Building Healthy Church Culture

Strength to Strength welcomed Bill Shiley to discuss what church life should and can be, and how to get there.

Often, when we think about culture, our discussions center around dress, vehicles, technology, etc. The problem is that Jesus and the apostles don’t really spell out a lot of details on many of the specifics we deliberate over. But what DO Jesus and his apostles teach us about culture and how to create change in people? Is there a third way besides love and hope things get better, or lay down the law and drive people away?

While I don’t have the answer to it all, I will be sharing some culture foundations Jesus teaches that are often ignored in efforts to create culture causing us to be unsuccessful, as well as some lessons we have been learning as a brotherhood at Chambersburg Christian Fellowship that have helped us build unity in our diversity and accomplish intrinsic change as individuals and as a group.

An interactive question-and-answer period follows.

My name is Bill Shiley. I am currently single and live in Chambersburg, PA. The last ten years of my life, I’ve been working closely with people in mission work, teaching, and now in sales/customer service.

I was nearly eight years old when my parents left the Independent Fundamentalist Baptists and joined an Eastern Mennonite Church. The ensuing years were filled with a lot of turmoil in church and home providing the battlefields for many of the subjects I am passionate about today. My journey of growth and wholeness has been brought about by learning to know God as a good Father.

Journeying through three Baptist and twelve Anabaptist communities, and facing a lot of modern Christian pressure, I have found my grounding in a loving, obedient faith through a holistic view of Scripture influenced by the pre-Nicene interpretation of Scripture as a unified story leading us to Jesus and His physical kingdom of spiritually renewed humans living as Jesus taught.

I am blessed to be part of Chambersburg Christian Fellowship and learning as a group to pursue the faith and life once delivered by Jesus and the apostles, practiced and testified to by the pre-Nicene church and early Anabaptist tradition.