Can You Communicate Your Vision?

By Jerry Harris

In the previous three columns, we explored three questions: 1) Is there a leader? 2) Is there a vision? 3) Am I passionate about that vision? This fourth installment discusses how leadership, vision, and passion are transmitted. 

When we were first dreaming of going to Macomb, Illinois with The Crossing, I took our pastoral staff up to survey possible locations. We were eating at a Mexican restaurant close by. The lunch crowd was filling up the place with business professionals, students taking a break from campus food, families eating together, and so on. While we waited for our order, I told them to look around and imagine how many of those people were members of our church and just didn’t know it yet. How many marriages and families were going to be saved, how many victories over addictions, and how many students forever changed were in that room? There was something epic and dramatic about seeing it that way. It was like seeing it with God’s eyes. When leaders are passionately preoccupied with their vision, they are always looking for opportunities to communicate it.  

Transfer of Ownership 

Effective communication of vision happens when ownership transfers to those receiving it. There is dialogue in the conversation. The effective communicator tries to help the receiver make the vision his or her own. He will frame the vision in contexts familiar to the receiver. I see this illustrated dramatically in the preaching event. I believe the best sermons people hear are the ones they don’t hear. Confused? Let me explain. We all believe the Holy Spirit is working in the Word of God as it is delivered, but I see something more. I’m preaching and the congregation is listening. Each one is listening with their own set of circumstances, challenges, and emotions. Something trips in the listener’s mind. Maybe it’s a word, a phrase, or a thought that comes from what they are hearing. Suddenly, they are attaching that thought to their own personal experience. They aren’t listening to me anymore. The Holy Spirit has taken over the controls. This is the richest moment because something new is attaching itself to the soul of the listener. The experience runs its course, and the listener finds the on ramp back into the sermon. Before long, another trigger starts the next rich moment. People have approached me after sermons sharing a point that affected them deeply only to find me staring back at them, realizing I never said what they heard. What’s happening? They are making the sermon theirs. It may not look the same as when you gave it. That’s not really important. What is important is what happened between them and God. That’s intimate, personal, and relational with Jesus.  

The Power and Passion of the Vision 

The same thing is needed when communicating vision. The listener gets caught up in the power and passion of the vision. The most effective ideas communicated are the ones people consider their own. The best leaders have learned to be comfortable with adjustments to means and methods or with entirely new ones. Remember, the vision hasn’t changed; just the way to carry it out. Very few things look like I imagined them at our church. They look a lot better. While I’m willing to die on the hill for the vision, I get excited about how leaders around me adjust the means and methods for making it their own. If the leader has this all figured out beforehand, he fails to capitalize on a great opportunity to develop the leaders around him. Everybody owns the vision through the means and methods they’ve developed to achieve it. Everyone shares in the success produced. Everyone realizes that only Jesus works through the body of Christ like this.  

Core Values 

A passionate vision is expressed in core values, and they are critical to the alignment a leader needs out of his people. The best resource I’ve found for this is Craig Groeschel’s leadership podcast on core values. There was a time when I realized that our church’s mission had been clearly communicated and transferred but that our core values, the means through which we accomplish that mission, had not. My mistake was thinking that it was enough that I knew it; but I couldn’t have been more wrong. We fashioned those core values into short, life-giving statements and communicated them over and over. It was amazing how they were received and how it aligned our church. Now, when we discuss some new idea or plan, our first question is whether or not it follows our core values. Core values are what we do; not what we wish we did. I would love it if I could add some values not presently there, but there must be honesty in the reality of what we are actually walking out. It doesn’t become a core value until after you do it and do it well.  

When a vision is communicated effectively, people are drawn to the vision and not just the leader. In the long term, this gets far more traction for the church and for the kingdom of God. I know this sounds like a contradiction because a passionate vision is personal; but a great leader gets people to focus on the vision itself. Churches that center on a vision are going to be much healthier than those that center on the personality of a leader. Letting the focus rest on the leader is ultimately and invariably destructive. Leaders are humans and humans can’t help but make mistakes, be inconsistent, and disappoint. Concentrating on the vision puts the focus on God where it belongs. He alone is consistently faithful and true.  

I want to mention one last thing about leaders in churches. The normal look of leadership in a local church is a group of staff and a group of lay leaders. There will probably be some form of regular staff meetings and regular lay leadership meetings (board meetings). Both of these circles of leadership are critically important. The “true leader” leads through these groups. He has the responsibility of keeping these two circles connected by building great relationships inside of both. He not only facilitates each one in the circles to reach a higher potential, but also promotes mutual respect between groups as they own each achievement together.