Vision Statement Mania (February 25, 2007)

Does a church need a vision statement?

The issue came up at our last business meeting, and so I thought it
good to write out a response to any who might regard my position on
the matter as disturbingly out of the mainstream.

I'll be blunt: ever since the early 90's when I first heard about vision statements, I have been baffled by the energy and zeal that churches have devoted to crafting them. In 15 years of studying for and serving in the ministry, I have yet to hear a coherent defense of them! But I know they are an article of faith for many. A fellow
student in seminary announced in class that he would not accept a call to a church that did not already have a statement. A district superintendent friend of mine told me that he spent 18 months in committee meetings crafting one for the church he pastored. In seminary I was told, to paraphrase Cowboy Woody in Toy Story, "If your church doesn't have one, get one!"

But I have always had a couple questions that have never been answered to my satisfaction. If vision statements are vital to the functioning of a church, why don't the writers of the New Testament ever instruct their congregations to create them? Saints Paul and Peter and James and John wrote many things to the churches, but they never pressured them to outline a statement of purpose. Maybe today it is wise policy to have such a statement - just as it is wise to have constitution - but then it should be clear that what is at stake here is prudent procedure rather than spiritual necessity.

My next question is, if church vision statements are a matter of good policy rather than biblical mandate, just when did they become so? The answer seems to be: very recently - here in North America in the 1980's, to be exact. That is when they came into vogue. Before that, somehow or other, churches got by without them. It seems to me that vision statement zealots necessarily believe that churches, for about 1,950 years, were rudderless, meandering and confused about their purpose. I deny this, of course. Chrysostom, Calvin, Edwards, Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones and Ironside were men of clear purpose who led flourishing congregations without ever having bothered to craft a 100-words- or-less statement of mission for them.

I went online and googled "church vision statement" and got 122,000 hits. I read a few. A couple patterns emerge:

1) They are indeed recent. I'd love to see a vision statement from 1969, 1954, 1922, but apparently they don't exist. Again, nobody realized we needed them until yesterday, historically speaking.

2) They're dull. I'm not saying they're bad - nearly all of them are quite good, actually. I'm just saying that the eyes glaze over and the lids begin to droop after a very small sampling. What I'd love to see
is a statement that makes me say, "Now that's galvanizing" or "Oh no, I completely disagree with that!" Instead you get something like the statement below from Zion Christian Church. It's fine, nothing wrong it. I don't mind if you skim it though.

We seek to love God and worship him with all our hearts, to walk in integrity and godliness, to teach the Word of God with balance and
depth, to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ enthusiastically andlovingly with our city and out world, and to build a community of mature, joyful believers who will be empowered to fulfill their God-ordained purpose and ministry.

Fair enough. But isn't that true of every church? And just how many committee meetings did you need to come up with something (excuse me) so bloody obvious?

I'll tell you how a vision statement might intrigue me and prove valuable: if it is specific, geared to the purpose at hand, reflects the unique priorities of current leadership and expects to be revised when leadership changes. We can all agree on the basics - that we here to glorify God by proclaiming the Word and leading lives transformed by Christ etc etc. No need to re-invent that wheel. But the specifics
can get very interesting if we are explicit about them and hold members accountable to them.

The model that comes to mind is that of a basketball franchise or coach. Every basketball team has the same basic vision: to win games,win the championship, satisfy fans, etc. Boring. We already knew that. But different franchises and coaches have distinct, mutually exclusive approaches for how to be a winning team. For example:

Pat Riley: Must have a low post presence (Jabbar, Ewing, Mourning,
Shaq) or he does not coach the team.
(Old) Denver Nuggets: They'd score as many points as possible and try
to beat you 140-130.
Phoenix Suns: Run on every possession - even after a made basket.
Hank Iba: Tightly controlled, slow pattern offense like the old Soviet teams.
Chicago Bulls: Defensive intensity, team discipline, no felons.

Do you see what I mean? Every institution wants the same thing (basketball teams want to win games; churches want to glorify God), but they have different ways of trying to get there. Only the differences, the unique factors, strike me as worth the bother of articulating.

I doubt by now there is any question about the unique factors of my vision: my goal is that people of the church be hospitable to guests and meet together for prayer.

Sermons Should End Mercifully On Time (February 11, 2007)

How long should a sermon be?

A pastor friend of mine told me that he just preached a 40-minute sermon: that would put him in the Pentecostal range. I did some research and found that the average Protestant sermon is 31 minutes, with Pentecostals the longest-winded at 40 while Lutherans are the shortest at 20.

Maybe that is why three different times people have come up to me
after a message and said, "You sound like a Lutheran!" They weren't
able to pinpoint why, but it had something to do with my style (or
lack thereof). Maybe they were keying on the clock. I don't time my
sermons, but I know that they're seldom longer than 25 minutes.

That is more than twice as long as what Catholics are used to. I read
a fascinating interactive blog among Catholics and found that 10
minutes was pretty much the limit of what they could stand from their
priests. (It must be torture for them to visit an evangelical worship
service. They must wonder, "When is that preacher ever going to
stop?")

My parents said that the greatest preacher they knew, Harry Ironside of Moody, gave 20-minute messages. When I mentioned this to a homiletics professor in seminary, an old-timer who had heard Ironside, he said, "Poppycock!" (Literally, he actually said the word "Poppycock," and loudly.) He insisted that Ironside preached 35-40 minutes. He was probably right. I think the discrepancy is accounted for by the fact that Ironside was so good that, in my parents' minds, his messages flew by in about half their actual time.

My advice to any young preacher is that, if you're as gifted as Ironside, go ahead and push past the half hour mark, because there is no need for you to be constrained by the rules that govern us mortals. Just as star basketball players get to jack up 20 shots a game, so the Ironsides and Spurgeons and Wiersbes get to preach as long as they want. The rest of us had better know our limitations. Once in Colombia a guest preacher at the church I attended began his message with, "My sermons aren't any good, but they're short." He was right. He gave an adequate (but bland and forgettable) message for 12 minutes and then sat down. I thought, "You're my hero!" What blessed self-awareness, what kind consideration of a congregation's beleaguered attention span.

Then there was the preacher who filled in for me while I was on vacation at my former church. I talked to him beforehand and told him that the congregation was accustomed to sermons about 25 minutes in length. He thanked me, but then when he preached (I saw the video later), his first words were, "Your pastor told me that he preaches 25-minute sermons, but where I'm from we don't know how to preach messages that short." He then proceeded to bore the dung out of my poor congregation for most of the next hour.

You can read aloud Jesus' whole Sermon on the Mount in under 20 minutes. If we make our words count, we preachers shouldn't have to take much longer than that to get our message across.

Praise God For Heat (February 4, 2007)

Has your heater been working during this bitter cold snap? Give thanks to God.

Yesterday I got my ailing furnace replaced, and today for the first
time in a while my indoor temperature has crept into the 60s, and I
can walk around my duplex without having to wear layers of
sweatshirts. It feels nice! Thank God for heat.

In the Bible, cold is always bad. Jacob complained about cold working conditions to his boss Laban: "This was my situation: The heat consumed me in the daytime and the cold at night, and sleep fled from my eyes." (Genesis 31:40). Job saw cold as one of the sufferings of the oppressed: "Lacking clothes, they spend the night naked; they have nothing to cover themselves in the cold." (Job 24:7). James indicts people who say to the cold and hungry, "Keep warm and well fed!" but who don't give them a meal or a blanket (James 2:15-16).

Several Bible heroes (in addition to Jacob) suffered from the cold. 1
Kings 1:1: "When King David was old and well advanced in years, he
could not keep warm, even when they put covers over him." (1 Kings
1:1). Pity poor Paul: in 2 Corinthians 11:27 he wrote, "I have labored
and toiled and often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and
thirst,...I have been cold and naked" - and about 12 years later,
imprisoned in Rome, he was still cold! In 2 Timothy 4:13 he asked
Timothy to bring with him the coat he left at Troas.

Jesus probably shivered on the night before his crucifixion. In John
18:18 we read, "It was cold, and the servants and officials stood
around a fire they had made to keep warm." Stripped for a beating,
Jesus stood nowhere near that fire.

But I'm warm pretty much whenever I want to be. Just as I have only known hunger from dieting, so have I also only known cold as a temporary inconvenience. In this I am more privileged than the patriarchs, the apostles and the King of kings. Is it the same for you? Are any of your toes frostbitten? Do you read these words huddled
in a fetal position, desperately trying to retain your body's heat? If not, give thanks. It is by God's grace that your metabolism keeps you at a comfy 98.6 and your furnace heats the air around you to near 70. That is a stunning degree of luxury for a people as foolish as we are to live this close to the Arctic Circle. Be grateful for the glory of heat.