Or, more specifically, should they have vision statements?
It’s common these days to expect a church to have a specific vision, often expressed in a pithy statement about what they will or won’t be seeking to do in their location. Sometimes it’s accompanied by a mission statement—which sometimes is the same thing, but at least in business speak isn’t—though these are more common in churches that drew on a slightly older stream of business insights.
Is this a good idea? I’ve gone on record as thinking that lots of churches in the spaces I move in have missed what the church is for, and think this can be symptom of the same thing.
However, we should distinguish carefully because there is, I think, a good and a bad way to do this.
Good Vision
My late friend Zoltán Dörnyei was a Professor of Psycholinguistics who later in his life completed a PhD in Theology. One of his interests was the place of vision in the Christian life, due to his work on the importance of ‘mental imagery’ in acquiring a second language.
The scriptures tell us that without vision the people perish (Proverbs 29). In order to go anywhere and do anything, you need vision. In other words, to do something you have to first visualise it. Zoltan would teach that you needed to both appreciate the benefits of the thing you are considering and consider the costs of failure.
In church life, if the body is going to do anything—and we mean here acts as diverse as witness to their friends, move to a new venue, give their money, volunteer their time, support a project helping the poor, make friends who aren’t like them, and many more—then the elders of the church will need to articulate a ‘vision’ of why this is worthwhile as well as the potential costs of failing.
This isn’t business speak, it’s clarity and ‘leadership’. It’s also not anything super-fancy, for all you can be better or worse in how you go about it. By vision we mean simply painting a picture with words so that people understand why they might choose to take some concrete actions.
We can’t function without this, for all it can easily stray into manipulation—which is true of much of what we call leadership—where you make the vision sound compelling so that people are more likely to take those actions. That’s a tempting thing for a pastor to do, but honesty is integral for Christian leaders in these matters. We should be working to make Jesus sound beautiful and endlessly compelling, because here our words will be falling short of reality, and let Jesus grip people’s lives as they choose to whether or not to engage in what the church is doing.
You need some sense of where you’re going long term—that could be supporting missionaries, it could be sending people to pastor elsewhere, it could be planting churches or sites, it could be growing until you’re of a size to do a particular thing (though I’m wary of this last one, because growth soon becomes its own goal; growth is only good when in service of other goals). These are all valid, other things will be too, and they are a unique vision in the sense that not every church will do the same things with their limited resources.
We should also be careful to not confuse our vision for what we will do in our locality with ‘following Jesus.’ It will be possible to follow and worship Jesus without engaging in this church’s vision. It’s necessary to have some sort of vision in that you can’t engage in every local project to bless your locality, so you have to choose to engage in some (or, I suppose, none). You can’t do every possible thing that Christians could do together because there aren’t enough hours in the week, so you have to choose some deliberately for specific reasons and tell your people why. That is, in a sense, vision.
What it’s not is fancy.
Bad Vision
When vision goes bad is when it owes more to the business world—and to business speak—than it does to the Bible. Your church does not need a USP. And it doesn’t need a USP because you aren’t trying to ‘attract’ people, you’re trying to worship God. You aren’t in competition with the other churches in your town or city, you don’t need to distinguish yourself from them.
You do need to decide to do some things and not others. That’s good vision. You don’t need to have a way of selling your church, because you aren’t selling your church.
The pithy statements look good on a website, but… actually they don’t look good on a website. We just think they do because we’re Christianised. They’re a sort of code where people try to figure out what you’re painting in and out of the picture by using those specific words. I would recommend clarity. Just tell people what you’re doing.
There is a place where these kind of statements can work for some churches. Sometimes it lodges in people’s memory, especially if you don’t change it frequently, and it can help us remember something we might forget otherwise. The problem comes, I think, when we think we have to have this sort of statement and so mistake that for actual vision. The need for a catchy phrase gets in the way of us communicating how the church is trying to live out God’s vision in this location.
God’s Vision
What is God’s vision for the church? That the glory of God covers the earth like the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2).
Stick that on your website.
God wants the earth full of his glory by reflecting the image of the Son in those who are united to Christ. As the earth is filled with believers, the Father fills the cosmos with what he loves most: Jesus.
God’s vision is that we are a Temple who worships him. God’s vision is holistic and encompasses all our lives, because the whole world is shot through with the glory of God. God’s vision started in a Garden and ends in a Garden-City. God’s vision is laid out in the Bible’s account of the world’s story.
That is your church’s vision. Can you do all of it? No, which is marvellously freeing, so do some of it. Move the needle. Change your world even if you can’t change the world. Discover that God loves to take faith and prayer and a handful of loaves of bread and make them an army, fed on the word, sitting at the table of the Lord.
Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash
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