I’ve written before about vision, and whether or not churches should have it.
To briefly summarise my argument in that piece, a church does need to have some sense of what they will and won’t do, a church does not need an incredibly specific well-outlined, pithy statements that change every year. You don’t need an annual Vision Sunday; you do need to keep articulating the basics of how you understand yourselves and what you’re there to do.
Those basics don’t need to be clever and can amount to ‘be a church in this place,’ but I think it’s also fine for churches to be more specific about that. One church might train and send lots of church planters, another might major on efforts to provide for those in need in their place—there will be lots of other valid and good things that not every church can (or should!) do. As long as it’s never less than ‘be a church in this place,’ of course, something has gone wrong if we lose that.
There will be more specific local challenges that will need the Pastors to articulate why they’re making a specific change and what they need people to do if it’s to be a success. This too is ‘vision’ if done properly.
So, Pastors will need to articulate something ‘visionary’ on a regular basis. How do you do that? By painting a picture.
James K. A. Smith, in his book You Are What You Love, relates the old story of the two stonecutters. Both are asked what they’re doing. The first says, “I am carefully cutting precisely square blocks of stone to these dimensions using these tools in this way.” The second nods and says, “I’m building a Cathedral.” The second stonecutter has caught a vision, the first is doing a job. If you want people to do something difficult that will involve sacrifice and hard graft, then it’s much easier to motivate them by showing them the finished work that they are contributing to.
Cutting square stones sounds hard, building a Cathedral sounds glorious. We need reminding too, the first stonecutter will at some point have known what the end goal of his activity was, but he’s forgotten it among the hum of the mason’s workshop. The Cathedral is a long way away. Realistically both stonecutters will be dead before it’s realised, so they need to see that their work is towards something bigger than themselves.
Smith also quotes from the novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who says that,
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
We can get stuck in the mundanity of the church’s day-to-day, the need to do this or that task in order to get things done. Yet, if these tasks are things that we should be doing, then they contribute to the building of Christ’s glorious church and to people becoming and growing as disciples of Jesus.
I’m sure there are cheesy and over-the-top ways you can do this, “clean the toilet for Jesus, lads!” But I think there can also be an opposite tendency to not paint the picture of what could be. You might be surprised how people respond to it. They may even have a wild idea and the energy and grace to pull it off in a way you could never have imagined. If so, they’ve done that because you offered them truth, beauty, and goodness, in a picture of God’s work in the world.
My late friend Zoltán Dörnyei, a world-leading expert in ‘vision,’ would always said that the picture you paint should always include a picture of what failing would look like. What will happen if we don’t do this? In order for someone to decide that they’re ‘in’ for whatever sacrifices might be required, they need to consider the genuine alternatives. You thinking about this will also expose what is or isn’t at stake in the thing you’re talking about.
I have that quote by de Saint-Exupéry on the wall above my desk to remind me not to get stuck in the weeds. I often think about it as I write, trying to pull wider to answer why does this matter and how does this lead back to the glory of Christ. I’m sure I do more or less well on different occasions, and some topics are harder to do that with. My overriding goal as a Pastor and as a writer is the same: I want you to see Jesus. Nothing will be the same if you do. If you long for him and his kingdom, the ships will take care of themselves. Well, they’ll still need organising, no ship designed by improvisation would be seaworthy, but the people involved will want to do it because it’s worth doing.
Look, there’s a danger here. You can paint a compelling vision that will cause people to follow it that you shouldn’t. You can manipulate people, especially because they trust you if you’re a Pastor or in a similar role. You mustn’t. The vision you paint must be God’s for his church rather than feathering your own nest. Of course, everyone thinks that’s what they’re doing until it becomes apparent that they aren’t.
I would encourage those who Pastor churches to carefully audit that the picture they’re painting is one of the church triumphant and glorious rather than of your church triumphant and glorious. Could people validly respond to it by going and doing something else for the kingdom? Because, however painful the loss of them to your church might feel, that’s a thing we need to learn to rejoice in. Of course, you should pastor them through it, of course we should check the ‘call’ of God with the community (though that doesn’t have to be you), and of course people sometimes do crazy things. The thing to watch for though is that if the vision you paint only allows them to get stuck into what you’re doing you need to—at least—do a serious audit on your motivations. The church belongs to Jesus, not to you.
Of course, your application of the vision can be about the project you want to start in your church, but that isn’t the vision. The vision is to see Jesus, or for the glory of the Lord to cover the earth like the waters cover the sea, or for the kingdom to come, or one of many other things that the Bible would lead us to: ‘cast’ that vision and the builders will come.
If we lift up our eyes, we might even manage some Cathedrals.
Photo by Yannis Papanastasopoulos on Unsplash
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