I attended the pre-conference session with Will Mancini. Will is the author of Church Unique and a very helpful voice on leadership and clarity. I have not yet read Church Unique, but it has fueled a number of conversations recently between me and Jason. I found Will’s session to be very thought-provoking and challenging.
I took copious notes from Will’s session which you can access as a PDF here. However, here are some highlights from those notes:
- Vision is the most overused and least understood term in the leaders’ vocabulary
- Most churches are over-programmed and under-discipled
- Ironically, church plants can be the worst at copy-catting one another
- God wants to do something cosmically significant yet locally specific in your church
- If your vision is not stunningly unique, you probably don’t’ have one
Counterfeit Clarity (these might be helpful steps, but not vision in themselves):
- Photocopied vision: you can see within 5-minutes what the last conference the staff has attended (e.g., “fully devoted follower,” “environments”)
- Lofty One-Liner: not necessarily vision
- Compelling page dump: that by itself is not visionary leadership
- Strategic planning notebook: don’t need a huge planning notebook
- ADD Pastor: unbounded creativity does not necessarily equal visionary leadership
Four-fold Movement – process for gaining vision
- Rethink Vision – repenting of how we’ve thought of vision previously
- Uncover – discover your kingdom concept
- Talk Up – Before you frame a statement, you’ve got to state your vision framework (common definitions)
- Live Out – tools to help us integrate vision with life; how well is everything in your church configured around whatever the big idea of your church is?
For more from Will Mancini, read my full notes here.
[This is part of a series of note-posts from the Exponential 2010 conference.]
