pat loughery

Over the past couple of months it’s become clear that the vision of our church isn’t crafted in such a way as to grab attention, create energy and excitement, or even be very memorable. People who are leaders within the church have asked me what the vision of the church is, even though we say it almost every week and it’s on page 1 of our bulletin handout, on the church’s website, in the Vineyard 101 materials and other places.

So I’m taking this opportunity to revisit how we’ve written our vision (the single line statement, and the larger picture). I really want it to capture the imagination of those who hear it, and I’d love for it to help direct us in the kind of church community that we’re called to be. I’m going to fold in what we’ve learned about ourselves and our project along the way.

Some of the words that Todd spoke to me/us a few weeks ago really grabbed my attention – especially the whole idea that we all have vision, and that leadership means intentionality (even though we might fear being coercive or strongarmed). I am realizing that I need to express those realities in a more creative, captivating manner.

In order to revisit this issue, I’ve been re-reading a couple of good books on the topic of vision in a church body:

For your own entertainment, here’s how we’ve crafted the vision statement of the church as it curently stands:

“Our vision is to be a growing community of passionate, authentic disciples of Jesus who transform the world through relationships with God and each other”

It’s a bit wordy, and not very catchy. So I’m taking all of our thinking from the last few years (two publicly “open” as a church; a year+ before that in initial planning) to revamp that work. To help me along this journey, I’m using a nice little resource that appears to be out of print… it’s alled the Strategic Planner’s toolkit, written by Ron Ford and Bill Bean. I bought the rights to the toolkit when we first started to plant, and kept the PDF file around for furture use. Last time around, I just skimmed it. This time around, I’m trying to learn from whatever mistakes I may have made and work the plan, then recraft the results for our own body.

It’s interesting to me, though, how close this is to what Brian McLaren writes: McLaren: “To be and make disciples of Jesus Christ in authentic community for the good of the world” from Generous Orthodoxy, p. 107. There’s a lot of commonality between those two statements, although I still want to dig into this more.