Dispatches from Exponential 08, day 2.2

Here are some highlights from two sessions this afternoon.

Andy Stanley, Pastor at North Point Community Church, brought the following message “Making Vision Stick.” It’s a standard Stanley message that has now been made into a book by the same name. He defined vision as “a mental picture of what could be, fueled by a passion that it should be.” Here are his main points in working out how to make that sort of vision stick.

1. State it simply – “Memorable is Portable”: he used examples of memorable vision statements, such as the ONE campaign‘s vision “to make poverty history” or BarackObama’s vision for “change.”
2. Cast it convincingly – basing his thoughts out of Nehemiah 2, he said we need to:
1. Define the problem – clarify what exactly is the issue
2. Offer a solution – what is the clear solution to it
3. Clarify ‘why now?’ – what makes this the time to do something?
3. Repeat it regularly – find the rhythm of your organization and build times into that rhythm that allow for regular repetition of the vision
4. Celebrate it consistently – moving beyond your own mental pictures of what the vision is about toward helping people see the vision through living examples of your vision and values; I think the most helpful example here was taking time to celebrate these things with staff regularly
5. Embrace it personally and publicly – we as leaders need to be a personal illustration of our vision

After hearing Stanley, I went to hear from John Burke, Pastor of Gateway Church and author of No Perfect People Allowed. This was of interest to me because we’re borrowing some things from Gateway for our development of a spiritual pathway at Brooklife.

While a lot of John’s presentation was drawn out of his book and some of it repeated words from Andy Stanley, I think what impacted me most were three things:

1. In communicating your messages, you need to consider that people will lose attention every 5-8 minutes because of our media-saturated culture. It takes work to prepare for this.
2. In reference to organization change, you need to reevaluate and reorganize your structures when you grow by 30%. This applies not only to internal structures, but is extremely important for clarifying next steps for people coming to the church. What is their pathway?
3. We, as leaders, need to live these things out ourselves. Are we prepared to enter into the messy ministry of entering into real life with people?