Will Mancini

This is the season of “Vision Sunday” or “Vision Night” or other events dedicated to church priorities for the upcoming year.

As I watch the landscape of vision casting in the North America church, the most important tip is the 11/16 principle. What exactly is it?

For the last 10 years I have played over and over again Martin Luther King’s famous, “I Have a Dream” speech for church leaders. It is the best vision casting moment I know of, as an American shared experience for the 20th century.

So here’s the principle: In MLK’s famous speech, which lasts 16 minutes, he doesn’t get to “I Have a Dream” until the 11th minute. What that means is that he spends 11 minutes on ‘burning platform” before he talks about “golden tomorrow.” He spends more time telling us what’s wrong with “here,” before he tells us about going “there.”

This highlights the single most important principle of vision casting:

People could care less about your vision until they are emotionally connected to the prior problem.

Vision at the end of the day, is only a solution to a prior problem. And if I don’t feel the problem, I don’t get the vision. Your problem as a pastor is that you think I feel the problem. Well I don’t. So pleeeaassseeee remind me.  The world, my flesh and Satan have worked very hard to shield me from the real spiritual problems around me and inside of me. 

Give me 11 minutes of problem and see how much 5 minutes of solution really goes. That’s the 11/16 principle.

• What about your vision night to come?
• What about the vision night you just had?

Try 11/16 and let me know how it worked for you.

It’s such a joy to receive daily correspondence from pastors and church teams taking vision seriously in the name of Jesus. Often questions come about the “vision statement.” The primary reason for the question is that the process, as outlined in Church Unique, is not fully appreciated as a new paradigm. Teams engage the process but don’t fully reboot the hard drive when it comes to vision. Here is an e-mail I received today, followed by response.

We decided to follow the book Church Unique and used a denominational coach trained by your organization. We have gone through a the process of articulating the Vision Frame. Now we are talking about vision inside the frame, what you refer to as “vision proper” I would dearly love to see some examples of vision statements to get a better handle on the shape and feel. Is that possible? Thank you very much!

Without sounding upset, I must say that the point of my book is that you don’t need a vision statement, but a visionary state of mind. You don’t need a strategic plan, but a strategic thinking point of view. But the problem is clear: we are addicted to the statement itself.  Although the new paradigm is completely discussed in Church Unique, the addiction is strong. 

Try these 12 steps for recovery. 

#1  Admit that as soon as you make vision a statement, you render it powerless.

#2  Believe that a redefinition of vision, under the Lord Jesus as your Chief Visionary, will restore your leadership; decide to turn your leadership of His church completely over to Jesus.

#3  Commit to develop a visionary state of mind not a vision statement; realize that a visionary state of mind allows God to be God and allows others to speak into the process.

#4  Pursue a visionary state of mind by developing a framework (Vision Frame) of thinking first,  that you CAN and SHOULD  state.

#5  Before developing your framework, do a searching and fearless inventory of where God has placed you, your congregation’s capabilities and your leadership’s deepest passion. (I call this the your Kingdom Concept.)

#6  Start your framework by restating the timeless mission of Jesus for your time and place; decide that this will be THE organizing principle of everything you do. Otherwise, disband and close the church.

#7  Then state the four most important driving motives and core convictions that will shape the culture of your church as you pursue Jesus’ mission. (Congrats you have completed to sides of your Vision Frame.)

#8  Based on you searching inventory and the first two sides of your frame, state what kind of disciple your church is designed to produce; these may be called measures, life-marks, practices or something similar.

#9  Finally determine and state your church strategy as the “the how” of the mission using a picture. Note: You will never have a visionary state of mind or a visionary church until the congregation enthusiastically embraces this picture along with the other sides of your Vision Frame.  

#10  Now that you have a Vision Frame, you can start thinking, praying, discerning, dialoguing and dreaming about your vision as God’s better future God. Use the sides of your Vision Frame to serve as a guide. Decide on the single most important thing the church must do in the next 12 months. This priority is called vision proper.

#11  Ruthlessly avoid the temptation to write vision proper as a statement. Do gather 6-12 key leaders and ask them to contribute “living language” in the form of phrases, metaphors, stories, and “what if” dream nuggets based on your single 12-month priority. Use this tool as a team and revisit it quarterly.

#12  With your priority in mind create talking points for every kind of daily interaction (prayer, one-on-ones, recruitment, teams, preaching, etc.) Use this spider diagram to practice painting a picture with words. Cast your vision as much as possible by dripping vision into daily conversations. Encourage the team to do the same. Don’t print your talking points. Remember that vision transfers through people not paper.

In the end, a visionary leader is not someone with a vision statement in their hand, but a compelling picture of God’s better future, streaming from their lips and entering peoples hearts all the time. May God bless your recovery process.

If you have not registered yet for Leadership Network’s free online conference, The Nines, you might want to put it on your calendar. It’s coming up in a few weeks, on September 9th. 

As a presenter, I have seen some of the content highlights and I am looking forward to hearing from all 100 leaders who will share a GAME CHANGING  moment in a 6-MINUTE highlight.

But I am really looking forward to Steve Furtick’s talk. Here are some quotes:

• We live in a culture of carbon copy.  Embrace your uniqueness!  
  
• Mediocrity is mass-produced, but destiny is custom designed. 
  
• We spend most of our life trying to stamp out our uniqueness. 
  
• What are some of the ways you’ve been trying to operate in someone else’s gifting? 

Are you surprised that this is my favorite talk?

That’s an amazing claim from Matt Chandler, pastor of The Village Church. In this video, Matt explains one of the early “shaping influences” of his life being Larry Osborn’s book Sticky Teams. (Originally entitled The Unity Factor.) 

Would you like to have that kind of team effectiveness? Of course you would. Then come out and join me along with

• Wayne Cordeiro
• Larry Osborne (1 min. video about Sticky Teams)
• Jamie Munson, Mars Hill Lead Pastor (yes that’s Mark Driscoll’s church) 

at North Coast Church’s Sticky Teams Conference. This is focused content, in a great location, from accessible leaders at a great price. 

• READ MORE on WHY YOU should attend

• SIGN UP HERE

• Come to my PRE-CONFERENCE workshop and COMMENT on this blog and I will bring you a FREE Collaboration Cube, the single best team-building tool, I have ever seen. 

I consulted with two large and very effective ministry organizations this week. Both are freshly engaging and experiencing the power of singularity. The power of singularity is narrowing the essence to one thing. 

In organizational terms we refer to this one thing as mission. Yet most leaders never capture and lead from a defining, thoroughgoing sense of one thing. The big question is why? The answer is that they substitute strategy for mission.

Your one thing is your mission, your strategy is how you accomplish the mission. Mission is what we do, strategy is how we do it.

Most of the time I see a statement of mission, or talk to a leader about their sense of mission, they are speaking strategy, not mission. What about you?

TAKE A 3 MINUTE TEST

Look at or write down your mission as a ministry.

• Count the number of “and” words in it. 
• Count the number of commas. 
• Count the number of words. 

If you have any “and” statements, any commas or more than 15 words, most likely you are articulating strategy not mission.

LET’S ILLUSTRATE

The mission of Google is  to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. I think this is a clear, concise and compelling mission. Yet it does crack open the door to NOT having the power of singularity. The clue to this is the two “and” statements. Why did they introduce these? 

They are introduced because they are important aspects of vision equity, but all the words of this mission do not answer the same questions. What is the core of this mission? What is Google’s one thing? I would suggest that their core is “making information accessible.” Their one thing is not organization; their one thing is not making information useful.

Now look at how knowing the one thing clarifies everything else. If their mission is actually,”Making the world’s information universally accessible” than “organization” is one step in HOW they do it (strategy). The idea that the information is “useful” is WHY they do it (values). Look at the new mission I am recommending for Google. Is it better? 

Now we begin to see the benefits of the tool I call the Vision Frame, which brings clarity to the essence of these defining questions. 

 WORST PRACTICE

This dilemma in how we think is so profound, that even one of our best selling ministry books gets it wrong. I absolutely love and highly recommend Simple Church by my friends Eric Geiger and Thom Rainer. But in their excellent book on having a simple ministry process, they mistakingly recommend using the process as a mission statement. So yet again we substitute “the how” to getting the mission done with the mission itself.

If you want to read a bit more on “One Thing” check out this week’s helpful little post from Mac Lake.