Last year, I made the decision to re-read some books that were highly influential in my life as a leader and pastor. The reason is that I read many of them when I was a student pastor and knew more than the lead pastor I worked for. Now that I’ve planted a church and I am the lead pastor with a growing staff, I’m in a different place. I’m also hopefully a little more humble than the first time around.
One of those books was Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement by Will Mancini. This book is like having Will come to your church and consult for you. It is jam packed with insights and learnings on how to create vision, cast it and move a church forward.
What I love about this book is that it is set on finding what makes your church unique, not the latest copy of the megachurch in your town or the last conference you went to. Which is what most ministry books set out to do. Which isn’t wrong, but I’m not sure it is as helpful to a pastor. The reason is simple, as Mancini points out: most effective pastors know what makes their church unique, and they did it. Then they write a book about it and a bunch of pastors copy it and now their church isn’t unique, they’re just using someone else’s vision.
Let me be clear, you should steal ideas from pastors and authors, but not visions. That is what God communicates to you in your city through your team.
Here are a few things that stood out to me:
- Every day, local churches step either closer to or further away from becoming the movement that God designed them to be.
- Church culture is the combined effect of the interacting values, thoughts, attitudes, and actions that define the life of your church. Church culture is foundational to the life and witness of every church. Unfortunately too many church leaders fail to recognize or understand the implications of this reality.
- Too many goals threaten to make any one goal unclear.
- Clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear. Being clear as a leader means being simple, understandable, and exact.
- The higher the leader goes, the harder the leader must work to stay clear.
- You won’t do ministry that really matters until you define what matters.
- Don’t tell me that you are excellent or relevant; tell me what makes you excellent or relevant.
- The absence of strategy, as I am defining it, is the number one cause of ineffectiveness in a healthy church.
- The most powerful position in the organization is the role that can choose the metaphors and tell the stories.
- The greatest mistake in vision casting is not recognizing that vision is always a solution to a prior problem.
- Without a mind-blowing goal in front of them, your people will never have a reason for risk taking, collaboration, and heroic sacrifice.
Here are some helpful questions for leaders and churches to discover their uniqueness and vision:
- Leaders: What are the unique strengths of the leader(s) in your church?
- Gifts: If each person has unique spiritual gifts in your church, what does the collective gift mix look like?
- Experiences: What shared experiences do your people have in common?
- Values: What values drive decision making in your church? What unique convictions do your people share?
- Personality: If you were to describe what makes your church distinct from every other church, what would you say?
- Evangelism: How do your people talk about the Great Commission? How does your church nuance it?
- Recovery: What sins and sin patterns have your people been delivered from? What patterns of worldliness are they most tempted by?
- Motivation: Is there a deeply motivational rubric behind how your church sees its mission (for example, community, service, prayer, or worship)?
To me, this is one of those books that you chew on, come back to and chew on some more.