At VOUS, we believe culture either happens by default or by design. Culture, by definition, is a shared set of beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that characterize a group of people and are passed down from generation to generation. That's the heart behind the VOUS Culture Guide, and it's also why we think every church, regardless of size, benefits from building one. All great organizations have archival systems in place to protect their history and culture. A Culture Guide can simply be that system for a church.

The idea originated in 2018 as a resource to align the leaders of our house around the same language, celebrate where we had been, and set guidelines for where we were going. The goal was to document VOUS culture and equip every leader to lead in alignment with it.

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How to Start Building Your Own

If you're considering something like this for your church, here's the process we found has worked for us below:

Write your culture down before you design anything. Start in plain language: values, gatherings, recurring phrases, the language unique to your house. The temptation is to jump to design first; resist it. The content has to exist before the container does.

Group it into a few clear categories. Our current guide has grown to eight sections over several years: VOUS Values, Staff Values, Locations, Ministries, Gatherings, Themes, Cultural Language, and a Glossary. If you're starting from zero, don't try to replicate all eight on your first pass. Begin with the key three or four values, gatherings, and a glossary of house language as a natural starting point. This will lead to a realistic first version you can build on year over year.

Let your look come from your culture, not the other way around. Our Design Team doesn't lock into one aesthetic across every edition. Instead, each year's look is chosen to express whatever feels most true to VOUS's artistic culture in that season. Ask the same question of your own church: what visual language already represents your church's personality? Start there rather than with a design trend.

Build it all at once, on a realistic timeline. We create ours in a single push rather than in phases, and update it annually. For us, that update takes about two to three weeks, but that's a fast timeline specifically because it's a refresh of an existing document, not a first build. If you're starting from scratch, give yourself meaningfully more runway to ideate, create, revise, and print.

Treat it as a living document. Ours isn't static, it's meant to be added to every year as your church grows and changes.

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What This Looks Like at VOUS

For reference, here's how our eight sections break down inside the VOUS Culture Guide:

• VOUS Values — our core, non-negotiable values for staff and leaders.
• Staff Values — the attributes we're constantly pursuing as a staff, not to say we’ve arrived as a guide to who we’re becoming.
• Locations — an archival reference to where we've been, are, and are going.
• Ministries — reflecting the heart of who we are and what we stand for.
• Gatherings — our regular and seasonal gatherings, designed around one mission: to bring those who are far from God close to Him.
• Themes — recurring events carry themes that help us reflect and remember year over year.
• Cultural Language — the specific words we use, because words matter.
• Glossary — an A-to-Z reference of VOUS-specific terms, from Basecamp to VOUStern.

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The Takeaway

Write your culture down. Decide what it looks like in practice. Then build a document, however simple at first, that protects it, outlines it, and makes it easy to replicate it. We've attached our InDesign files as a blueprint if you want a starting point of your own.