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 for 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 your vision isn’t stunningly unique, you probably don’t have one.

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

Related posts:

1. Top 11 Clarity Takeaways from The Nines Conference #thenines
2. Top 77 Church Logos of 2011… A Response to Kent Shaffer and Church Relevance
3. 10 Surprising Mobile Web Stats for Church Leaders

I’ve been writing and speaking about assessing and articulating vision for years now, so I’m not going to try to summarize Church Unique here. Instead, I’d like to share a couple of pieces of my recent experience in leading Vanguard University through the Vision Frame process. Over a period of about nine months, I facilitated an assessment and articulation process for a group of Vanguard’s key leaders. Each month, we would spend a day or two together, wrestling with different aspects of their Vision Frame to more clearly articulate the unique mission God has given Vanguard. I was honored to work alongside these committed, passionate leaders who have dedicated their lives to Christian secondary education.

By using Vanguard as an example, I’d like to answer the question I am most frequently asked about the Vision Frame process.

Why does it take so long to articulate vision clearly?
Many people assume that clarity means simplicity. That’s not usually the case. The best kind of clarity—clarity that provides fuel for the organization—is only find by slogging through the complexity. Only after wading into the complexity of organizational history, internal dynamics, multiple priorities, personal callings, and, most importantly, listening for God’s voice together, can a leadership team emerge with unified clarity. If you just want a nice mission statement, you can do that in a couple of hours. If you want a fully-formed vision that fills your leaders with an unquenchable fire to do whatever it takes for the cause…it will take a big longer. You can’t microwave clear, compelling vision. Period.

With Vanguard, there were many complex issues that needed to be discussed openly and honestly in the process. We included key people from these different constituent groups (faculty, staff, administration, etc.) in the core team, but at significant points in the process, we needed to hear from the wider group as well. In order for us to be able to move forward confidently, it was absolutely critical to hear the voice of the larger group. And (this is important), we had to be willing to go back and make adjustments to the way we had articulated things based on their input. There are times when a leadership team must listen and adjust and other times when a team needs to set the direction clearly, inviting everyone to join in. A wise leader knows which is which and leads accordingly.

Do you see why it takes longer than you think to fill the pool with a clearly articulated vision? You’re going to need people to help you maintain the pool and invite others to jump into the pool in the future, so you can’t do it all yourself. Articulating vision clearly is a collaborative effort, not an individual task.

Vanguard’s Vision Frame
After months of work with Vanguard, here’s the result…their Vision Frame. Over the next few posts in this series about Taking Vision Public, it’ll be important for you to have their Vision Frame in mind so that you can see how all the different pieces work together and are built on this foundation.

Mission
Equipping students for a Spirit-empowered life of Christ-centered leadership and service.

Values
Truth – We pursue truth by knowing Christ who is Truth.
Virtue – We honor God by committing ourselves to the person and model of Jesus Christ.
Service – We develop our talents to their potential and discern God’s purpose for our lives.

Strategy
Cultivating the Spirit-empowered life in Christian experience and service
Promoting academic excellence that integrates faith and life
Providing professor-mentors in a dynamic community environment

Measures
Spiritual vitality
Academic excellence
Institutional health

As a part of articulating the Measures, we developed what we called the Vital 9, a grid of more specific mission marks in the life of each student. The Vital 9 were developed by placing the values on one side of the grid and the measures on the other side of the grid and describing the resulting attitudes and attributes that Vanguard wanted to see in each student.

This Vision Frame articulated the unique vision and approach of Vanguard, filling the pool with clear, refreshing water. That meant it was time to move on to the next step of vision-soaked communication…the tagline. We’ll cover that next time.

Related posts:

1. Taking Vision Public in 2012: Six Steps to Vision-Soaked Church Communication
2. Life in Generica: Your Vision is Outdated
3. Vision is Your Greatest Asset

This is what the best organizations in the world do so well. Apple. Starbucks. Target. Every piece of communication or interaction you have with these organizations is absolutely soaked in their vision, mission, and values. Just when you read the names of those organizations, colors and feelings were evoked inside of you, weren’t they? That’s the power of vision-soaked communication.

And, just in case you’re tempted to go here, this  approach to vision-soaked communication is not just about “secular marketing strategy.” These same principles fueled the way Jesus and his first followers used as they announced and demonstrated the Good News. “The kingdom of God is here!” they announced. And then they used all sorts of imagery and compelling language to tell more about what they meant…and they invited people to live in this new reality.

And although the communication tools at our disposal today look very different than they did 2000 years ago in the towns and villages of Israel, the ideas and the approach are still the same. How do we invite people into a vision that could change the world? I believe it’s a part of our calling as church leaders to wrestle with this question and find creative methods to share the message God has given us in the most compelling, grab-you-by-the-heart-strings, kick-you-in-the-gut ways possible. That’s why communication matters so much in the church.

Through a series of posts, we’ll look at six steps to vision-soaked communication. Here’s an overview.

Step 1: Fill the Pool – Articulating Your Vision

Step 2: Boil it Down – Developing Your Tagline

Step 3: Describe the Water – Crafting Your Key Messages

Step 4: Tap into the Thirst – Communicating the Big Why

Step 5: Break out the Hose – Leveraging Every Medium

Step 6: Drip, Drip, Drip – Talking Vision Daily

As we walk through these steps together, we’ll look at a specific example of an organization we recently worked with: Vanguard University. Although this series of posts will speak specifically about church communication, there are many parallels and, hopefully, a non-church example will help you to focus on the approach I’m presenting and not the specific language in each step. (Vanguard is a Christian university in southern California with a great vision for training and equipping Christian leaders.)

I truly believe that if you can learn to leverage the power of these six steps, your communication will be soaked with vision and your church will gain more momentum toward achieving that vision.

Related posts:

1. 12 Steps to Recovery for Vision Statement Addicts
2. Vision to Reality First Steps
3. The Cardinal Sin of Church Communication

#1 Keep it about the walk.

Whatever the decision, remember Jesus is walking next to you and your life belongs to Him. How will the decision affect your relationship with Him? This question alone should be the only one you need to ask. During this season, I have been reflecting on the pattern of big decisions in my life and relishing the memories of Jesus guiding me for 30 years. Prayer this way becomes more than an act, it’s an expression of long relationship.

#2 Don’t get advice, get better questions.

Getting advice is a no brainer. The real pursuit is getting better questions. You will have the top three or four people from whom you receive general wisdom. What about the next 15-20 who can give you special, very specific insight? With each person, ask, “What other questions do I need to consider about _________?” or “Here is an assumption I am working from, but what question am I not considering?” I have had some big explosions of insight by asking these questions.

#3 Create a tug-o-perspective-war.

It’s important to “mine out” the conflict and tension of the decision. I even imagine a tug-of-war of different perspectives. Who can you enlist to pull on the different sides by offering new perspective? Of course you’ll have to live with the internal battle in keeping the first and last “move” of this list in mind. In the last month I have different sides “winning” as I stack each side of the rope with new people offering new points of view.

#4 Travel in time, while watching time.

God gave you an imagination so that you could dream forward and exercise faith. While we can’t predict the future, you can play out your decision, and practice in your minds-eye the blessings and byproducts of your big decision. How does the decision change your life in the next year? In the next ten years? How will the tone of the hours of your day be affected? How will all of your key relationships be affected? The list goes on. Remember there are times when your creative mind is more active, like the fringes of sleep and hypnotic states, like taking a long shower or driving. I intentionally use these times. But remember to watch your time. Don’t make a decision to quickly, and don’t forget that some opportunities expire. You only have the lifetime of the opportunity to leverage the opportunity of a lifetime.

#5 Do the trust fall.

In the end, every decision is an act of trust. Remember that crazy thing you did at camp when you were a kid? You really didn’t know if your buddies were going to let you hit the ground for a laugh. But you did it. You let go. You trusted. The final act of the decision-making process is the moment of commitment. How does this act of trust feel for me? I simply tell God, “I have listened and discerned as much as possible and I am making this decision for you. If this is not the right decision, I trust you to show and to direct my path. Everything I have and I am belongs to you.”

Related posts:

1. The 5 Defining Questions for Every Visionary Church Planter
2. The Trust-Objectivity Dilemma
3. Inspiration or Emulation? – How to Build Your Message

Right now, everything you do or don’t do is guided by a set of underlying values. The same is true for your church. Culture-savvy leaders understand how to mold the invisible stuff of values to shape, like clay, the atmosphere, attitudes, actions and automated responses of their teams.

What if we were to x-ray the intuitive movements of  great values-based  leaders? What would we see?

What if we were to  make even more conscious our intentions towards culture-shaping leadership? What core practices would come to the surface?

Here are seven:

#1 Articulation: The first step of culture-shaping is to identify, name and define. That’s what it means to be human- bringing meaning through how we label and distinguish within the created world and within the world we want to create. You can’t mold in the real world what you don’t hold in the mental world. So, what are you holding? What are your top 3 or 4 culture-shaping aspirations?

#2 Imitation: You teach what you know, but you reproduce what you are. Your life is broadcasting and multiplying a values set. How is that values set being consciously transferred by you, even though the receiver may not know it?

#3 Mechanism: If you lead a team or an organization, you have the authority to create a shared experience or a roll-out a new process. Think of a mechanism as an event or process that clarifies, restores, aligns or attunes your people with an existing shared value. Think of this as a wake-up call that shakes up business as usual.

#4 Collision: Oftentimes values get clear and concrete at the very moment they are violated. Or it may be a time of testing or crisis that brings a “near violation.” Look for collisions in the past and potential ones in the future to rehearse and strengthen values. As a leader don’t be afraid to name when you missed a values-based decision or needed a realignment yourself. That may be the most important impression you ever leave.

#5 Decision: Consciously run your decisions, big and small, through the filter or your values. Most importantly combine this with “imitation” and walk through a conscious decision-making process with your team using your values. What decisions are you facing today? What are your biggest decisions in 2012?

#6 Question: Dialogue is one of the leader’s greatest tools. And dialogue works best with questions, not answers. Ask questions to clarify, to meddle, and to rethink. Pose questions for your team to answer. Specifically bring bold questions that force new thinking around the same values.

#7 Celebration: The most often cited culture-shaping activity is celebration. People repeat what’s rewarded. Make sure you take time for this. If this is one of your perpetual weaknesses, assign someone on the team to plan the moments that mark your church’s progress. Life is too short not to celebrate!

Related posts:

1. 10 Distinctives of Culture-shaping vs. Church-building Leadership
2. 36 Questions for 20/20 Church Vision from Start to Finish
3. 6 Extremely Powerful Questions for Simple Ministry Design

With that as background, I have to say that I’m a little confused by Kent’s recent post that shows, in his opinion, the “Top 77 Church Logos of 2011” and I thought I’d respond with a few thoughts.

Let’s start with this—the statement I like most in Kent’s post is this one: “…a good logo communicates the unique qualities of its brand.” The way we say this at Auxano Design is that your logo should communicate vision visually. Of course, it can’t communicate everything about your church, but it can serve as a visual front door that matches what people will experience once they step through that door.

Now, I’ll move on to my questions.

1. 77 top logos? Really?
I’m not sure that a list of 77 anything is all that helpful, other than as a gallery that we can all peruse and say, “Those are nice.” Especially within the context of communicating vision visually, certainly there are some among that 77 (or beyond that 77) that are more effective at communicating vision and deserve to be examined more closely. I’ll single out a few from Kent’s list below for this reason.

2. Where are the stories?
When the list has this many entries and there is very little context of how these 77 were chosen, I want to hear the stories of these churches. Why did that church choose this specific logo? What about their vision or unique calling is communicated through this specific design? There are some great looking logos on this list that could possibly be communicating things that aren’t connected to vision and mission, but there’s no way to know that without the background story.

3. Why do unused concepts make the top 77?
If the true essence of a great logo is that it communicates vision visually or, in Kent’s words, that it “communicates the unique qualities” of a brand, how can we include unused logo concepts in the list? That serves as a signal to me that the list is more about what looks nice rather than what communicates the uniqueness of a specific congregation. Therefore we have reinforced the classic problem of church design: slapping together pretty pictures without meaning. (Read Picasso’s Missing Subject, my contribution to the Outspoken book on church communications.)

Those are probably my initial three questions about Kent’s list. From his list, however, I’ll pull out a few to examine more closely…because I think they are more effective.

Christ Church (Fort Lauderdale, FL)

From a brief look at their website, Christ Church seems to have done a good job of choosing a logo that connects with their unique way of communicating their vision. They talk about being a “gathering of people coming together to leave a personal and eternal ‘fingerprint’ on the world around us.” This type of language can form the foundation of a unique way of interacting with the world, inviting people into this kind of life. I love it. And their logo, which is a cross made of fingerprints, communicates the personal nature of this invitation and how each person can make a contribution to it. Great stuff.

Harvest Church (Mobile, AL)

Here’s a great example of communicating vision visually. While I don’t necessarily think that this is the most beautiful logo on the list, it communicates well. Their tagline, which is almost directly pulled from their mission statement, is “discover your destiny.” Their logo communicates that this is a journey (with the roadway image) and the sun-like shape at the top (illustrating the destiny piece). Not only that, but the roadway has a subtle “H” in it, in case you missed it. Again, not my favorite from a pure aesthetic point of view, but it connects directly to their mission and communicates it well without a ton of effort to explain it, which makes it stand out to me.

The Foundry (Houston, TX)

Of course I’m going to mention one of the logos we designed at Auxano, right? I won’t repeat it here, but I already shared a short case study on this church and their logo here.

New City Church (Phoenix, AZ)

I love the way this logo connects with the way New City talks about their mission. Listen to this, pulled from their website:

“Cities are the intersection of art, politics, and business. New City exists to engage culture where it’s created, weaving the story of God into the story of Phoenix. The desire of the church is not simply to gather on Sundays, but to meet you where you live, work, study and play. The green section in the New City logo represents an oasis among urban streets. Likewise, New City believes that following God breathes new life into our culture. We believe we can actively change our world by shifting the priority set from money, success, and fame to worship, community and mission.”

I couldn’t have articulated it that clearly, but their logo certainly communicates intersection and city, and the colored section makes you want to ask, “What’s different about that block?” The answer they offer: it’s an oasis among urban streets. That’s a great logo and a great mission.

What about you?

The real question that I want to raise is this: what does your logo communicate? Does it say something unique about your church, inviting people to find out more? Then, whether it made Kent’s list of 77 or not, it’s a top logo.

Thanks, Kent, for your time in searching out great logos and keeping the conversation going about how we can, as the Church, use design to effectively communicate vision visually to our congregations and to the world.

Related posts:

1. Top Ten Church Logos for Telling Story through Design
2. 40 Top Thoughts on Clarity at 40
3. The Power of Visual Thinking Applied to Church Leadership

I received the heads up on this video by Bill Mancini (my Dad) on the Auxano team and some of staff at Concord Baptist in Knoxville who are working through Church Unique.

Related posts:

1. 12 Steps to Recovery for Vision Statement Addicts
2. Life in Generica: Your Vision is Outdated
3. #Exponential Clarity and Unique After Hours Opportunity

It was great to be at the Right Now conference in Dallas today. Here are the resources I referenced during my speaking:

6 Elements of Compelling Vision

• Here is the Vision Casting Spider Diagram: Articulating Vision Proper
• Recommended Exercise: Listen to Dr. MLKs “I Have a Dream Speech” with this tool

The Future of Church Strategy

• If you have an iPhone or iPad download the free Leadia App from Leadership Network
• You can purchase FLUX: Four Paths to the Future. There is a chapter on 3 K
• Here is the  Vision Frame Overview and other related Vision Frame links.
• Check out the Vision Frame of RIGHT NOW

The FREE Church Unique Visual Summary

• Go here to download this 52-page graphical summary.
• It can be read in 10 minutes!

If you joined me at Right Now today:

• Consider subscribing via e-mail to my blog.
• Use the search box to hunt for relevant stuff.

Related posts:

1. FREE Clarity and Vision Casting Tools from The NINES Content
2. “I’ve been looking for something like this for years” Now it’s FREE through July
3. The Church Unique Visual Summary

Clear vision requires clarity about the results you are after. Any result you might desire for your ministry will fit into three broad categories - input results, output results and impact results.

INPUT RESULTS

Input results in the church world focus on the number of people and dollars that “come into” the church. Input results are important. You don’t have a church without them. It’s also important to measure input results. You can’t lead well without knowing them.

Common ways we talk about input results include the “ABC’s” (attendance, buildings and cash) or “nickels and noses” or “butts and bucks”  Every week, thousands of churches across the land will print their input results on a worship bulletin or review them in the next elders meeting. Input results inform the functional dashboard of the American church.

OUTPUT RESULTS

Output results refer to actual life-change outcomes that God intends for followers of Christ individually and together. Examples of output results include the quality of a believer’s prayer life, the skillfulness in sharing the gospel, or the development of patience as one of the fruits of the Spirit.

There are hundreds of biblical phrases and concepts to capture the wonder of gospel-centered output results. From terms like “spiritual formation” and “transformed living,” to “Christlikeness,” and “full devotion to Christ.” I have never met a church without some banner, slogan or mission that points to output results. Output language shapes the primary intent of all the pastors I have ever met. Yet while output results shape intent, most pastors rely on input results to validate the mission’s success. Output results, not input, are the only true measure of the mission.

IMPACT RESULTS

Impact results capture the broader effect of the church in the surrounding city or community. Think of it as the positive difference that is made from the sum of believers influencing a region or pursuing a specific kind of social impact together. An example of an impact result would be lowering the number of homeless people or reducing the percent of teen-age pregnancy or increasing the high-school graduation rate in an area.

A tree is a useful analogy to relate input, output, and impact results. Let’s imagine a Florida orange tree soaking in the sun and drinking in gallons of rainwater. We could actually measure exposure to light and absorption of water as input results. After all you can’t have healthy citrus without them. Output results reflect the total number of good oranges produced. Impact results are the happy faces and healthy bodies of little Joey and Suzi as they guzzle down fresh OJ with their scrambled eggs.

What is the significance of these three kinds of results for vision casting? That answer is for another post.

Meanwhile you might enjoy my new book from which this post was taken. It’s my first published work since Church Unique on innovation and vision. The title is FLUX: Four Paths to the Future, which is available to iPad and iPhone users through Leadership Network’s new app called Leadia.

Related posts:

1. 3 Kinds of Church Complexity and What to Do About It
2. The Church as Redemptive Tribe: 6 Ingredients
3. The Five Horizons of Leadership and How to Use Them

Life Lesson #1: FUTURE ORIENTATION- You have to trust in something.

• Trust that it will all work out in the end.
• Dropping out of college allowed me to “drop in” on what I wanted to learn.
• Most of what I stumbled in on turned out to be priceless down the road.
• Trust that the dots will connect down the road.
• You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only looking backwards.

Life Lesson #2: LOSS AND LOVE- You have got to find what you love.

• I was lucky I found what I love to do early in life
• After 10 years and building a 2 billion dollar company with 4000 employees I got fired.
• I had been rejected but I was still in love.
• It turned out that getting fired from apple was the best thing that ever happened to me.
• The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again; I was less sure about everything.
• It freed me to enter the most creative period of my life.
• And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
• If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, don’t settle.  As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

Life Lesson #3: DEATH – Your time is limited, so don’t waste it.

• When I was 17 I read a quote, “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you will most certainly be right.”
• I have looked myself in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
• Remembering that I will be dead soon is the most important tool I have ever encountered to help me make the big decisions in life.
• You are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart.
• Death is the destination we all share.
• Death is the best invention of life. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
• Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
• Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition- everything else is secondary.
• Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Related posts:

1. The Main Thing the Church can Learn from Steve Jobs
2. If Steve Jobs Made Disciples…
3. The 3 Ultimate Lessons in Ministry Focus