Once your vision is clear, there are three questions you’ll need to answer.
Agreeing on a clear vision helps you empower others to lead and carry out ministry.
It’s also a lot easier to get everyone pulling in the same direction if there’s agreement on what you hope to accomplish. A clear vision will:
- Set expectations and foster unity
- Help facilitate decision-making that impacts your future
- Create a framework for defining ministry priorities
- Attract talent (both volunteers and staff) and financial resources
- Define success for your ministry
But just “making the vision plain” is not enough to keep people focused on it—or to equip a church to accomplish it.
Both your team and your people need to be reminded frequently of what the vision is and where you’re going next. This isn’t just a communications task… it has to do with how your team fundamentally operates. The communications aspect of rallying a church around your vision becomes a difficult (impossible) task if you stop after simply defining it.
Once your vision is clear, there are three questions you will need to answer:
1) The Strategy Question:
How will we accomplish the vision?
Churches get stuck after clarifying the vision because they never define a clear strategy for reaching it. Your vision may be the destination you see for your church, but your strategy will help you determine what action steps you’ll actually take to get there. Strategy helps you prioritize the right programs, events and ministries, and cut everything that is not in line.
How to Sharpen Your Vision-Casting Skills
As your church grows and the world around it changes, your vision needs to be refreshed. Join Tony Morgan, Amy Anderson and guests for this free webinar where you’ll get re-energized to clarify your church’s vision and learn how to successfully rally your congregation around it.
2) The People Question:
Who’s on the team and what are their roles?
With a clear vision in place and core strategies outlined, you can easily identify the gaps—and excess—on your staff team. For your plans to be realized, you will need to have the right people in the right roles. Strategies fail when no one owns the action steps, or when the people who own them are ill-equipped to follow through.
3) The Systems Question:
How do we streamline what we do to improve our effectiveness?
Every action plan needs a system for accountability. As your church grows, every individual ministry also needs systems to ensure people are well-cared for and the ball doesn’t get dropped. Good systems keep your strategies on track. Without them, your staff will always drift towards focusing on the urgent over the important.
You’ll notice that underlying each of these components is the need to invest your time and energy into a comprehensive planning process, not just a process to define your mission or vision statement. Few churches take that next step to answer the “How?” and “Who?” questions.
And that’s one major reason vision leaks.
Both your team and your people need to be reminded frequently of what the vision is and where you’re going next. Share on XChurches get stuck after clarifying the vision because they never define a clear strategy for reaching it. Share on XStrategies fail when no one owns the action steps, or when the people who own them are ill-equipped to follow through. Share on XGood systems keep your strategies on track. Without them, your staff will always drift towards focusing on the urgent. Share on X
2 Comments
I’m learning much of this is easier said than done unfortunately. Perhaps in one of your posts you could discuss casting vision for a vision, lol! That’s where we seem to be getting stuck.
Hey Lance, this podcast episode might help!