FROM THE Blog

The Barna Group did some interesting research in asking pastors how they wanted to improve their churches.  They were given a list of 12 priorities like building improvements, upgrading technology, learning community demographics, making the building safer and clarifying their mission.  Then they were asked to prioritize them.  The number one thing pastors wanted, regardless of church size, was to assess their mission and vision. 

Barna President David Kinnaman explained it this way, “Like other organizational leaders, pastors are trying to right-size their efforts to the new economic, technological and social realities. Most pastors are open to changing their ministries, yet many of them are struggling with the foundational questions of mission and vision. In other words, they want a clear direction to pursue, not necessarily just more ministry resources, like facilities, equipment, technology or ministry tools.”

The findings really give credit to why casting your church’s vision has to be the first thing you do.  What in the world are you the best at?  What makes you who you are?  How are you best equipped to serve the people around you?  When you have your vision in place it makes the rest of your decisions easier.  It helps you decide what ministries to add (or get rid of).  It helps you know where to spend your resources.  It helps guide your communications strategy.  Casting your vision with the congregation helps them better share you with their friends.  When vision is engrained in everything you do, you are the best you can be in your community.

I think that’s why vision also fits well with the second highest priority for pastors:  assessing the church’s reputation in the community.  For churches, part of their mission and vision has to include reaching out to people in the community.  Plus, who you are as a church in your community has a lot to do with people’s perception.  You may think you’re one thing, but your community may look at you totally differently.

 It reminds me of a story Scott Wilson, Senior Pastor at The Oaks Fellowship in Red Oak, TX, tells.  The church had a vision for serving the community and held lots of events on their campus.  One day the mayor told him the church had a bad reputation in their community.  People thought of them as a big church doing their own thing and not really helping the community.  They were too busy doing things for the community and they weren’t available to actually be a part of the community and work toward the community’s goals.

Three changes came from that conversation.  The Oaks Fellowship created a community relations position to go meet with community leaders, school boards, etc, to know what was going on in the community.  Second, they had a day at the church for all the service organizations in the community to come to the church so church members could meet them and volunteer with them.  Lastly, they aligned the church calendar with the community calendar.  Instead of doing their own Fall festival, the church took ownership of the city’s Fall event.

The Oak Fellowship had the right vision, but the execution wasn’t there.  They didn’t know they were doing anything ineffective until they uncovered what their community was saying about them.

Casting vision isn’t a throw away.  It can’t be ignored and it can’t happen overnight.  Conversations around vision aren’t always easy either.  It leads to making tough decisions.  But according to this research, it’s something pastors want to do more of.  Support them.  Help them in the process.  Don’t resist it over the fear of change or the unknown.  God has called your church to do great things.  Go beyond writing a generic mission statement and talk about your passions.  That’s when you’ll cast great vision.

It was rumored for some time, but now it’s a reality.  Facebook has launched the Timeline feature for brand pages.  That includes your church’s page.  And whether it’s a change you like or not, Facebook will make the feature live and mandatory on March 30.  Leading up to that deadline, you can try things out without publically launching it until you’re ready.  And you can launch early; Church Juice has. So as you work on your timeline—even if you’ve already activated it—here are some of the basics as well as things we’ve learned as we’ve played with this new feature.

Cover photo. This is one of the biggest visual changes. It’s a large picture (851 x 315 pixels) at the top of your page...

My wife noticed it right away.  There it sat.  Right near the front door of a church we visited.  A bright yellow brochure with the big heading “Just Try It” positioned above…the trademarked Nike logo.  Like a scene from a church-communications action film where a bomb was armed to blow, we looked at each other wide-eyed, mouths open as we shook our heads in slow motion—all the while silently yelling, “Noooooo!”

Okay, it wasn’t that dramatic.  Our reaction was probably more of just subdued frustration. Inside, though, I did feel that dramatic, animated anger.

The brochure in question was an attempt to get people to serve as volunteers in the church.  The phrase “Just Try It” isn’t...

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