Will Mancini

I am spending two days at the Innovation3 Conference hosted by Leadership Network today and tomorrow. RIght now, Stacy Spencer from New Directions Church is preaching the good news clarity and the message of Church Unique. ”Get on your Zag” is the exhortation coined from a great little branding read by Marty Neumeier entitled, Zag. The opening of Marty’s introduction to the title:

As the pace of business quickens and the number of brands multiplies, it’s customers, not companies, who decide which brands live and which ones die. An over-abundance of look-alike products and me-too services is forcing customers to search for something, anything to help them separate the winners from the clutter.

Spencer leads New Directions with the clear mission to Empower all people to know God through life changing experiences from the inside out.

My 15 year old son twittered the MLK quote yesterday: “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” The quote struck him from his 9th grade studies yesterday.

In my vision work I am indebted to MLK’s mastery of vision casting. His 16 minute watershed “I Have a Dream” speech is one the best teaching tools I have used on the elements of vision. In fact we have a cool listening exercise with churches, where we play the speech with a spider diagram in front of them to see how MLK weaves various elements of vision throughout the address. Recently Auxano started developing new resources for Church Unique readers (yet to be released on churchunique.com). The most requested tool is the vision casting “spider diagram.”

Download Vision Proper_Spider Also, if you want to see the video, one of Auxano navigators, Steve Bradley has it posted here.

I was asked an interesting question today at the end of 3-hour "futures forum" for a church starting the Vision Pathway. One the wall in front of the group was the work of 30 different subgroups that all presented the "Best of" stories of the church. The retelling of these stories obviously created a sense of enthusiasm among the group.  But the last question of the day was, "Will, can you comment on the health of the church from these stories you see?"  The question presented the opportunity to shift the tone of our meeting from pure celebration to challenge.