Will Mancini

This is the season of “Vision Sunday” or “Vision Night” or other events dedicated to church priorities for the upcoming year.

As I watch the landscape of vision casting in the North America church, the most important tip is the 11/16 principle. What exactly is it?

For the last 10 years I have played over and over again Martin Luther King’s famous, “I Have a Dream” speech for church leaders. It is the best vision casting moment I know of, as an American shared experience for the 20th century.

So here’s the principle: In MLK’s famous speech, which lasts 16 minutes, he doesn’t get to “I Have a Dream” until the 11th minute. What that means is that he spends 11 minutes on ‘burning platform” before he talks about “golden tomorrow.” He spends more time telling us what’s wrong with “here,” before he tells us about going “there.”

This highlights the single most important principle of vision casting:

People could care less about your vision until they are emotionally connected to the prior problem.

Vision at the end of the day, is only a solution to a prior problem. And if I don’t feel the problem, I don’t get the vision. Your problem as a pastor is that you think I feel the problem. Well I don’t. So pleeeaassseeee remind me.  The world, my flesh and Satan have worked very hard to shield me from the real spiritual problems around me and inside of me. 

Give me 11 minutes of problem and see how much 5 minutes of solution really goes. That’s the 11/16 principle.

• What about your vision night to come?
• What about the vision night you just had?

Try 11/16 and let me know how it worked for you.

It’s such a joy to receive daily correspondence from pastors and church teams taking vision seriously in the name of Jesus. Often questions come about the “vision statement.” The primary reason for the question is that the process, as outlined in Church Unique, is not fully appreciated as a new paradigm. Teams engage the process but don’t fully reboot the hard drive when it comes to vision. Here is an e-mail I received today, followed by response.

We decided to follow the book Church Unique and used a denominational coach trained by your organization. We have gone through a the process of articulating the Vision Frame. Now we are talking about vision inside the frame, what you refer to as “vision proper” I would dearly love to see some examples of vision statements to get a better handle on the shape and feel. Is that possible? Thank you very much!

Without sounding upset, I must say that the point of my book is that you don’t need a vision statement, but a visionary state of mind. You don’t need a strategic plan, but a strategic thinking point of view. But the problem is clear: we are addicted to the statement itself.  Although the new paradigm is completely discussed in Church Unique, the addiction is strong. 

Try these 12 steps for recovery. 

#1  Admit that as soon as you make vision a statement, you render it powerless.

#2  Believe that a redefinition of vision, under the Lord Jesus as your Chief Visionary, will restore your leadership; decide to turn your leadership of His church completely over to Jesus.

#3  Commit to develop a visionary state of mind not a vision statement; realize that a visionary state of mind allows God to be God and allows others to speak into the process.

#4  Pursue a visionary state of mind by developing a framework (Vision Frame) of thinking first,  that you CAN and SHOULD  state.

#5  Before developing your framework, do a searching and fearless inventory of where God has placed you, your congregation’s capabilities and your leadership’s deepest passion. (I call this the your Kingdom Concept.)

#6  Start your framework by restating the timeless mission of Jesus for your time and place; decide that this will be THE organizing principle of everything you do. Otherwise, disband and close the church.

#7  Then state the four most important driving motives and core convictions that will shape the culture of your church as you pursue Jesus’ mission. (Congrats you have completed to sides of your Vision Frame.)

#8  Based on you searching inventory and the first two sides of your frame, state what kind of disciple your church is designed to produce; these may be called measures, life-marks, practices or something similar.

#9  Finally determine and state your church strategy as the “the how” of the mission using a picture. Note: You will never have a visionary state of mind or a visionary church until the congregation enthusiastically embraces this picture along with the other sides of your Vision Frame.  

#10  Now that you have a Vision Frame, you can start thinking, praying, discerning, dialoguing and dreaming about your vision as God’s better future God. Use the sides of your Vision Frame to serve as a guide. Decide on the single most important thing the church must do in the next 12 months. This priority is called vision proper.

#11  Ruthlessly avoid the temptation to write vision proper as a statement. Do gather 6-12 key leaders and ask them to contribute “living language” in the form of phrases, metaphors, stories, and “what if” dream nuggets based on your single 12-month priority. Use this tool as a team and revisit it quarterly.

#12  With your priority in mind create talking points for every kind of daily interaction (prayer, one-on-ones, recruitment, teams, preaching, etc.) Use this spider diagram to practice painting a picture with words. Cast your vision as much as possible by dripping vision into daily conversations. Encourage the team to do the same. Don’t print your talking points. Remember that vision transfers through people not paper.

In the end, a visionary leader is not someone with a vision statement in their hand, but a compelling picture of God’s better future, streaming from their lips and entering peoples hearts all the time. May God bless your recovery process.

If you have not registered yet for Leadership Network’s free online conference, The Nines, you might want to put it on your calendar. It’s coming up in a few weeks, on September 9th. 

As a presenter, I have seen some of the content highlights and I am looking forward to hearing from all 100 leaders who will share a GAME CHANGING  moment in a 6-MINUTE highlight.

But I am really looking forward to Steve Furtick’s talk. Here are some quotes:

• We live in a culture of carbon copy.  Embrace your uniqueness!  
  
• Mediocrity is mass-produced, but destiny is custom designed. 
  
• We spend most of our life trying to stamp out our uniqueness. 
  
• What are some of the ways you’ve been trying to operate in someone else’s gifting? 

Are you surprised that this is my favorite talk?

That’s an amazing claim from Matt Chandler, pastor of The Village Church. In this video, Matt explains one of the early “shaping influences” of his life being Larry Osborn’s book Sticky Teams. (Originally entitled The Unity Factor.) 

Would you like to have that kind of team effectiveness? Of course you would. Then come out and join me along with

• Wayne Cordeiro
• Larry Osborne (1 min. video about Sticky Teams)
• Jamie Munson, Mars Hill Lead Pastor (yes that’s Mark Driscoll’s church) 

at North Coast Church’s Sticky Teams Conference. This is focused content, in a great location, from accessible leaders at a great price. 

• READ MORE on WHY YOU should attend

• SIGN UP HERE

• Come to my PRE-CONFERENCE workshop and COMMENT on this blog and I will bring you a FREE Collaboration Cube, the single best team-building tool, I have ever seen. 

I am meeting with a pilot group of 12 churches and 12 consultant-practitioners known as Future Travelers. The group is led by Alan Hirsch.  The 12 churches are large growing mega-churches that represent 90,000 in weekend attendance. Some of the churches involved include: 

• Austin Stone
• Christian Community Church
• Rock Harbor
• Granger Community Church
• Seacoast Church
• Kennsington Community Church
• Mountain Lake Church
• West Ridge Church 

What’s exciting about this group, is that these churches, most considered to be thought-leaders, are not satisfied with their current strategy. They are pushing the envelope of strategy in the name of things like “missional community” and “apostolic movement.”

KEY QUESTIONS WE’RE ASKING

• How does our declining church influence in our leading cultural cities, help us wake-up to the enormous need for completely new strategies? Right now we are in San Francisco which has a 4-6% churched from an evangelical perspective. 

• As we develop new strategies, how do we keep mission as the organizing principle of all we do? (That is, how are we thinking missional not just talking missional.)

• If our best church models will not even come close to touching 40% of our culture, how do we reach the other 60%? Here is a post from Tim Steven on “The Shrinking 40.”

• How do we get our best churches to a place of re-imagining the future and not just improving existing methods?

• How do we leverage the platform of the “attractional,” mega-church to integrate and launch initiatives that multiply the mission with new “incarnational” strategies. 

• Is the multi-site “strategy of the day” just a stepping stone to a more viral and exponential strategy to expansion that could be captured by the progression: MEGA  > MULTI > MICRO. Read Todd Wilson’s Micro Manifesto. 

I will continue to post learning from this group.

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