Will Mancini

How do you present a church vision? The answer is simple: Everyday

No doubt many of you are thinking about vision at the dawn of 2010. So I would invite you to reconsider vision delivery in 2010.

This post is a follow-up from Drip Vision Today.  The post recommended 5 things you can do in less than 5 minutes to communicate your vision in practical ways.  It led to some interesting conversations that I think present one of the most dynamic opportunities for the art of vision casting- open source vision casting.

Here is my story and my invitation. The day I wrote the Drip Vision Today post, I had a few spare minutes in the airport, and came up with five ideas relatively quickly. I then encouraged you to write your own little nugget:

• What is simple way you can drip vision right now?
• How can you re-communicate today, the things that matter most to someone else; a team, the church, or to yourself?
• Think daily, think practical, think viral.
• Think of vision casting in tennis shoes, not coat and tie.
• Think of a vision moment today, not a vision night once a year

What if just 100 people share 5 of their best ideas.  What about 1000 people sharing 5 ideas? Why shouldn’t we have thousands of ideas at our disposal from people across the globe? Imagine kingdom folks helping other kingdom folks uncork their biggest and best ideas. Imagine releasing vision from our “stuck on paper” practices to culture-shaping, life-giving moments that flow like a stream through daily ministry.  The rest of us need the immediate ideas that are coming to your mind right now as your read this post.

Here’s how to do it.  Using twitter, share your idea for dripping vision or a positive experience dripping vision using the #visiondrip hashtag.

Stevie Dunn was the first off the line to use #visiondrip. Thanks Stevie!

I encourage leaders to invest a lot of time assessing, aligning, and articulating vision.  But at the end of the day it doesn’t mean squat if it doesn’t deliver. How about taking cues from the postman to deliver vision daily! 

Here are 5 things you can do today- any one of them will take less than 5 minutes:

Ready, set, act now.  Stop reading about vision and drip it. 

If you have fun with this exercise, why not tweet about it and/or tweet your own ideas for dripping vision using the #visiondrip hashtag. 

After a decade of visioning with churches, I created a simple tool to guide the vision-to-reality conversation.

What is the first step? Dialogue. What is constantly overlooked? Dialogue. So I created a tool to jump-start real dialogue.

Don’t underestimate the power of robust interaction as a team.  Why? The common practice is to leave vision on paper and go back to business as usual.  And business as usual is usually riddled with silo-based, ministry-department thinking. (See Tony Morgan’s excellent post on What if Target Operated Like a Church.)

The simple tool places your Vision Frame in the center and clarifies the five areas of integration for any church. And guess what? You can’t hide in your ministry silo. The tool forces cross-ministry, cross-program conversations.  We call it the Integration Model (Ok, not real creative I know!) Are we living out our vision through…

• Developing Leadership
• Intentional Communication
• Duplicatable Process
• Compelling Environments
• Conscious Culture

Here is how you can start using the tool today:

1. Subscribe to Auxano Insights (Free). We cover more details and share client stories from the Integration Model. See this month’s issue called Culture Candy
2. Read part 4 of Church Unique. (That’s right, skip ahead.)  Three key principles are given for each of the  five areas. That’s 15 principles- see the summary here.
3. Check out the Vision Deck. We designed these 52 “ice-breaker-on-steriods” leadership exercises to turn up the heat on vision talk.  They are organized by the Integration Model.
4. Scan this blog. My topics are all organized by the Vision Integration Model.

Without dialogue there will never be awareness, understanding, collaboration and accountability to do something different based on the vision.

Perry posted today on Seven Reasons Your Church Plant Might Fail. It’s a fantastic post and I wanted to add two observations. First, three of these are directly related to vision. (And the rest are strongly tied, but indirectly related to vision.) Second, these apply to more than church planting situations.  For example, I see a church plants that might start off strong with photocopied vision, but during later growth stages, say years 5-10, things begin to putter out.

What are the three ways your vision might fail?

1) Reaction

2) Imitation

3) Accommodation

Here are 3 of Perry’s 7 statements to church planters. You might mail if…

#1 The church is planted out of bitterness rather than a divine calling. This is the common problem of reaction. Many churches react in subtle ways, like when they communicate their core values.  Want proof.  Look at your own church’s set of values.  I bet you might find “excellence” and “relevance.” These are usually statements more about what you aren’t than what you are.

#2 The leadership has a desire for imitation rather than seeking revelation. Obviously this is a constant rally cry for me – no imitation vision!  You were born an original don’t die a carbon copy. Here are Perry’s thoughts:

We’ve seen it before…a group of guys go to a conference and see a church…and then come back to their community and try to be just like the church they saw at the conference.  There is NOTHING wrong with receiving inspiration and ideas at a conference…but when one church tries to be just like another one in every area…then I believe the leaders are spending way too much time studying methods rather than the Scriptures.  God calls every church to be unique in some sort of way…and that will never be found if the leadership isn’t desperately seeking God for His direction.

#3 The leadership allows the vision to get highjacked in order to keep everyone happy. Again, accommodation can happen for any leader at any time.

Read all Seven from Perry

As promised last month,the November issue of Auxano Insights focuses on Developing Leaders – one of the five categories of the Integration Model as unpacked in Church Unique. What good is clear vision without a cascading movement of leaders who carry it?

There is an ever present crisis in the church. The crisis is not the absence of leaders, but the absence of a leadership development process. While God is in the business of providing things like leaders, we often get stuck in patterns of under-utilization that begin with failing to see the emerging leaders around us. (Check out Exodus 18 for the crown jewel biblical example of this mistake.) This idea is so big, that Aubrey Malphurs invited me to co-author Building Leaders with him to provide practical steps in designing your own leadership pipeline. Another leader who sounds the trumpet is Mac Lake at Seacoast, a passionate advocate and great source for leadership development stuff.

In this month’s Insights, we introduce a great picture of what leadership development can look like in your church. What if every leader in your church kept a campfire burning where his or her people sat? And what if those people were then sent to start their own campfires? When you look out over the landscape of your church, how many campfires do you see? Imagine a hillside of growing fires representing the mini-tribes that are a part of your larger tribe. Do you see multiplying campfires? Are they burning bright? Read this month’s Insights to learn more about how to develop leaders in your ministry – and the difference it can make. If you are not subscribed yet, you can do so here.