Video Transcript: Developing a Vision
All right, today we continue talking about vision. And today we're talking about developing a vision. And part of that is developing a vision statement, which we'll get to. Next time, we've already talked about that a little bit about needing to be clear and concise and a mental picture and challenging and those sorts of things. But then, when we talk about a vision before the vision statement, how do you develop a vision now, just as a reminder, here we are a model, a leader engages culture, to create a vision, which is a preferable future. And then provides the impetus to do the actions and the prayer that are needed to bring that future into reality. So that's what we're talking about today. There it Is. Birthing a vision. That's what I want to be talking about today. Who does it? All right, you are a leader, and you're coming into an organization and you recognize as you have learned, its culture and how they do things here, or you know, the history of the place, you know, how it's going to be impacted? Now, who develops that vision for the future? And what that's going to look like? What it's going to be? Who who does that? Well, there are a couple of different answers to that. One would be the leader does it right. I mean, it's the leader. That does it. Sometimes, you'll find that a strong natural leader that's SNL here, a strong natural leader. That's how it's sometimes done. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to be in Lake Avenue Congregational Church, large congregation in Pasadena, California. And I happened to be there when their Pastor Paul Cedar, was coming back to share the vision that God had called him to over the next year. And he had been up in the mountains for several days in the cabin up there. And he'd been praying and fasting and asking God to give him a vision for what God was calling to the church to in this next season of its life. And so he was announcing it there. Now, that's often the case of what happens in this sort of situation, that you get a very strong natural leader, and they're coming back, and they're sharing what God has said to them. Now, that happens in many places in the United States, that will happen in blue collar churches, as I said before, where people are used to being told what to do. More often, I think that the vision has to come somewhat out of the people, if the vision is going to gather up the hopes and the dreams and the desires of the people, it's got to engage them in the process of identifying the vision. Now, the leader then in that kind of situation, provides the impetus or for even creating the vision. And he'll provide a process that will help them create the vision. And otherwise, you know, people will just follow the pastor, I've shared with you before about the church that I served in California and sold the building to this other independent congregation and, and boy, Pastor Duke is the one who told him where to go, because they thought it was one step between him and God, and it was a very, very small step. Otherwise, you'll probably need some others. Well, if you are going to be involved, as the strong natural leader announcing that that's where God leads you. And that's where you think your gifts lie, then you've got to know these truths that are below about knowing yourself, knowing your context, and knowing God knowing good advice, you've got to know those well. It's even more important if you are the one who's working through a series of people groupings of people, or you're working through certain key leaders, in order to envision what the future might be. You've got to know these things about yourself because your leadership will be impacted. For instance, you must know yourself. And we talked about that in that section on leadership a whole lot about knowing your personality, you know, your spiritual gifts, knowing, knowing your strengths and your weaknesses, knowing your dark side doing all of this stuff. But this knowing yourself is a little different in that it looks at your life experiences. Now, in my experience in life. I grew up in a church that was very conservative. It was it was totally focused inwardly it was not focused outwardly at all. It was that that offspring of Dutch immigrants, and we all kind of flock together and if we could all be together, we were happy. And that's the kind of church I grew up in. And I had no models of what it meant for people to come to faith in Jesus Christ. And I knew it happened. I'd read about it. I'd watched it on TV occasionally. But in my church, there's one person in the 22 years I was a member of that church, one person that came to faith through the ministry of that church and it was somebody who married a young man of the church, and she was so excited about it. That she began going to her neighborhood and to the women there they started a morning Bible study of the ones that were available in the morning. And you know, over coffee, they would sit and talk about the Bible and amazingly the elders of my church went and visited her and said she had to stop doing that. Because, you know, she wasn't trained. And it wasn't an official ministry of the church. That's the kind of church I grew up in. Well, when I was in high school, a group of us, all engaged in music went through a spiritual revival of sorts. And out of that came a musical group, we call ourselves The Dreadful Noise. And we would go on Sunday evenings, usually, to various venues as churches, services, and sing. And many times these were in evangelistic kind of settings. And I will never forget the night we sang at the Honor Camp, it was called the Honor Camp. It was the place where first offenders would go only for a period of time. So they had short sentences. And there's no fences around. They were there on their honor. And they would serve out their sentence there. Well, we did a service there in conjunction with a teacher who'd come from a local school, and we provided the music. And afterwards, we interacted over games, ping pong pool, etc. With the young men, all men who were incarcerated there. And remember the day that this one man came to me and said, Can I talk to you? Took me outside, and huge, young man, so I was a little intimidated by him.HeI said, "you know, I've been thinking about what you folks said in there. And I'd like to pray and receive Jesus Christ." And so I explained the gospel to him as best I could. I prayed with him to receive Jesus Christ. And that changed my perspective, I knew that I wanted to be part of that sort of thing. And that happened more and more as we sang. And then I began to get involved in other kinds of ministries, where I got to share the Good News. Found, I didn't have the gift of evangelism, spiritual gift. But that's what I wanted to be around. And so I knew when I was entering ministry, I had a couple of different calls to different churches. And the one was one like, I grown up, and I said, I knew that's not what I wanted to do and be. And so I ended up in this other little tiny church in Plainwell, Michigan, and told you the story about that. Knowing yourself is a big part of it, knowing your context, knowing your culture, you've got to know your culture. We've talked about that in detail, but but knowing your culture so that your presenting a future vision. You know, what needs to be changed at this point. Now, there are some parts of your culture that will be very strong and very positive and will contribute to reaching your vision. But there are some parts that will be changed, you must know God, you must know that there are things that are possible, beyond what you can think or dream. And you must know good advice. There are people who are very, very wise, and you should listen to them. I was thinking of the time where I kind of decided that the vision of our church should be that we were going to be involved planting churches. And so I made all the arrangements for this to happen. We invited a young man in who was going to serve in our church for a year, and he was going to gather a corps of people to go plant a church out a few miles from where we were. And in the process of doing that, because the money wasn't in the budget at all. I kind of manipulated things around. And yeah, I made it happen. I, I, I tweaked the right levers at the right time and made it all happen. But then later, one of the leaders, one of the church fathers said, "Yeah, I'd like to take you out to lunch." And we sat there and he said, "you know," he said "you made this happen," he says, "But next time," he says, "share your vision with those of us who are in leadership, and we can run it for you. Otherwise, you're gonna have people who are automatically opposed, just because it comes from you." So you must know good advice. I took that advice. And that's where I spent a lot of years working out a vision to impact a lot of people's lives. So who does it? The leader does it but will also do it in connection with significant others, at least if you're not a strong natural leader. In fact I love this quote from Bennis and Nanus there. They write about leadership from a perspective, not Christian necessarily. This is just general business, general Corporation kind of stuff, nonprofit stuff. They said "historians tend to write about great leaders, as if they were capable of creating their visions, and sense of destiny of some mysterious inner source, perhaps some do. But upon closer examination, it usually turns out that the vision did not originate with the leader personally, but rather from others." Wow, and that's the way you can go to have people say yes, wow, you're a leader, we want to go there. In fact, in my last church, that's one of the reasons they called me is because as we began to talk, they wanted to be moving in a certain direction, and they sensed that I could be one who could get them there. So who does it? Well, the leader, maybe with some significant others. Now there's a process by which visions are born. First of all, there's the gestation period. This because we're untapped opportunities arise, or dissatisfaction with the status quo, now untapped opportunities, Bill Bright in the United States here just felt a burden for college students, he realized there wasn't any great ministry to college students. And so he established Campus Crusade, he said, You know, there's an opportunity here, opportunity for young people who are at an idealistic time of life, that we've got to find a way to reach them, and created this organization that has had an impact on hundreds of 1000s, maybe millions of young people, on campuses around the United States and around the world. And it started because he saw an untapped possibility, something that could fit for the future. Church Planting comes out of this, when we were in Southern California, we realized that the number of people unreached, in Southern California was huge. And so we looked at that. And said "you know, we've been planting maybe one church every five years, and we committed ourselves to a goal and a vision of planting 50 churches over the next 10 years." It turns out as the momentum grew, we ended up at year seven, planting 53 churches trying to reach the very communities, various ethnic groups, etc. But it started out of a vision saying, "well look at all this opportunity that exists here with this unchurched population opportunity for for the Gospels and making inroads" started with an untapped opportunity. In my last church, we started a ministry to families who have children with developmental disabilities. And we did that because that we were looking at, as we always do, a report about our community. And it indicated that only 8% of people with children with developmental disabilities attend church at all. They can't because since their child was a baby, they've ended up staying home taking care of the child. And sometimes there's behavior issues that make it difficult for that child to be in, in public. And so they quit going. And therefore we had a couple of people in our church, who developed a ministry started with a couple a few young children, and gradually grew to 30-40 kids and young adults. A separate ministry on Tuesdays that engaged these young adults, then. It came out of here's an opportunity. And there's got to be a way that we include this in our overall vision as a church that doesn't fit with that. And so untapped opportunities and dissatisfaction with the status quo. It's another way that visions start to grow as a status quo. That's our Thank you read about this in Scripture, Acts 6 with the appointing of the first deacons. It came out of a dissatisfaction with the status quo there, there's not an equal distribution of food. So this has to change. And so the deacons are chosen people who are full of the Holy Spirit, and they are chosen to do that work. And the apostles now have a new vision for their role, their role is going to be a prayer and the preaching of the Word. And so they divide that thing, but it came out of things aren't good, we've got to have some changes here. We find that later on, in Acts 15, we realize there's that question about what is the church going to be like? You know is it going to live by the Jewish laws? Or is there going to be a new day where there's no application to the Jewish laws whatsoever. And so that tension, says, you know, what we have here is not good today. So that's how it happens, gestation period, things are being thought through. Then there's a growing phase visions expand as viable alternates alternatives are explored. That's how some churches are moving to multi site. You know, one of the leaders that I had the privilege of sitting down when the first leaders who develop multisite congregation in the United States started, because they began looking at their choices, their alternatives, the church had been growing for a period of time, and now it was looking like they would have to make a choice. They would have to build, or they began to look at other alternatives. You know, would we maybe create different worship services or plant daughter churches around the area? And then the third one was, what if we take our worship service and we put it in these different sites, and we create these ministries with our vision with our DNA in it, what would that look like? And that's how that got started. It started because there had been looking at the alternatives to solve some problems related to their growth. Now, that bad one, bottom one, leaders versus critics, there's a difference between there are a lot of people who have pointed out the deficiencies of the status quo, they'll do that. And those are often called critics and they are multitude in number. And you don't listen to critics as much. But there's a difference between a critic who just sees the dissatisfaction experiences the dissatisfaction and communicates that. That's different than a leader who's leading people to solve it. Bill Hybels years ago was talking about being on a study break. And every morning he would walk to Burger King near his house, and that's where he'd have breakfast. While he sat and meditated over the scriptures and etc. And he said, there was a door that just drove him crazy, because it was squeaky. He said, eight weeks straight. Nobody had oiled, that door or repaired it. And he realized he said, I'd become a critic. But he says, he realized also, that there was no leader there that was looking at this and saying, Wow, that's got to change. Simple thing. But just an example, about how that can work. Many will point out the deficiencies of where you are. So it goes through a growing phase where, okay, what are the alternatives, we're we're sensing that there's dissatisfaction with the status quo, or there's this new opportunity, we're looking at the alternatives. And then comes the just a minute, I've got a confused here, leaders versus critics. And then comes the developmental phase, where prayer takes place. A lot of prayer, we're gonna talk about prayer, a great deal as we get into rolling out the vision and, and talking about that, but the group that's developing it should be people who are praying, and then there's that idea of thinking big now, and then putting it on paper. Now, just to reflect on each of those prayer, where God calls us to go, that's what we have to decide, then the how is not really our concern. For instance, Abraham, God called him to establish a new nation. Now that's a huge vision, establish a new nation out of which is going to come the Messiah, eventually, that he would be a blessing to all nations. But God didn't say, Okay, here's how it's all going to happen. He led him step by step, or Moses. Said you know, I want you to deliver the people, Moses got that message all wrong and killed the Egyptian because he thought everybody would rise up and say, Oh yep, this is the guy, let's go. Instead, God created a whole different way of how and those hows are determined through prayer, example of Jericho. Here's this group that's never really fought any major battles, some minor battles out out on their way there. But now, Jericho is huge. In fortress building, it's one that has this wall, that the history tells us had a wall wide enough that chariot races could take place on the top of it, how would they ever knock down that wall, and yet they came to God and they trusted him, God gave them a battle plan of just marching around and he'd take care of it. A Mary, the mother of Jesus asked, How is this going to be when the angel announced to her that she was going to become pregnant through the Holy Spirit? And God said, I got this, this is what's going to happen? Nehemiah, of course, how's it gonna happen, God took care of it. So there's a contrast, you can have a lot of good ideas in this whole section, where you are in the developmental phase of the vision, or you can come to God and get God ideas, the kind that are going to get you past. So prayer. And then that whole idea of listening to people and thinking big. Now, this list here, it comes from Andy Stanley, in his book on visioneering. He tells about the time he had a woman come to him with this great vision for a ministry within the church of older women mentoring younger women. And he said he just zapped the vision right out of them by asking all these questions, how will you find the women to be mentored? Who's going to be mentoring? How are you going to find those women? How will you train the mentors? What program will you use? How long will the program last? Who's in charge of this whole thing? How are you going to pair women up? What curriculum, etc, etc, etc, etc. to drain the vision. And so they weren't necessarily thinking very big. So. So developmental phase prayer thinking big, putting it on paper, thinking big, Nehemiah. Imagine all the years that those people that lived with broken down walls and didn't even realize the limitation it put on them. Read Hebrews 11, the heroes of the faith. People like Moses, people like Abraham, people like Noah, who are given great visions and visions that were way beyond their capacity by themselves to accomplish. That's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about having a great vision. It's having something that you can't do without the movement of God. So thinking big. And then the questioning phase, it's the time to start asking questions about the vision, especially when you start getting the wording down. we'll talk about that next session. But questions like, Is this vision culturally relevant? Does it fit in my setting? Is it clear? Is it compelling? Is it future oriented? And how long in the future? This is a Chinese proverb, "if your vision is for a year, plant wheat, if your vision is for 10 years plant trees, if your vision is for a lifetime, plant people," How long is your vision? Is it realistic, get stretching? Those are the kind of questions you asked in the questioning phase. Does this fit? And when we talk about the process of getting a group together and working through a process of talking about where's God calling us to go? How are we going to get there? These are the kind of questions you ask in the questioning phase. And then finally, you get to the patience phase. In other words, it takes some time for visions to become reality. You know, when I was interviewing my friend, Frank, back in session seven. And he talked about the fact that how painful it was to get critics who didn't see the vision that they had developed as the vision that they wanted for the church, and how critics hurt. And yet, he said, again, that that was only the first don't 8 or 10 years after that it got easier and easier and easier. And people were anticipating their annual banquet where they could see the vision. Some people leave too soon, they give up too soon, because the critics hurt, they do hurt, it's painful to be criticized. One man, I know in Southern California felt called to turn around churches. Came to a church there and began to change things to make that church more relevant to its culture, the bigger culture, so they had to make some changes. So they changed worship, they changed structure, changed a lot of things. And then he left. And sure enough, one person described it as a rubber band, you know, a leader can stretch, stretch, stretch, stretch, stretch that rubber band, but if you move remove the leader, it's going to go back like that very, very quickly. And that's what happened in that church. Because the establishment of the vision hadn't come to the point where people just accepted that as the new reality. And so anyway, that's the patience phase means, you know, I'm in this I'm going to work on this vision. I'm going to work through this vision. I'm going to work with these people to see reality set in new concrete. When we talk about change process few sessions from now on, we're going to look at how that works and how you establish and put in concrete a new culture within the culture you've been working with. So those are things about birthing a vision