Will Mancini

In Church 3.0, Neil Cole discusses several catalysts for creating movement. One of them is called the “Surprising Proposition.”

First of all why would anyone want to go through life without a Surprising Proposition to share? If we belong to the infinite creator God, are being transformed into the likeness of the living Jesus, and are leading others into eternally significant ministry, wouldn’t it be natural to have a few bold ideas to guide your leadership?

Sure it would.

And, it’s more than worth the time to process, pray, dialogue, wrestle, sweat and figure it out. What is God calling you to do and what difference will it make in the world?

Remember that the Gospel is God’s Surprising Proposition and this message is at the center of everything. Now co-create with God and remix your ministry’s DNA and audacious vision for your time and place.

Neil gives three examples from Church Multiplication Associates in his chapter on the subject:

• “We want to lower the bar of how to do church so everyone can do it, and raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple so that everyone will do it.”
• “If you want to win this world or Christ, you’re going to have to sit in the smoking section.”
• “Bad people make good soil for the Gospel; there’s a lot of fertilizer in their lives.”

Here are a few of ours at Auxano:

• Clarity isn’t everything but it changes everything.
• God wants to do something cosmically significant and locally specific in your church
• If you vision isn’t stunningly unique, you probably don’t have one.

Now grab a journal page or a napkin and give your own a shot. What’s your Surprising Proposition? I would love to hear your ideas!

It’s a delight to watch teams get clear on the future. But it’s a fright to see that hard work of visioning go south when it comes to execution. If the work of visioning can be compared to taking a journey, there are six mistakes I see most:

#1 Spinning Wheel Decision-making. Sometimes a team can have a great vision process only to get bogged down in complex or ineffective decision-making after the fact. On a car ride of a thousand miles, the spark plugs fire a thousands times each mile. If the little steps to make the vision happen don’t fire, you’ll only putter along.

#2 Courage-on-empty: Clarity is no good if there isn’t courage and conviction to act on it. Sometimes the team or the point leader get fired up about the next ministry chapter or new direction only to hit the brakes if a few people push back. This lack of courage may be just another way to describe approval addiction.

#3 Ego Side Trips: Sometimes a team of strong leaders create sideways energy. Maybe two senior leaders have different operating philosophies. Or, maybe youthful vigor on the team insists on going in its own direction. Sometimes leaders gets distracted with building their platform outside of the organization or use a ministry position in a way that promotes personal hobbies and interests. While I don’t often run into ill intent in ministry, I do see lots of strong egos that don’t harness together well.

#4 Communication Breakdown: The best vision in the world will die fast if people are left out of the loop. Meaningful connection to the vision must be sustained by dialogue, vision-soaked media, and vision dripping from the core leadership. After you map out the vision, make sure you map out your communication processes and systems.

#5 False Start: Every now and then, I see a team so anxious to execute that they move to quickly. It may be inexperience, or over-optimism. Sometimes a leader grows to or moves to a larger organization, where implementation requires more steps and nuances to bring everyone along. Sometimes a leader has a mountaintop experience and fails to get the key lieutenants together and on board for a great start.

#6 Running Too Hot: Having clear vision is one thing. Getting there in God’s time is another. Sometimes leaders have the right vision but want to achieve it too fast. In their drivenness, people suffer from burn-out. In times of stress and extreme performance other temptations come to the table. It’s critically important not to let the work for God hinder the work of God in the personal lives of the team. God’s vision should never eclipse the godliness of the visionary.

Step One: Ask “Who?”

Consider who created the pattern, the model, “the how” of your particular ministry area or ministry responsibility. Did it come from a book, another church (conference), the previous pastor? Someone was the designer. Who was it?

Step Two: Ask “Why?”

Consider the motives and the intent of the person who designed the ministry you lead. Why did the originator of the ministry make the decisions they made? Why is your ministry designed the way it is? What problems were they trying to solve? What were their assumptions?

Step Three: Ask “What’s Changed?”

Somewhere between the original design or latest modification of the ministry you are leading, things have changed. Make a list of things that are different. Is your ministry reaching the same people? Who is coming now? Who has left? How has communication and technology changed? How have peoples’ values changed. What’s new in our community? Is your leadership style different now? Obviously these are a small sample of the countless questions you may ask.

Step Four: Ask “What Change Can We Make?”

After the list of what’s changed, consider how you can modify the pattern, design, for strategy of your ministry area or responsibility. What new problem needs to be solved today? What new challenge or new opportunity is most important to address? How do you need to add value? How can it be done less expensively? How can you reach more people? How can you reach different people?

In the end you want to be able to answer, “What is the most important tweak to our ministry that we can make today?”

Step Five: Engage Flux

Flux is the new reality. And flux is good. Fast Company magazine’s cover story this month is on Generation Flux. It’s not about an age segment demographic, but a way of thinking that successful people of any age must embrace.  Prepare yourself to change and to change things. Think not like a fast follower or best practicer, but like a future designer and better experimenter. This last September I released a little digital experience with Leadership Network called FLUX: Four Paths to the Future. If you want to keep thinking and pushing yourself as a courageous tweaker of ministry, I recommend that you check it out as part of the Leadia App, for iPhone and iPad.

Drip, drip, drip. It’s constant and you can’t not think about it. I know, I know, it’s a double negative. But haven’t you experienced that when you hear a drip somewhere in your house? You become obsessed with finding the source of the drip. Usually I don’t like using illustrations that have a negative connotation, but the final step to taking vision public is to drip it daily, and this constant dripping is a great way to think about it.

Near the end of Church Unique, I describe your leaders as the engine of your vision. Without leaders that are aligned with (actions) and attuned to (emotions) the vision, you’re destined for failure. How do you keep your key leaders aligned and attuned over time? You’ve got to drip vision daily in your conversations and interactions.

Here are a few simple questions to see how well you drip the vision.

• Have you drawn your strategy on the back of a napkin in a restaurant to explain it to someone in the last month?
• Can all of your key staff and volunteer leaders recite your mission and talk about why it matters?
• Have you spent time in the last month during a staff or leadership meeting to revisit your Vision Frame?

If you answered “no” to any of those questions, you need to do a better job of dripping vision daily. This is where  your Vision Frame language, tagline, and key messages can help. Start using this language all the time—in every meeting, during every conversation. This language should infiltrate and permeate your conversations, becoming a part of your normal vocabulary. By talking vision daily like this, your vision will start to become ingrained as a part of your culture rather than just some language you developed once to be framed and put on the wall.

Here are three practical suggestions for ways you can drip vision daily.

1. In the next conversation you have with a key staff member or volunteer leader, work in at least 3 phrases from your Vision frame, tagline, or key messages.
2. Add “Vision Frame Review” to your leadership meeting agenda for sometime in the next month and take 30 minutes to reflect together on one or two parts of the Vision Frame (I’d suggest reviewing your mission and your strategy).
3. Consider using the Vision Deck as a tool in your regular meetings. It’s a tool we developed with 52 suggestions for ways you can better integrate your vision into your culture during normal meeting rhythms.

The main thing you need to do is start dripping vision daily right now…if you’re not already doing it. You’ve got to be intentional about doing this at the beginning, until you develop it as a habit. Soon, talking vision should become a natural part of your daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms.

If you keep these six steps in mind: fill the pool (by articulating your vision), boil it down (by developing your tagline), describe the water (by crafting key messages), tap into the thirst (by communicating the Big Why), break out the hose (by leveraging every medium), and drip, drip, drip (by talking vision daily), you’ll have vision-soaked communication that will move your church or organization toward being more effective for your mission. And that’s the goal, isn’t it?

I’ve been in a series called Taking Vision Public: Six Steps to Vision-Soaked Communication. We’ve been looking at the steps involved in sharing your unique vision in compelling ways, inviting people to join in and be a part of what God has called you to do and be as a church. Here’s what we’ve covered already:

• Step 1 – Articulating Your Vision
• Step 2 – Developing Your Tagline
• Step 3 – Crafting Your Key Messages
• Step 4 – Communicating the Big Why

Now, it’s time to break out the hose, leveraging every communication medium as an outlet for your vision. This is a crucial step as we move from strategy to implementation, from planning to practice. This is also the step where far too many ministries drastically limit their effectiveness because of their unwillingness to make changes to their daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms.

Communication in any organization is built on certain rhythms and rituals, and churches are no different. A church’s normal weekly rhythm (a weekly worship service) drives many of its communication rituals. Each of these rituals need to be examined, evaluated, and reshaped in light of the work you’ve done in prior steps. This is where the hard work is really done, where the rubber meets the road, where difficult decisions need to be made.

Don’t Make the Big Mistake
The biggest mistake I see churches make at this point in the process is that they don’t leverage every medium to its fullest for the sake of communicating the vision. Here’s what I mean. You can redesign your weekly bulletin and overhaul your announcements to be built on vision, but if those things are disconnected from all the other things you do every Sunday, the effect will be minimal. Remember, your entire worship service is a communication event. Every word that is said, every song that is sung, every message that is preached is telling people what you think is important. If the only “vision language” that people hear is during the announcements or in the weekly bulletin, it will fall flat. That’s why I like the image of “vision-soaked communication.”

Your vision—articulated in the language you developed in steps 1-4—needs to permeate your weekly worship services. Why do we sing? Why do we pray? Why do we spend so much time reading the Bible and trying to understand what it means for us today? Why is community important? The answers to these questions must be articulated all the time and in every medium, using the vision-soaked language you’ve developed. Use the language until you’re tired of it. That’s when people will start to understand it.

There are three stages to vision becoming engrained in the hearts of people: awareness, understanding, and appreciation. First, people will slowly become aware of the vision you’re presenting and the consistent language you’re using to present it. Next, people will begin to understand what you mean and why it’s important. The final stage is appreciation, when people value the vision and can tell others why it’s important. These stages only come as you break out the hose in every area, not even just your entire weekend services.

Leverage Every Medium
Here’s a list we’ve developed over the years of many of the possible mediums you can use to communicate your vision. It’s not comprehensive, but it should certainly give you a good start. Each of these mediums should have vision running through it all the time.

• weekly bulletin
• verbal announcements
• message or message series
• videos (used during services, on website, etc.)
• information center (physical place people go with questions)
• pre-service announcement slides
• photos
• website
• Facebook (and other social media)
• e-newsletter (monthly or quarterly)
• print newsletter (monthly or quarterly)
• pastor’s blog (or other staff members’ blog)
• mailings (letters, postcards, etc.)
• billboards
• newspaper ads
• sign(s) outside church building and/or offices
• posters (inside the church and in the community)
• invitation cards (tools for people to invite friends)
• welcome brochure
• other print pieces highlighting programs and events
• environmental design (photos, banners, etc. within your meeting space)

Special Note
Churches are historically bad at leveraging visual media like photos and videos. With the tools available today, decent videos are within the reach of every church in America. By definition, photos and videos connect with people on an emotional level long before words alone will. (Check out the book Flickering Pixels for a more detailed exploration of this topic.) Who are the people in your congregation that love to take pictures? Ask them to take high-quality photos at least once a quarter in all of your different environments (not just the main worship services!). Use as many of these photos as possible across every medium, showing people what the vision looks like. (Make sure to get permission from people to use their photos. Check with your lawyer on specific guidelines for this.)

When you take your vision public, you need to break out the hose, leveraging every medium to share your vision-soaked communication. There’s one more step to taking vision public, and it may be the most underestimated step of all. We’ll cover it next time.