Q
3 | HOW CLEAR IS OUR
VISION?
Our future will not be about duplicating
the thing we’ve done for the last few hundred years. Reggie McNeal makes the point that he gets
very nervous if someone says to him: “I’m
called to plant a church.”
The
reason is that because alongside our other social silos like politics,
commerce, sport, home, justice, education and so on, Christians tend to add a
new silo called ‘Church.’ This is where people go to ‘get’ personal religion;
‘do’ worship and ‘find’ religious succour. What would it look like to re-envision our role as being salt and light across all the other silos rather than just becoming a new and separate silo?
Says Reggie: “We have too many ‘church’
planters - we don’t need more church planters, but sowers of Kingdom across our
cities. We plant Jesus and His Kingdom into the arenas of politics, commerce, sport, home, education, and every other
field of human endeavour to be transformed. The people alongside us are not
‘church members’ attending to find fellowship - but a ‘band’ of subversive
missionaries changing people and culture – who happen to discover koinonia as they serve together. What
would it look like to train and send out Jesus ‘agitators’ from our
congregations to plant the seeds of the Kingdom in their vocational contexts?
In
this uncharted ‘post-Christian’ era, taking the time to clarify our shared understandings of mission and church is vitally important. We can assume that others in our congregation share a
common understanding of the church and its mission, when in fact we probably have a great diversity of views, and most of us don't think about it much at all. Indeed,many of us have grown up in a great variety of church cultures and interpret church stuff through those filters.
I remember a number of years ago attending a leadership seminar run by Peter Senge and Stephen Covey. At one stage they asked all of us to stand up and without referencing anyone else to point North. So several hundred people stood up and point where each thought north was! Of course in a large theatre with no windows everyone pointed in different directions! After some initial laughter, the volume increased, as arguments broke out, as the stronger leaders tried to convince their colleagues to point in their direction!
After some time, everyone sat down flustered and Covey and Senge stood up and smilingly explained, that this is exactly what can happen when a senior leader announces that there is a new corporate Vision and "We're all heading North!" Everyone accepts it, often quite enthusiastically, and then the Departmental leaders hurry back to their teams to explain the the Vision and what it means. The trouble is everyone has interpreted 'North' differently, and each understands what that will mean for their team. Often it is filtered through their inbuilt departmental bias. The result? Everyone thinks they are pointing 'north' together, but actually they are pulling in different directions and there is no forward movement. A confused understanding and communication of the vision means that nothing is gained.
This can be true of the church. Everyone carries, from their past a mix of experiences and pictures of what words like: 'outreach' or 'church' or 'eldership' or 'worship' or 'gospel' or 'spirit-led' or 'revival' or 'vision' or 'evangelism' or 'growth' or 'fellowship' or 'prophetic' mean. So when the leadership announce that the vision for renewal is, for example, to: 'Worship God, and through spirit-led and prophetic outreach to bring the gospel to others so that there will be spirit-led revival, worship and fellowship,' it will be heard in widely differing ways, that may not, in fact be what was meant by the speakers.
This is quite understandable given we are all still wrestling with the
new world we find ourselves in.
Where two or more people or groups are collaborating on a new project –
clarity becomes the more important! We need to converse clearly and deeply together so as to ensure clarity as to our mission and agreement as to what it is we want to achieve together, and a shared vision of where we want
to be.
After some time, everyone sat down flustered and Covey and Senge stood up and smilingly explained, that this is exactly what can happen when a senior leader announces that there is a new corporate Vision and "We're all heading North!" Everyone accepts it, often quite enthusiastically, and then the Departmental leaders hurry back to their teams to explain the the Vision and what it means. The trouble is everyone has interpreted 'North' differently, and each understands what that will mean for their team. Often it is filtered through their inbuilt departmental bias. The result? Everyone thinks they are pointing 'north' together, but actually they are pulling in different directions and there is no forward movement. A confused understanding and communication of the vision means that nothing is gained.
This can be true of the church. Everyone carries, from their past a mix of experiences and pictures of what words like: 'outreach' or 'church' or 'eldership' or 'worship' or 'gospel' or 'spirit-led' or 'revival' or 'vision' or 'evangelism' or 'growth' or 'fellowship' or 'prophetic' mean. So when the leadership announce that the vision for renewal is, for example, to: 'Worship God, and through spirit-led and prophetic outreach to bring the gospel to others so that there will be spirit-led revival, worship and fellowship,' it will be heard in widely differing ways, that may not, in fact be what was meant by the speakers.
This is quite understandable given we are all still wrestling with the
new world we find ourselves in.
Where two or more people or groups are collaborating on a new project –
clarity becomes the more important! We need to converse clearly and deeply together so as to ensure clarity as to our mission and agreement as to what it is we want to achieve together, and a shared vision of where we want
to be.
The ‘vision’ needs to be tangible enough for a Board and key
stakeholders to ‘get’ and understand, debate and commit to. We need to be able
to imagine what sorts of questions will be helpful in evaluating our effectiveness a few months down the track. This vision needs to be set in 'jelly' not in 'concrete'. We need to be constantly listening for what the Spirit might be saying to us, and observing what our context is showing us. Long term static strategic plans don't work. We need to be flexible, in a posture of continual listening, interpreting and learning and responding.
This culture of watching and listening continually is vital, it needs to be part of the vision. It can be helpful to develop a team culture that includes all the congregation (or team) in this shared work. The whole 'body' brings insights and data to the table - after all they are the ones at the coal-face who will first notice what challenges or opportunities might be forming around them. Often actual projects and programmes will arise from 'below' as individual small groups or team members are called to serve in their neighbourhood.
This culture of watching and listening continually is vital, it needs to be part of the vision. It can be helpful to develop a team culture that includes all the congregation (or team) in this shared work. The whole 'body' brings insights and data to the table - after all they are the ones at the coal-face who will first notice what challenges or opportunities might be forming around them. Often actual projects and programmes will arise from 'below' as individual small groups or team members are called to serve in their neighbourhood. 
