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The following post is an excerpt from God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates or Finding and Focusing your Church’s Future.
In part three of the book I walk through the 12 templates starting with a simple definition and providing a personal snapshot from my point of view as a vision consultant. Then, I explore the template biblically, providing historical and contemporary church examples and metaphors for communication. For the complete guide with team assessment questions, I recommend that you buy the book. You can also see all of 12 templates in one visual overview or visit the God Dreams resource site.
Quick Definition
Your church’s vision is to welcome and experience God’s presence anticipating ripple effects far beyond the life of your congregation. You might state it as, “We will seek God’s presence to be manifested to do whatever He wants and however He wants through our response, renewal, and revival.”
Personal Reflection
When developing this template, I was thinking primarily of charismatic strands of evangelicalism and churches I have worked with in the Assembly of God, Foursquare denominations, and other faith tribes that are “supernaturally sensitive.” I think of conversations with Vanguard University’s leadership (an Assembly of God school), where the big idea of “opening worlds” represented not just the bodies of knowledge and vocational opportunity for undergraduate students but the Spirit-empowered life in God’s supernatural world. Or I think of Visalia, California, First Assembly whose mission is “to help people see that God can do more than they believe,” conveying the mind-stretching reality of God’s present miraculous power.
But churches that work with the manifest presence template are not necessarily from a charismatic or Pentecostal background. One example is Hope Church in Las
Vegas pastored by the founding planter, Vance Pitman. Vance and his team are deeply drawn to a practical expression of “the abiding life.” Take note of the language they use to describe what they call the marks of abiding. Here are three from a list of fifteen they have articulated:
- Intimacy: Understands that God’s primary call on my life is to be with Him, not to do things for Him.
- Word: Pursues time in, under, and around the Word, alone and with others.
- Prayer: Talks with God consistently, desperately, and expectantly.
To empower these spiritual outcomes, Hope uses a “5 percent time strategy” for how to build a relationship with God. All relationships require time, so Hope’s ministry is designed around four kinds of time, including daily individual “God time” (fifteen minutes a day is 1 percent of your life’s time) and “Go time” which is the investment of time with people in cross-cultural settings (one week of your year is 2 percent of your time). The other two times are “Gather time” (a weekly worship service) and “Group time” (a home-based small group setting with other believers) that each make up an additional 1 percent.
Not only is God’s daily presence and emphasis individual, but it is an important part of sharing the church’s history. Every significant event in the church’s life can be directly attributed to God’s intervention and leadership. For example, the unlikely idea that a pastor like Vance from the deep South should uproot his family and go to a city like Las Vegas. Or the unexpected dynamic of God’s leading Hope to become a multiethnic church or rescuing them from a financial crisis that should have closed their doors. Hope does a lot as a church, but its primary template is based on God’s speaking and showing up first.
Bible Reflections
The Israelites’ wilderness journey contains many pictures of the Christian’s walk with God today. The pillar of fire taught that when God moves, we move. When God does not move, we stay put as well (Exod. 40:36–38). The children of Israel would respond with awe and worship as God met with Moses: “When all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would rise up and worship, each at his tent door” (Exod. 33:10).
Likewise the New Testament, especially in the book of Revelation, forecasts the worship of heaven as a continual experience of God’s presence before His throne.
People in heaven don’t even need the sun to shine “for the glory of God gives it light” (21:23; cf. 22:5) as God dwells among His people: “He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (21:3).
Starting Point Metaphors
The image above shows a big circle coming down upon smaller circles, representing God’s coming down from heaven onto His people, descending on various people in church or other holy gatherings.
Another image that depicts manifest presence might be smoke rising from a fire, marked by power, vitality, uniqueness, and mystery. These qualities could symbolize God’s pervasive presence in a church.
Still other images that convey this idea are Damascus road (Luke 24:32), worshippers with arms lifted, a crowd watching a countdown clock, raindrops beginning to fall, or a waterfall washing trees and rocks as it cascades.
Historical Examples
The book A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories that Stretch and Stir recounts the fascinating details of world-changing revivals, beginning with biblical events and continuing through awakenings and revivals of recent centuries. It also explores what these revivals have in common and how people prepare for them. A vision of God’s manifest presence was often part of that preparation.
One illustration is Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards (the key figure in North America’s First Great Awakening in the 1730s) who became the president of Yale in 1795. At that time only 10 percent of Yale students would claim Christ’s name in public, even though the school had been founded to produce great pastoral leaders. But Dwight believed in revival and led with several means of pursuing it: gospel preaching, Bible reading, prayer, talking with Christians, catechism, and self-examination.
During his tenure revival broke out three different times. In his own words describing one of them:
So sudden and great was the change in individuals, and in the general aspect of the college, that those who had been waiting for it were filled with wonder as well as joy, and those who knew not what it meant were awe-struck and amazed. Wherever students were found in their rooms, in the chapel, in the hall, in the college-yard, in their walks about the city, the reigning impression was, “Surely God is in this place.” The salvation of the soul was the subject of thought, of conversation, of absorbing interest; the “peace in believing” which succeeded was not less strongly marked.
The revival at Yale, like all revivals, owes its ultimate timing and power to God’s sovereign initiative. But men and woman have nonetheless pursued a vision for revival and seen God work in dramatic ways in their lifetime. For Timothy Dwight, that meant a huge surge in the quality and quantity of fervent pastors who left Yale over the decades to influence the world with a similar vision.
Contemporary Examples
Vertical Church is an association of worship-centered churches pioneered by James MacDonald. He begins his book Vertical Church by asking, “Is your church experiencing a window-rattling, earth-shattering, life-altering encounter with the living God? That’s not a common experience in North America today. But it should be. And it can be.” Worship that seeks and welcomes God’s presence is a priority for churches like this.
When I navigated Bellevue Baptist Church, in greater Memphis, Tennessee, through a year of visioning, the church changed its one hundred-year template of anointing amplification to a new template of presence manifestation. Their ten-year vision is to be a catalyst for spiritual awakening in Memphis and beyond. This led to many new initiatives including a redesign of Sunday evening worship to become an “Awaken” service where pastors from across the city—including the different ethnic churches—preach and where multiple congregations come together to pray for spiritual awakening for the city.
Realizing Your Own Vision
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