Will Mancini

I was scanning blog entries for last week’s release of my book Church Unique (on Favebot.com). I ran across a a interview on vision with Nelson Searcy on a blog called Visional Life. Here are my two favorite snippets:

Cultivating a vision:
Where does vision come from? Vision can flow from a number of sources:

* Experience: Because of what I have learned from the past, I have a vision for the future.
* Inspiration: Because of an imaginative or spiritual spark, I have a vision for the future.
* Analysis: Because of my analytical study, I have a vision for the future.

The key point on vision is that it is unique to every leader. My vision must be cultivated out of experience, inspiration, or analysis. If you borrow a vision, you are simply managing another person’s vision, you are not leading. To borrow a vision is to fail to lead.

Verbalize clearly:
If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t know it completely. You may think that the vision makes sense, but your mind will fill in the holes of the vision without you being aware. When you verbalize the vision, you’ve taken the important step of examining the holes and resolving them – for yourself and for others.

The only thing better than digesting Andy Stanely’s book, Communicating for a Change is hearing a communicator apply it! Bruce Wesley, Yancey Arrington and Greg Poore are my teaching pastors at Clear Creek Community Church, and they really hit it out of the park. Over the last two years, the teaching team has zeroed in on a less is more communication strategy that leaves the message resonating in the heart throughout the week. The key feature of the message delivery is a “sticky” central idea around which the entire message is built. This last Sunday Yancey continued his Suburban Legends series, and spoke on the Myth of “New is Better.” Yancey brought a great blend of humor and urgency as he uncovered our tendency to tinker with the real Jesus to brew a more appealing spirituality. Reasserting a clear gospel, he ramped up the central idea that “to mess with the truth is to miss the truth.”

Real vision is a living vocabulary. I see it as the living language that illustrates and anticipates God’s better future. I was with two groups of leaders this week where moments were marked with living language. One was Dave Saathoff the leader of Bandera Road Community Church in San Antonio. At one point Dave said, “We are not seeker driven, we are seeker freaks” What are the missional life marks that guide this passion? They have a list of short, sticky imperatives. One is “share a meal;” the simple step of hospitality is their beachhead for spiritual conversation. The second is “keep your passport current” which cultivates a global missional perspective.

The other group was the staff at Kingsland Baptist Church in Katy. They view their mission as a quest to love God and love people as they equip the generations, one home at a time. As each staff shared about their role, I was inspired by the constant repetition of seeing “parents as the primary faith trainers.” Many churches have identified this value, but few have gained real traction like Kingsland. They have developed a legacy pathway with life milestones that integrate into the church’s adult bible fellowship and other teaching platforms.

The small band of Christ followers that make up the Auxano team seriously dislike the term “consultant.” Unfortunately it is a term that most people would use to capture what we do for a living. From the beginning, we have sought to turn the “consultant” terminology upside down with the term “navigator.” Why? A consultant’s primary value is usually knowledge expertise that they bring from the outside. At Auxano, we want to emphasize what God is doing inside the church. Our role then is to be a guide whose primary expertise is not right answers but right questions. Here is an example of a recent e-mail I received after a first-time encounter with a pastor:

“I talked with our Elders the other night and shared with them my impressions of our conversation on the phone a week or so ago. Needless to say, it was all very positive. I appreciated your questions, your responses and most importantly your willingness to listen rather than anticipate my answers and what solutions you already had in your prescribed template for how you were going to fix us.”

I rarely get a chance to visit a church that I am not consulting navigating for, so I like to choose my visits very carefully. In this case I struck pure gold-City Church San Francisco led by Fred Harrell. The leadership has done a fantastic job not only with their articulated vision, but integrating it with intentional communication. I was inspired by:

• A compelling mission and values; they demonstrate thoughtful articulation and contextualization, albeit given the strong influence Redeemer Presbyterian in New York. Their “purpose” includes the ideas of “being the very presence of Christ in word, deed and lifestyle,” and “following Christ in mission to a beautiful and broken city and through the city, the world.”
• A skillfully woven thread of vision into the preaching event itself, that did not detract from the biblical text, but gave a clearer understanding of church’s vision through the text.
• An accessibility for unchurched in their midst to a liturgical worship style and high-view of sacrament. They decoded the partaking of the Lord’s Supper beautifully.
• A preaching event that could have done nothing less than captivate the prechurched and dechurched, both young and mature believers alike in the 20 – 40 year old congregation. For example the use of “self-quake” to describe both the “negative” moment of repentance and the “positive” moment of calling when “Christ steps in your boat.”
• An stunning brand that organically reflects their style, context, theology and even their unique rented facility- The Russian Center. The brand was executed in a masterfully designed worship guide that was clear, uncluttered, and elegant. (Unfortunately their brand is not executed on their website yet.)