Who is God Calling Your Church to Become in this Season?
Just as people have a call, churches have a call. This congregational call is also referred to as a congregation vision. While every church has the same mission or purpose (to make disciples who transform the world), the vision or congregational call is unique to each church. The vision is specifically how God is calling your church to live out its transformational disciple-making mission in this given season of ministry.
The mission won’t change, but the church’s vision does change. In years past a congregation may have needed to go through a visioning process every five or so years. In today’s culture, a re-visioning process (or congregational call discernment) is likely needed every couple of years. Yikes! This frequency may sound scary and overwhelming, but is required in our constantly changing and shifting world.
Vision is the catalyst for congregations. A clear, relevant vision provides energy, momentum, focus, and legitimizes leadership. Without a relevant vision, a congregation will stagnate and then decline into death. Vision creates a new life cycle in the church.
Vision is birthed through a congregational discernment process. The process includes identifying the giftedness of the congregation, the passions of the leaders, and the need, gap, or opportunity in the community the congregation feels called to address with who. The alignment of these three is from where the vision (congregational call) is cast. When the vision is obtained, when any of these three shifts,or when the vision is no longer a congregational catalyst, re-visioning is required.
Here are some considerations as your discern your congregational call (vision):
If any church could pick up your vision and call it their own, your vision is too generic. I often find the vision is actually the mission or maybe even a discipleship pathway rather than a unique congregational call.
Your congregational call must be rooted in understanding and bridging to your community. True call discernment takes time, heart work, head work, and foot work.
If your church has a sour taste about visioning (i.e., too much work for no difference made, poor experience previously), it is likely due to one of three reasons. First, it could have been an inadequate discernment process. Second, there was no strategic plan following the visioning process to live into the congregational call. Third, the visioning process was pastor-centric and the congregation was not involved or brought into the vision.
Living into a congregational call takes focus, alignment, intentionality, and experimentation.
Ministries that no longer align with the vision may need to be stopped or paused to allow the available resources for living into the congregational call.
Resources (time, dollars, facility, capacity, energy, staff) may need to be reallocated to align with the congregational call/vision.
Is your church’s vision clear and compelling? Or is your church’s vision generic, uninspiring, and providing no energy or momentum? Gather other leaders and analyze your current vision statement. What are the next steps? Re-visioning? Better alignment? More focus? This vital analysis is critical and can provide a new pathway forward for your church!
Here are some additional leadership resources:
Innovating for Love, Dean
Be Innovative (not Imitating), Nieuwhof
Congregational Visioning, Kotan
