How deep is your vision....

Each weekend we have church planters and church teams from around the country come to Charlotte to see what God is up to at Elevation Church. With each of the visits there are a few things you can always count on happening. First, they will be given the VIP treatment through our Backstage:Elevation experience. We will spend hours with each team answering their questions and explaining every element of what we do. The second thing that happens is the church planters will experience our volunteer force firsthand. The question they will invariably ask is, “how do you get your volunteers so committed”. The answer to that question is easy to say, but extremely difficult to engineer. The answer is vision, but it goes way beyond a tag line or a rah-rah session. It comes from a place of calling and a singular focus on a common goal, “seeing people far from God filled with life in Christ”. Everything that happens on a Sunday morning points to one thing – the preaching of the gospel and people receiving Christ as their savior.

To see how well a church believes in the their vision don’t start with the Pastor or the staff, start with the guy in parking lot or the lady changing diapers in the baby room. Go and ask them “why do you do park cars” and see what kind of response you get. That’s where you’ll learn how powerful the vision is in a church; how deep does it permeates through the organization. Is the parking guy just as passionate about his role and opportunity as the lead Pastor? If he is, now you’re onto something because everyone in the organization is moving in the same spirit with a singular focus.

At Elevation Church we’re becoming even more passionate about moving forward with a singular vision and here are a few practical things that have been guiding us along the way.
Check the flow – Ask the guy in the parking lot “why does you park cars”. What do you hope to hear from him? At Elevation we want to hear 2 things 1) People are coming here today who are far from God and need to be filled with Jesus Christ and 2) my role as a parking guy is a vital link in the chain of people coming to faith in Christ, they connect what they do to the vision with passion and excitement.
Be slow to appoint – The key to having you vision permeate through the organization is directly linked to who you put in your leadership roles. You need to be slow and put in place only those who believe in the vision of your church. Learning the vision is a process and takes time, here’s a simple filter I am beginning to use in communicating the concept:
A. Understanding the vision – Do they clearly understand the guiding principles behind
the vision?
B. Embrace the vision – Do their actions show they understand the vision?
C. Communicate the vision – Will they speak it to those around them?
D. Defend the vision – Will they correct someone who is speaking contradictorily of the vision?
Only appoint leaders who have gone through the filter and will defend the vision. Time on the front end will save a mess at best or a mutiny at worse on the back end.
How are you training – Look at your training systems for every area and evaluate how much time you spend teaching the x’s and o’s of how to perform their role and how much time is spent on vision casting? How often do you do retraining? How frequently will they hear the vision? Is the vision communicated as pieces of information or as a compelling call to action the connects peoples hearts with what they do and the vision of the church?

The biggest commodity you have in your church is vision. It needs to be constantly communicated, demonstrated in the leaders and always defended. The influential capacity of your church will be determined by how deep the vision permeates your organization.