Will Mancini » Culture

Taking Vision Public, Step 6: Talking Your Church’s Vision Daily

Will Mancini — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:24:13 +0000

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.

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.
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).
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?

The First Step of Recovering Movement in Denominational Life

Will Mancini — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:04:01 +0000

Effective movements know who they are.

There’s something missing in the leadership atmosphere of denominational life these days. Name your faith tribe—it’s true in every corner of North America. That “something” is an overwhelmingly clear, unquestionably compelling, big idea of why the “collective” exists. It’s the esprit de corps of “what makes us unique.”

In Steven Addison’s book, Movements That Change the World, he identified this uniqueness as a movement’s “founding charism”:

Christianity is a movement of movements—monasticism, evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism, to name a few. These movements can find expression in movement organizations such as mission agencies and denominations. . . . . Each new movement has a unique contribution to make to the kingdom—its “founding charism” or gift of grace.

The beauty of the founding charism is often best seen at a movement’s start—when it’s in the air and you can’t help but breathe it in.

If you could have asked one of Jesus’ 72 disciples, “What are you doing?” how clear do you think their answer would have been? If you could have talked to someone who experienced the early 1900s revival at Azuza Street, how magnetic would you have found their response to be?

Now it’s your turn. Why do you belong to what you belong to? What is your denomination about in 10 words or less? Go ahead—grab a dinner napkin and write something down.

As you think about your response, allow me to share a few guidelines to shape your “napkin sketch” answers.

Guideline one: Don’t answer with glittering generalities. If you tell me that your denomination exists to glorify God and make disciples, that’s great. But so does every other denomination, association and church-planting network. Go deeper and get more specific. Don’t be a restaurant whose only vision is to “serve food.”

Guideline two: Don’t let personal passion be your only criteria. The thing you write down—as passionate as you may feel about it—may or may not be what makes the movement unique. The “uniqueness of us” comes before and informs the “passion of me.”

Now, why are these questions so critical?

A denomination’s founding charism is like a new car or a new pair of shoes. Through rugged use and unintentional neglect, the vivid awareness of our reason for being fades away. Eventually, leaders engage in things like strategic-planning processes that add layers of objectives and goals to the equation. Then we add more denominational structure and programs. Then this, then that.

As the organization matures, complexity eclipses clarity. Before long, the half-buried treasure of our movement’s identity is completely lost beneath the surface of our conscious focus and energy.

The safeguarding of the movement’s primal impulse is key to the movement’s ongoing existence. Without it, activity is amoeba-like. A movement without a crystal-clear DNA would be better called a mush-ment.

Ultimately, the decision to move with clarity or to mush around “doing denominational stuff” comes down to a choice: Do we live, work and play with the large calling of God guiding our way? Does the church universal need a faith expression like ours anymore? Should we call it a day and disband?

These are bold questions. And our day demands a courageous response. It’s courageous to move ahead with bold vision. It’s likewise courageous to acknowledge that an association or denomination has fulfilled its purpose in its time.

(This post is an excerpt from an article I wrote for EFCA Today, the magazine of the Evangelical Free Church of America)

Removing the Invisible Walls on Your Leadership Team

Will Mancini — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 21:44:10 +0000

Last week I was completing the Vision Frame with a church in California. They could feel the removal of what one pastor called their “invisible walls.” It’s an interesting comment given the fact that its a very effective church.

What is an invisible wall? It’s something your eyes can’t see that keeps your team from working better together.

Mistrust
Missed time
Misalignment
Misunderstanding

Every week brings a fresh truckload of glass bricks for your team to stack. Busy week after busy week leads to busy semester after busy semester. No one has ill motives. No one intends to build a wall. But the walls go up without conscious notice.

The good news is that it’s NOT rocket science to take down a wall. Haven’t you noticed it’s easy (and usually fun) to tear stuff down anyway? What we need are some sledge hammers to take down this hard-to-see barriers.

Weekly, I watch leadership teams tear down their invisible walls. Keep in mind, I am talking about effective teams, not broken ones.In Auxano’s clarity process, teams feel like a team at a whole new level. Even though the meeting room looks the same, the real albeit unseen barriers have been removed.

How do you demolish those walls? Try these five things.

Give permission to identify walls.
Beyond permission, shape a culture of authentic dialogue by how you give and receive feedback. Telling people that you are open to honesty and “push-back” isn’t enough. Permission has not truly been given until it you have done. Keep in mind if you don’t receive it well, you’ll shut down the sharing next time around.
Schedule time dedicated to strategic conversations. Most teams don’t create enough space for important, non-urgent dialogue and decision-making. At Faithbridge over the years, the team has regularly “parked” (sometimes monthly) conversation topics for scheduled “strategic-stuff-only” meetings.
Schedule margin in the calendar for “drop in” conversations. With the speed of ministry, it goes a long way to touch base for no “necessary” reason. It says you care. It says you are available to listen. It provides an opportunity to remove a glass brick, instead of adding one. Yesterday, I challenged a staff member pretty hard in a consulting meeting. Today I stuck my head in her office to check in and mentioned, “Hey, I pushed you pretty hard yesterday and I just wanted to acknowledge that it might have been a little too hard.”
Make one bold feedback question a standard part of your team culture- “Have I done anything lately that has diminished the trust in our relationship?”

What other actions would you add to demolish invisible walls?

5 Indicators that Your Church’s Average Age Might Have Increased Without You Realizing

Will Mancini — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:42:08 +0000

#1 The senior pastor has been there for over 10 years and is still preaching over 90% of the time. (No team presence)

#2 You could not tell the difference between the worship (music, praise, liturgy) last Sunday and a video of worship 5 years ago.

#3 There are no leaders under age 40 among the top twelve leaders.

#4 There is no one under age 40 participating in the worship planning, programming or leadership.

#5 A majority of the top leaders still laugh about the fact they don’t do social media.

Start Reaching Real Lost People Not Church Shoppers

Will Mancini — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 02:23:09 +0000

This post is not for everyone. First, its for followers of Jesus who really want to reach messy people groups with the gospel, including some entrenched in darker darkness. Second, its for people who live within Las Vegas or a Southwest airlines trip to there at cities like:

San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Reno, Sacramento, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, etc.

Vault is one of the most unique equipping opportunities you will ever have. This mini-conference (noon to noon, Monday-Wednesday next week) will bring you deep inside the thinking and methods Vince Antonucci and Verve Church use in Las Vegas, which have led them to reach atheists, pimps, prostitutes, bikers, Wiccan witches, Buddhists, strippers, lesbians, and many more of the truly lost, the people Jesus called all of us all to reach. I have been onsite with Vince and his team two times- his church work is the real deal!

How can YOUR CHURCH go from reaching church shoppers to reaching people who don’t like church? That’s what Vault is all about, and you don’t want to miss the conversation!

This year special guest John Burke will be leading three sessions of Vault. You may have seen John speak at Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit. He’s the author of No Perfect People Allowed, and the church planter and pastor of Gateway, one of the most evangelistically effective churches in America. John will share principles you can use to reach people who are truly far from God.

I will be there sharing thoughts on redemptive passion and vision clarity. Most importantly I am bringing one of our Auxano navigators, Dave Saathoff, who has learned how to reach thousands of people, far from God in San Antonio, Texas.

The cost is only $125 (or $100 for groups of 2 or more), which includes three meals and book giveaways! The conference is limited to about 100 people, which provides for an amazing dynamic that promotes learning and relationships. But it also means that registration will fill up soon, so register today!

Steve Jobs Delivers 3 Life Lessons on Personal Clarity

Will Mancini — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:01:20 +0000

Steve Jobs, one of the world’s most influential inventors, died today. If you have the slightest interest in pursuing a personal vision, this 15 minute video is a must watch. And if Steve Job’s innovation has impacted your life, you will like these three life lessons even more.

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.

On the Heartbeat of Time: A Church Unique Snapshot of ICF Zurich

Will Mancini — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 11:49:23 +0000

Yesterday, I conducted a Church Unique workshop for 10 churches connected to ICF- International Christian Fellowship, headquartered in Zurich. ICF Zurich started in 1990 and now runs almost 3000 in worship at renovated factory in downtown Zurich. ICF Zurich is a one-of-a-kind church, especially in Europe, as it boldly presents the gospel with energy, creativity and culture-savvy leadership.

My favorite part of their Vision Frame is their six style statements. ND Strupler, who leads the movements church planting network shares them below as I put in on the spot outside of the church.

ICF Zurich – Our Style

At the heartbeat of time: We constantly ask ourselves how church needs to be to attract people today.
Excited about life: We are excited about life with God and have a positive attitude towards life.
Experiencing fellowship: We treat one another with love and enjoy life in fellowship.
Developing potential: We support people and help them to flourish and develop their full potential.
Giving the very best: We give our very best for God. For we value quality.
Nothing is impossible: We believe for God nothing is impossible.

If you are interested in learning more about effective church planting in Europe, please leave a comment and I will pass it on to ND.

The Main Thing the Church can Learn from Steve Jobs

Will Mancini — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 20:58:11 +0000

As I reflect on Steve Job’s resignation this week, I am grateful for how his achievements inspire my own thinking. Here are some updated thoughts on a post I wrote from 18-months ago.

Whatever your opinion of the Apple products, they continue to capture the consumer imagination and bring innovation to life. With the historic moment of the iPad’s original release, now about 18-months old, I want to revisit some of the actual sound bites of the marketing blitz. Quotes from the release include:

When something exceeds our ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical
It’s hard to see how something so simple can be so capable
It’s going to change the way we do the things we do, every day
I don’t have to change myself to fit it; it fits me
We decided, “Let’s redesign it all…let’s redesign and reimagine and rebuild from the ground up…”
You get an order of magnitude more powerful
There’s automatic orientation
Everything gets out of the way so that you can focus on the content you care about
We want to put it in the hands as many people as possible right from the start
This is a new category, but millions and millions of people are going to be instantly familiar with it

What if the ministry of our local churches could reflect amazing claims like this? Go ahead and reread the list, but this time thinking about your church.

Is there even room for a comparison of Apple’s advancements to gospel-centered ministry? I believe so and I think the magic of this tech revolutionary has something to teach church leaders.

Listen to the linchpin strategy of Apple’s success:

“It’s built by our hardware team in concert with our software team and what that gives you is a level of performance that you can’t get any other way. Apple is the one place that you can really do this. We build battery technology, we build chip technology and we build software and we bring all those things together in way that no one else can do it.”

The singular application of Steve Job’s success to church leaders is that design from the ground up is so fully integrated, that quality and innovation are unsurpassed. In church speak, we would dream that ministry content, ministry environments, ministry people and processes are so integrated that life change and accessibility to the gospel are unsurpassed.

But often doesn’t happen. Why not? We simply prefer NOT to do the work of designing, thinking and building this way. We like the message of Simple Church, or Church Unique, but get stuck relying on existing models. We get weary of talking with lay leadership about real changes in ministry strategy. We get satisfied with the good results of duplicating a program rather than the great results of incarnating our own. We get so busy on the ministry treadmill that we let every staff person makes decisions based on their own “operating system.”

What would happen if Steve Jobs decided to make disciples?

How would he design the church? What adaptations would he make to your ministry design? What would he stop altogether? How would he redesign from the ground-up?

The Story that Pastors Are Forgetting to Tell

Will Mancini — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 22:09:19 +0000

This is the fourth post on “Vehicles for Vision.”

The series started with an exploration of why preaching should not be your primary vision vehicle. Then we reviewed six vehicles that every church leader should use. Next we declared the leadership pipeline is often a missing link when it comes to using every vehicle.

Now I want to discuss a vehicle which is always in place but not intentionally used. It’s a powerful way to tell your story but neglected it broadcasts static. It’s your church’s “structural story.”

What is that you ask? More consulting speak?

Your structural story is the combination of language, systems, and processes that are running in the background of your organization that communicate, for better or worse, something about your church’s identity and vision.

Here is a sampling of five major structural story components:

Staff titles and org charts: Even when we chart a new course in ministry direction it’s easy to keep the labels of yesteryear. Recently a executive pastor completely redrew an org chart using a circular format instead of a linear top down scheme. Several titles changed. It energized the leaders and helped them understand their new strategy better.
Budget categories and process: How we think and communicate about spending money tells a story. What is it? One church is reevaluating their annual mission budget process which is completely separate from their operating budget. Forty years ago, having a separate budget highlighted the priority of missions, but now it seems to minimize the emphasis in missional living
Systems and Information: What information do we keep on hand for each member? What does a first time guest receive if they give us their information? Your church has a lots of systems (whether designed well or not). On more than one occasion, I’ve visited a Sunday class where a sheet is passed around with the term “prospects” printed at the top. (Southern Baptists have historically used this term.) While I appreciate the attention to attendance tracking, what does that terminology in our database suggest when a guest sees it? Or when the class leaders reviews it?
Policies and procedures: Does your church have a policy for reserving space? For designated gifts? For social media? Again, this list goes on. What values or aspirations do these policies subtly reinforce? One church I am working with is developing a social media strategy. As we look at the policy we are wrestling through the tension of trying to control what’s being said verses trying guide positive engagement in the body of Christ.
Internal communication “footprint.” By “footprint,” I am referring to the amount of space and prioritization of messages that are embedded into the internal communication strategy. This would touch on things like the “square footage” of content areas on web space, web navigation, the size of ministry brochures, and word count and font size of ministry info in the worship guide. At a church I visited this week, the women’s ministry brochure was three times bigger (and more colorful) than the “next step” brochure based on the church’s strategy. In this case the emphasis in the print communication did not align with the church’s vision.

These five things are not an exhaustive list of your church’s structural story, but they illustrate many simple and everyday decisions in church life. Why not use them to better broadcast your vision and story. Use this vehicle.

Two resources I want to mention related to this topic:

The first is a great way to reframe your membership process. It could be a catalytic “structural story” change. Read about it here.

The second is a fantastic free resource by my friend Steve Caton at Church Community Builder. Check out how to leverage processes and technology to make disciples.

The Six Vehicles for Church Vision: How Many Are You Using?

Will Mancini — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 17:49:34 +0000

Every pastor wants to get people excited about God’s activity in the world through their local church. But not every pastor understands how to use the multiple vehicles at their disposal.

The idea of vehicle is easy to understand. If a community is in desperate need of medical supplies, what vehicles are you going to use? A wheelbarrow or a 18-Wheeler or a C-130 cargo aircraft? And if you could, would you want five C-130’s or just one? You get the picture.

Keep in mind that the concepts we are covering are very powerful when implemented. The truth is that pastors have trucks in their fleet that have never seen drive time. The cost is high as the precious cargo of motivational kingdom fuel never dispenses to hearts and minds of their people. But get those rucks rollin and you will see things happen like you’ve never seen before!

This post is the second in a series on “Vehicles for Vision.” The first post dealt with a primary challenge on the subject- the default setting in the pastor’s mind that preaching is the primary vehicle for vision. It is the default mode because it is the easiest. After all, pastors are preparing messages every Sunday already and they don’t have to get other people involved in the delivery process. It’s simple and clean.

In that post we revealed that despite the important role of preaching, the primary vehicle is the church’s connecting environment. So let’s start there and continue our list:

Vehicle #1: The Connecting Environment. This is the primary vehicle because it is the most relationally intensive. Therefore most of the validation, understanding and appreciation takes place here. Don’t complicate this too much. If you have small groups or Sunday school or missional communities, I am suggesting that those leaders or facilitators and the environments that they create are crucial to the delivery of vision.

Vehicle #2: The Leadership Pipeline. If you understand the importance of vehicle one, you might be asking, “How does that actually work?” That’s a great question because it reveals an even more foundational vehicle. In fact, I consider it the prime mover. The leadership pipeline is the vehicle where vision is transferred from leaders to other leaders. It assumes a leadership development culture. It supposes there are time and places where only leaders meet to pray, dream, dialogue and train together.

Vehicle #3: The Preaching Event. Now we get to everyone’s favorite. And this vehicle is important as it carries a special authority and motivational dynamic with the congregation at large. Preaching connects the vision to the Word of God, to the act of worship, and rallies the entire body of Christ together in a unique way.

Vehicle #4: The Structural Story. This is a meaningful piece that I look forward to unpacking with you. By structural story I mean everything from staff and volunteer position titles, to budget categories, to systems. It’s everything in the background; the supporting processes of the organization. And these pieces will either make a random, static-like noise or work together to contribute to the story and the vision.

Vehicle #5: The Visual Brand. From screens and worship guides, to curriculum and websites, your church is creating visual palettes from which people are digesting information. It may be a church sign, or a e-mail from the pastor. Everything speaks. As we explore this often overlooked vehicle we will show how you can constantly reflect and reinforce your vision.

Vehicle #6 The Voice of Each One. The icing on the cake is always the word on the street. Vision transfers through people not paper. And the ultimate test is not how well vision was communicated leader to leader, but from a participant to participant. By that I mean, what does Joe attendee say to a co-workers after he’s visited your church for six months? There are important steps that you can take, to help the vision transfer on the front line. Do you know what they are?

As we continue the series we will explore each vehicle further. For now I would encourage you to evaluate your ministry. How many of these vehicles are you currently using?