By George Bullard
Early in my ministry I served on the national missions staff of my denomination. These were wonderful years. I served with a group of highly committed staff with a deep passion for helping leaders, congregations and local and regional denominational organizations reach their full Kingdom potential. It was hard work. I traveled nationally at a time I had two preschool children.
About the time I adjusted to the travel, and my wife and I figured out how to have high quality family life in the midst of my schedule, I was called to a regional denominational position in my wife’s home state. In many ways we saw this as a reward after four years of a challenging schedule. We were now in a state where much travel could occur within a day without having to stay overnight.
What went wrong is that we realized the depth of passion and the striving for excellence we experienced in a national missions agency did not exist in this state. What we considered mediocre at the national missions agency was seen as excellence in this regional denomination.
It took a while to figure out what was going on. It appears the issue was vision. At the national missions agency we experienced clear vision and deep passion around the mission of God. In the regional denomination we experienced a culture of good-enough-is-good–enough.
This is not unlike what is experienced in local congregations when laypersons, staff, but especially the pastor, are not passionate about God’s vision for their congregation. Here are several vision insights that speak into passion, vision and pastors. The first 25 overall insights about congregational vision are contained in posts found here.
Vision Insight 26: Pastors not passionate about God’s vision for their congregation are likely to become known as mediocre.
Let’s admit it. From everything we know less than 20 percent of all pastors are true visionaries. That is, if by visionary we mean pastors who have a vision of what will characterize their congregation if they with faithfulness, effectiveness and innovation live into the call of God upon them as a congregation.
Without an awareness of vision from God for their congregation, pastors will do more wandering around than going forward at a quick and passionate pace. Their reputation will be one of mediocre. They may be seen as a nice person, as one definitely called into Christian ministry, but also as one without sharp and decisive spiritual gifts surrounding leadership.
They may love their congregation, and their congregation may love them. The congregation may call them effective, but that will generally be because even the congregation sees mediocrity as excellence.
Vision Insight 27: Pastors not passionate about the vision for their congregation are likely to become known as former.
If there is a mismatch between the expectations for leadership from the pastor, and the performance of the pastor, then “former” may be the word that sticks with certain pastors in regard to the churches they serve.
This issue is substantially different than the situations where congregations expect their pastor to bring vision and push it out to the congregation. This is about congregations where there is a true, deep and genuine desire for God’s vision, but they need their pastor to lead them to embrace it by being the CVO (chief vision officer).
Either the pastor refuses or the pastor is among the 80 percent of pastors who do not get it about vision and their role in casting it. Vision casting is not taught in many seminaries, and as stated earlier it does not come naturally to pastors.
Vision Insight 28: Pastors and staff who feel entitled to their role with a particular congregation are not likely to empower vision.
Entitlements are a dicey thing. Different things are seen in different situations in life as comprising entitlements. Entitlements are more prolific than many people acknowledge.
Entitlements are present in congregations among both layperson and clergy. When pastors and church staff persons develop an entitlement mentality to their role in a church, they defend it, they fight for it, and resist any change in it.
If pastors and staff feel entitled to their job, and believe nothing can take it away from them, they have little urgency to help cast and fulfill passionate, empowering vision for the future of their congregation. The consequences are they suffer, the congregation suffers, and a small part of God’s Kingdom suffers.
This is the 12th in a series of posts on congregational vision. To see all the posts go here. Look for the next post, entitled “Vision casting is the responsibility of all congregational leaders.”