are we driven by objectives? Are we driven by rules? Are we task focused? Are we people focused? Are we product or service? We can reframe these questions depending on what the organization is doing. This, of course, is more from a business point of view. But just an example, are people open to change, try new things, or they are just focused on doing the same repetitive, old traditional things? How are decisions made? Is it, which way are things going? Are the forward thinking results focused? How is communication happening? Cooperation and attention to detail. So just as an example. We can frame our own questions depending on what the organization is all about and do a questionnaire, get feedback. When you have hard numbers, you can then do an evaluation of the numbers. You can see where things are and then take action. So that's another way to get a feel of, what we're talking about is getting a feel of the organization culture. And it's important to know from time to time how things are so that we can make sure that we are shaping and creating a culture that is healthy and that will help people enjoy and perform well and that we can serve people well. Okay, last few things, and then we will have time for questions. So now, of course, in a church setting, in a Christian ministry setting, what we really want is to nurture kingdom culture. Kingdom culture. That means we want to promote, we want to de-organization and the congregation. So I'm talking about the organization, meaning the church organization, as well as the church congregation or the ministry group. We want, really, because we're a Christian organization, we want to express biblical culture. Now, if we sit down and think, and I've just put some things down, but if we sit down and think and say, hey, when we look at the Bible, what are some of the traits or expressions of kingdom culture or biblical culture? Yeah, let's put it down. So we can, you know, and I'm sure we can, many of us will agree to some of these things and maybe we can add to this. And we talk about compassion or love. We talk about faith or express the courage. We talk about humility expressed through servanthood. We talk about sacrifice. We talk about generosity. We talk about hard work and diligence. We talk about perseverance or endurance going, pressing through difficult times. We talk about pioneering or innovative creative, because God is a creative God. He gives us new ideas. We also talk about stewardship and being fruitful. That means we want to be productive in what we do, not wasteful. We talk about unity. That means God wants us to be a united people. We can talk about integrity, honesty. We can talk about ultimately everything's being done to the glory of God. We can talk about these, this is not a complete list, but these, in many ways, are expressions of the kind of culture we want to have as an organization and also as a congregation. Right? So this is what we want to see. So we've got to keep a, you know, a pulse on this. We've got to see, hey, is that organization embodying these expressions of kingdom or biblical culture? How do we nurture these things? How do we encourage the development of these things? And how do we protect these things within the organization, also within the church congregation? So we need to be, you know, watchful, careful. Right? How do we nurture these things? So first of all, we've got to, and these are some things we already mentioned earlier in the very first part of this topic, but we've got to reiterate these traits. That means, hey, this is what, this is the kind of culture we want to have. This is what we value. This is how we want to function. These are traits we want to have within the organization, also within the church congregation. So reiterate them. We've got to model them. So if we don't practice it as leaders, it's not going to happen. Nobody's going to just do it just because we tell them. They have to see it in our lives. So we should be as leaders at different levels. We have to embody these things. Then, of course, we've got to require them. You know, once we do them, we can expect it from people. This is it. If we see something that's out of alignment, we get them back in alignment. So we require it from people and say, look, this is how we are going to work. This is our culture. We want to express kingdom culture or biblical culture. And then we reward, recognize and reward these traits. And then when we see people doing these kinds of things, we appreciate them. I say, hey, it's not only the performance, but it's the behavior that we want to appreciate. You were like this. You behaved like this. Of course, performance is the outcome. Performance results, that is there. But we also must appreciate the behavior. You did like this. You acted like this. That's something you value because you are embodying kingdom culture. So we recognize and reward these traits. The last thing is this, right? Last point here under culture, which we all need to think about is, as we are developing kingdom culture within the organization or within the church congregation, you know, there will be disturbances coming. Like we said in the beginning, there will be internal and external things that challenge the culture or try to disturb the culture. So it becomes our responsibility to protect organization culture. Right? So one, number, how do we do it? So here are some of these practical things. Number one is when you're hiring people or you're engaging people, ensure cultural fit. That's the very basic thing. Because if we bring people who don't understand the culture, who are not open to adapting to our culture, it's going to be a misfit and it's going to be a problem somebody has to give in. And I remember this was in the early days of the church. And at that time, you know, there's a lot of things we didn't know and we had to learn the hard way. But this was, I'm going back in time to about 2002, I think, 2002 or 2003, you know, as a church, we were open to, you know, starting new branches, new churches, so on. And what we did was at that time, we actually adopted somebody to be part of, they wanted to join us. Okay, you can join. This person was actually a musician and he only had a kind of a well-established music ministry in a regional language. Okay, so he used to sing in that regional language and he had a well-established music ministry. And he said, I'll join APC. I need somebody to, you know, to oversee my life, whatever, whatever. It's a young man. And we had just planted a church in that area. It was outside Bangalore. And so we said, yeah, fine. You know, we were excited, you know, he's a young man and we can help him and he can help us as well. So we said, okay, sure. We have just planted a church. We want you to be responsible for the church. And of course, when we will, you know, we can work together and you can, you know, you're a musician. You can definitely use your music and all that. So we just, you know, set the set together. And those days I didn't know, I didn't really understand that culture could be such a problem. You know, I thought, hey, he loves Jesus. I love Jesus. We can work together. You know, I guess in some sense, I really didn't understand how culture could be. A clash in culture could become a big problem. But anyway, here's what happened, you know, so we started the church. I said, okay, you know, our church services we have. I think it was like 1030 in the morning or something. So I said, you know, you have to be here to run the service. This is it. Everything's been set up here. Okay, fine. We all agree. Then one Sunday I got a call. I said, you know, this person hasn't showed up. For me, it's like, I can't understand, you know, if the service is starting at 1030, you're supposed to be there by 10 o'clock, make sure everything is open, set up, ready to go. So that 1030 service can start. But this person hasn't come. I was like, this is unacceptable for me. You know, this cannot, this cannot happen. So I called, I said, what happened? He said, no, no, no, I'd gone out here. I went to minister somewhere else. I'm on my way. I'm coming. I said, sorry, we don't work like this. You know, and I think this happened two times. I said, sir, this is not going to work out. This is not going to work out. You know, and I was a little firm. Right. I just spoke to him. I said, see, we don't work like this. If services starting at 1030, your responsibility is, you should be there at the venue, at least, at least half an hour before, open up everything, arrange everything, be ready to welcome the people. You're responsible for it. You know, and just a correction like that, he couldn't handle. Right. Because he, in some ways, I need to, somebody needs to mute their mic. I'm not sure who. Okay. Right. So he, he couldn't handle it that I spoke to him like this. I said, see, this is it, you know, service starts to have to be there. He couldn't handle it. He was already, like I said, he already had before coming, joining with us. He had an established music ministry outside. He couldn't handle it. So when I spoke to him and I corrected him, but I corrected him lovingly. I said, look, this is how we work. You know, you service starts at 1030, means 1030, it should start in this, nothing. In fact, we prefer if you started 1029, you know, it's not, not like you can't start five minutes late. These are just how we work. Yeah. He couldn't handle that. Next thing I know was he said, I'm leaving now. And, you know, this happened way back as I said in 2002 or 2003. That's when I realized, hey, to me, it was like an eye opener that, you know, we both people love Jesus. There's nothing wrong with him. He loves Jesus. He's a musician. God has gifted him. He's a wonderful person. Nothing wrong with him. We also love Jesus. But this is a matter of culture for us, you know, starting a service on time is very important. No, I mean, unless there's some big, you know, catastrophic thing that prevents us from starting. Yeah, I can understand. But otherwise with all things equal practice, you have to start on time. People are coming at 1030. No excuse. We are responsible to be there before time, get everything ready. It is a very small thing in my mind, you know, starting on time is like, it's a normal thing. But for him, it was a big thing. He couldn't accept it. And he resigned, quote unquote, resigned or left. That's when I understood, okay, to work with people, it's more than be both loving Jesus. That's important. Of course we love Jesus, but culture is such a big thing. Culture is such a big thing. And from that time we decided we are not going to adopt churches. So that that experience helped make a decision. We will not adopt. Why? Because there will be a clash in culture. And we cannot force them to change their culture. You know, suppose a pastor is there, he has a church. You know, he has nurtured his church a certain way. He has his own culture. He may want to become part of APC. That's nice. But we always say no. Why? Because we recognize there will be a clash of culture. So from then on, you know, there have been many pastors around the country who say, you know, and even we still get it now because we want to join APC. We want to work up with you. We always say, look, we will help you, whatever you want spiritually and take our books. You can take all the resources will help you spiritually, but please function on your own. Because not that they don't love Jesus or we love Jesus more. It's not that. It's because culture and we don't want to go there and try to tell them to change their culture. It'll be a problem for them. So you operate in as you are. We will just give you what we have. So I'm just giving that example where, you know, I'm going back to, you know, protecting culture here. And, you know, ensure cultural fit. You know, so when you're when you're hiring a person, you're bringing a person to join your organization or the example I gave us more in terms of a ministry to ministry relationship. Culture can affect that. And it's just different cultures. I'm not saying one is better than the other award. You know, some things will work and some things will not work, but there has to be this fit. If you're going to be able to work together, especially if you're hiring somebody into the organization, this is very important. It's, you know, they could be very well qualified. They can have all the gifts and skills, et cetera. But if there's no cultural fit, it will still become a problem. Another part is we got to preserve the organization's tradition. So we, you know, we got to protect the organization. Okay. This is traditions means I'm not saying traditions that restrain us, but I'm talking about straight traditions that strengthen us. You know, okay, hey, these are values. This is how what God has done. This is the call that God is having. This is how, you know, God has worked and helped us overcome challenges, et cetera. So those stories, those inspirational moments we need to preserve. Okay. So please understand the word traditions in the right way. I'm not talking about traditions, meaning the, in the routine way of repeating repeatedly doing same thing, talking about the stories, the, the, the way in which God has worked and the things he's given to us in our journey, the history with God, those things, you know, as we are repeated, it keeps inspiring new generations. Another way to protect the organization's culture is, you know, you, we encourage communication. And if you have an internal language, you know, that's like, hey, it kind of inspires the language, you know, though. So when we talk about, when we talk about like, you know, we are the people who are of the word and the spirit. Immediately people know what we, what, what we're referring to, right? APC. We are people of word and spirit or APC. Every believer is a minister. We understand what we're saying. Every believer is a minister. And sometimes I hear this back from people, the congregation. Oh, yeah, yeah. Every believer is a minister. That's good. That's an internal language we have that embodies a certain value that every believer is a minister. We encourage everybody to do ministry, you know. So like that, when you, when you create that internal language, it helps re-trade values that are important for the organization. And we've mentioned this before, when we reward, recognize what behavior, performance of course will be rewarded, but behavior also, when that's rewarded, you know, people understand, okay, it's not just performance, but also my behavior that's, that's appreciated. So encourage that and address, reward that. When there is behavior contrary to the organization culture, that has to be addressed. Like when somebody is not aligned to kingdom culture, you know, these, these things that we are seeing, this is what we want to embody within the organization. When there are things that are opposite to that, you know, lovingly address and say, hey, we need to get, sorry, we need to get into alignment. Here and so on. We need to hold people accountable. And we need to avoid covering or feeding toxic behavior. So like I mentioned last class, you know, this is especially true at the leadership level, you know, and there are just numerous, numerous stories, case studies of Christian organizations that have just been totally devastated simply because at the leadership level, they didn't hold leaders accountable. And in fact, the organization was guilty of covering up and feeding into toxic behavior. You know, and like I mentioned about Morris Hill church, you know, it's a case study. And it's, it's something, you know, like I said, Christian in today's put it is releasing a 12, 12 part cities podcast that are just, you know, looking at the whole, whatever happened to Mars Hill as a case study so that we can learn from it and make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes. And one of the things that comes out so clearly as they look at Mars Hill church is that when the leadership began to just become more and more toxic, more and more dominating, controlling, abusive, the organization was actually covering that up instead of addressing it. When I say organization, people around the leader, they're just supporting covering up. Why? Because, you know, the whole organization was dependent on that one very successful pastor. And nobody wanted to address it until somebody had the courage to say, Hey, we are not going to put up with this anymore. But the moment there was a reaction like that, you know, and the leader was not willing to receive that was a problem. The leader was not willing to receive chain correction or, you know, undergo a process of correction, change, things came down. But if it had been addressed earlier on and held accountable, it would have prevented a lot of harm to people. So many people hurt in the process. So many people were affected, you know, and it's very sad. But that's just one example of a Christian organization. And it's very high profile. You know, but like that, how many other churches, how many other Christian organizations are being affected? Simply because people are not being held accountable and issues are not being addressed. So if you're going to protect the organization culture, you need to address, address the behavior, hold people accountable and don't cover up, you know, just address it and bring about correction. Okay. So these are two lessons here on organization culture. Very important for the organization. Let me pause here and say, okay, if you have any, oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't sharing my screen. All right. Do we have any questions or anything you want to talk about? Any thoughts here? Hi, Pastor. So this is regards to the core values. So just a practical question. So, you know, our goal, we have our six core values, right? So how did you design it, Pastor? So maybe you would have had many options in mind, like probably like, you know, so many values should have been, but how did you finalize this? Was it like a design long back or after starting the organization? Was it designed collectively? Pastor, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Yeah. So if you tell me, so maybe like, you know, people, if they are starting organization, so that would be helpful. So was it like challenging for you to, you know, enforce them into the, you know, them to staff or volunteers, that kind of. Yeah. So to answer your question, these, these values or something they put down at the very beginning. When we started, of course, we didn't have this graphic, this fancy graphic and all. It was simple word document kind of thing. Where, when, and of course it was, there was kind of overlap between what I was doing in the company. We had this set of core values for the company. And so I said, okay, you know, we need core values for our church organization. Slowly, when we started adding people. So when we had two or three people, then I said, okay, we did. Sorry. We need an expressed core values. We didn't have this fan round graphic and all, but a simple document saying, look, and so it was something I said, okay, what do we want a PC to be about? You know, so it came from that simple question like, okay, you know, if as a church, what do we want? And of course it has to start with people working for the organization is from here. It goes into the congregation. What do we want? So then how do we capture it? And so then we put, you know, things like integrity, opportunity, pioneering, and so on. So unity and so relationships. So these are things that are very important for us. We put it down. And sometime later only we put it into this little graphic must have done it. I don't know. I'm thinking about eight years ago or something, and we put it in this graphic and all that stuff. But initially it was just what to say statements that were written saying these are our core values. That's how it came about. So to answer your question, yeah, it was done in the early days. When we initially started, it came out of this question of what do you want a PC to be a PC to be all about? And then how do we capture it in words? So we put it down. Our theme is Jesus focuses, you know, the word of God. So we used to say we had a word-based, spirit-filled church, you know, Jesus focused word-based, spirit-filled church. We don't depend on these things. We depend on the path of the Holy Spirit. We just put it down in statements and communicate that. Yeah. Did I answer your question? Yes, Pastor. Any other questions on culture, what we spoke about? Okay. All right. So let's close in prayer. Next week we're getting into finance accounting, financial aspects of the organization. Again, it's going to be more on guidelines, what we need to do as a Christian organization in terms of managing the accounts, the finance. So we're just sharing tactical things on that, how we do it, what we do at a PC and so on. So we'll talk about the financial, the money aspect of the organization next week. Okay. Could somebody please close in prayer and then we will dismiss. Please. Okay, Pastor. In Jesus' name, we thank you for this wonderful time and lot. Thank you for the learning, Daddy. Father, we praise you for your mercy and grace, for the wisdom, Daddy. Help us to meditate about this, Daddy. Learn things, Daddy. We thank you for this, Daddy. Father, keep us and guide us and lead us. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. Amen. Right. Thank you everyone. Have a good afternoon. I'll see you again next week. Thank you.