The need or lack thereof for church “vision” statements has the potential for being a controversial topic. I’ll confess that I’m a bit allergic to them myself. You’ll be hard pressed to find one on our website and I think I would have difficulty articulating one. What I can point to is our governing documents, particularly our Church Covenant. We remind ourselves of it on first Sunday of every month before taking the Lord’s Supper. Our “vision”, therefore, is to live in accordance with the articles of that covenant.

Okay, someone could argue that’s a bit unfair. The covenant doesn’t rightly meet the terms and conditions of a traditionally-defined “vision statement”. Furthermore, it fails to answer the question of what’s so wrong with a vision statement? In response, let me point you to an blog post by Richard Phillips to better answer that question. He has “Some Thoughts on Church ‘Visions’ “ that are well worth reading. Here’s his conclusion (emphasis added):

Church visioning is a powerful tool that can help make leaders much more effective. But since it necessarily focuses on things man can achieve, it has a dangerous tendency to secularize the church. Therefore, in my opinion, church visioning is probably a good idea only for churches that are strongly established with an ordinary means of grace emphasis, but who need to pay more attention to their missional context. Also, I would suggest that a visioning process should be conducted only periodically so as to set some longer term trajectories for ministry aspirations. The document should be kept ready so as to offer its analysis to future decision-making (hiring decisions, budget priorities, etc.), and then the church should continue to focus on its God-given mission of serving the Kingdom of Christ through the God-given strategy of Word, sacrament, and prayer, with biblically-defined elders and pastors serving a biblically-shaped church. (See 2 Cor. 10:3-4, and 1 Cor. 1:21-2:2).

If you are a leader in your church and thinking about reforming then this may be a conversation worth having with other leaders.

Posted in 3ABC Life, Church Life |