Custodians of Culture — Why Deep Loyalty Makes a Better Church
THE SHOCK ABSORBER
At a Sydney FC game, there's the Cove. It's the section behind the goal where the super fans sit. They wear the colours, they know the chants, they drive the atmosphere. They know why the club does what it does, where the traditions come from, what matters and what doesn't. And when a novice wanders in, it's people from the Cove who can explain it.
So what's the difference between someone who turns up and someone who is genuinely committed? And how do you honour both without losing either?
The Levels of Fandom
At any Sydney FC game, there’s a variety of different people in the crowd. Complete novices who wander in once with a friend and have no idea what they're watching. Occasional fans who enjoy a game here and there. Season ticket holders who are there for most home games and consider the club their team. And then the Cove, the people for whom the club is a core part of their identity, who are custodians of the culture, who pass the stories and the values and the reasons why things are done the way they are to every new generation that arrives.
It can be similar at Soul Revival. There are people just checking out Jesus who are welcomed, encouraged, and not pressure. There are irregulars who come every few weeks and are genuinely part of the community. There are regulars who are there every week and for whom Soul Revival is their church. And then there's a fourth category that Soul Revival has been trying to name and define for thirty-five years: the Commitments.
The Commitments aren't just people who come every week. They're people who are committed to Jesus and committed to Soul Revival specifically, not just because it's the closest church or the most convenient, but because they love it, know it's stories, understand its strategies, and have chosen it as the place where they will do life as a Christian community for the long term.
These are the custodians of culture.
The Counter-Cultural Saturday Night
The Commitments culture at Soul Revival was built, in part, on a deliberately counter-cultural decision: Saturday night.
It would be easy to assume, as many people who've come to Soul Revival more recently do, that Saturday night was chosen because it's convenient. It gets church out of the way before Sunday, frees up the weekend, and can be easier for families. But that's backwards. Saturday night was chosen because it was harder.
In the 1990s, Saturday night was party night. It was when you went to the pub, the concert, the 18th birthday, the clubs. Choosing to spend Saturday night with your Christian community instead was a choice made against all the available alternatives. It created conflict. It forced a decision. And that decision, made repeatedly, week after week, built loyalty.
When you choose one thing, it costs you something else, and so you own it differently than when you choose it because it's convenient. The people who kept choosing Saturday night over the parties and the pub weren't just attending church. They were committed to a community. And that commitment, accumulated over years, is what built the culture that Soul Revival has been working on stewarding ever since.
With some seeing Saturday night as the easy option, the counter-cultural edge has slightly worn off. This in itself is an illustration of why custodians of culture matter: without people who know the story of why a decision was made, the decision gets reinterpreted by the assumptions of whoever arrives next.
Three Dangers
There can be some shadows attached to a Commitments culture, and it’s worth being aware of them:
The first is that irregulars can feel on the outside. If the deeply committed are clearly close friends who share a rich community life, and you're someone who comes once a month, the gap is real and felt. You can't engineer your way out of this entirely; quantity of time together simply produces closer relationships, and there's no shortcut. But you can be honest about it without being dismissive: you're welcome here, we love you being here, and if you're finding it hard to get closer, that's partly a function of how much time we spend together, not a verdict on you.
The second danger is that commitment to Soul Revival eclipses commitment to Jesus. Tim brings in a striking piece of social psychology to illustrate what's at stake. In a study, Manchester United supporters were divided into two groups. One group was primed through a survey to think of themselves primarily as Manchester United fans. The other was primed to think of themselves primarily as football fans. As they left, someone in distress was staged outside; sometimes in a Manchester United jersey, sometimes in plain clothes, sometimes in a Liverpool jersey. The group primed as Manchester United fans helped their own jersey wearer 12 times out of 13, but only helped the Liverpool supporter 3 times out of 10. The group primed as football fans helped the Liverpool supporter 7 times out of 10. Same people. Different primary identity. Radically different behaviour toward those outside the group.
If your primary identity is Soul Revival, your particular expression of church. rather than Jesus, you can be tempted to look down on other Christians, other churches, other denominations. You'll see them as other. But if your primary identity is Jesus, and Soul Revival is the expression of that commitment for this season of your life in this community, your in-group expands to include every follower of Jesus. Keep Jesus the main thing. The local expression is not the main thing.
The third danger is the most practical: believing there is only one way. Soul Revival has a particular way of doing things that it believes is worth doing. That belief can curdle into a conviction that other churches are doing it wrong. The corrective is the same: remember that what we're custodians of is a way of following Jesus, not the only way of following Jesus. When someone's passions and values genuinely fit better at another excellent Bible-believing church, the non-anxious response is to say so.
Cultural Memory and the Reasons Why
The Spirit of Shankly is a movement founded by Liverpool supporters when the club's American owners were mismanaging it toward bankruptcy. Three hundred members who said: we know what this club is and what it stands for, and we're going to advocate for that culture. Liverpool's connection to the community, to the values of solidarity and collective effort, to the sense that the players and the fans drive each other — these are things that can be lost if nobody upholds them.
Every church builds up a culture of practices, values, instincts and stories over time. Some of those are theological non-negotiables, reading from the Bible every week as the primary preaching text, for instance. Some are strategic convictions, doing meals internally with your own community rather than outsourcing to caterers, because the cooking and serving is itself part of how you do community. Some are practices that can and should change as culture changes.
The custodians of culture are the people who know which is which. They're the ones who can hear a suggestion like “why don't you get Charcoal Charlie's to do the catering, it'd be easier”, and say: actually, that would undermine something we believe matters. The meals aren't just fuel. They're part of how we do life together, and the cooking is part of that.
Or when someone suggests doing a sermon series exegeting the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be more welcoming: the custodians can say, we understand the impulse, and we're always thinking about accessibility, but reading from the Bible every week isn't a preference we can negotiate on, it's foundational.
Or when a church from a different tradition suggests staffing kids ministry from people in other gatherings so nobody misses their own gathering: the custodians can explain that growing each gathering's own kids ministry leaders from within that gathering is a deliberate strategic choice, not an oversight. Each gathering is growing up its own community.
You can't make those calls confidently if you don't know the story of why the decisions were made. Cultural memory is what makes the difference between a community that can hold its shape through change and one that drifts.
The Practice Question
The thing is, Soul Revival Church doesn’t have it figured out just yet.
The original practice was a Commitments meeting from 6:30 to 7:30 pm on Saturday nights before the main gathering. That worked when Soul Revival was a youth and young adult community with a particular rhythm. The church plant changed the structure, and the old practice doesn't map cleanly onto the new context.
Commitments meetings at 4.00 pm, twice-a-term after-church gatherings, various other experiments have been tried. Some things have had energy for a season and then dropped off. A consistent practice hasn’t landed.
But being clear on the theology and clear on strategy is the key. The practice will keep changing as the culture changes.
Commitments won't always look the same. The commitment underneath is the point.
Discussed on this episode
Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast.
The Shock Absorber is a podcast for church leaders doing church a little differently. Next episode: the tangibles of church project management. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Email Joel at joel@shockabsorber.com.au, and join the Shock Absorber Network at shockabsorber.com.au.
Soul Revival Church is an Anglican church in the Sutherland Shire and Ryde.