Mission, visions, and values are valuable tools to help us clarify and focus on our true goals and develop strategies to reach those goals. Without mission and vision we lose sight of our true objectives. Accordingly, the church as an organization tends to drift; being swayed by personalities, trends, and moods from within and without. We conflate pleasing God; our ultimate goal; with pleasing ourselves, our traditions, our kids, our friends, or even the world. When this happens the church ceases to be the church. When the church ceases to be the church, it ceases to act with power and influence in the world. It becomes irrelevant.
To avoid drifting the church must be married to its mission. It's vision must be relevant to its world, while remaining true to that mission. The values we hold arise out of and at the same time sustain the mission and vision. Together they work to create who we are as a church. However, these essential elements are meaningless unless they are applied to the work and ministry of the church. As a leaders, and specifically as pastors, one of most vital tasks is to put all the above into action as a strategy for ministry that pleases God and impacts our world.
So what's the plan at Pathway Church? Well before we go into the details we need to address one last important issue. That is the issue of how success is measured in the church and the impact it has on the life of a church.
The fact is, many churches can trace their many organizational problems to competing ideas of success. Differing views of success mean that while some may feel excited and energized by what's happening; others may be disgruntled, feel frustrated, and even threatened by the same circumstances. Therefore it's vital for leaders to come to a unified understanding of what success means and how it is measured within the church. However, when mission, vision, values, and strategy are foggy its difficult to assess success. Leaders begin to develop divergent ideas as to what success is and how it's measured. This environment can be become a seed-bed for division, disunity, and worse.
Here are some typical competing views of success in the church
I think church is successful when…
- The right style of music is used for worship
- Church service starts and ends when I think it should
- We continue to operate, have service, do ministry like we always have
- My friends are kept happy
- My children are kept happy
- Altars are filled
- The church focuses on my favorite ministries
- Seats are filled
- Pastor does all that I expect
- I get my way, am not help accountable, can come and go as I please, and still have influence
- The services are "spiritual" according to "my" standards
- The church does what the "successful church" down the road does
As you can see, there can be many ideas about what equals success in the Church. In light of this, it's important then that leadership continues to clearly, boldly, and consistently proclaim the mission, vision, values, strategies, and the true standards for success and that other leaders continue to echo that in the face of competing agendas.
When the standards for success are agreed upon by the committed and core of the church, the resulting unity and shared understanding sets the groundwork for real teamwork and long term success.
So how do we define success at Pathway Church? Well, one thing is for certain, none of those things in the above list are our standard for measuring success. Our mission, vision, and values dictate that our measurement for success is simply:
Are people taking the next step on their journey with Jesus? Did we do our best to love, inspire, inform, instruct, equip, challenge, resource, and then allow for the opportunity for people to take their next step on that journey?
Because we are unified in our understanding of success, when the answer to these questions is yes we have reason to celebrate together. If the answer to either one is no then we can work together to fix what's not working and to be ready for the future, rather than fight over our own agendas. Unity in church starts with agreeing on what it means to be successful.
So now that we've discussed a few preliminaries, in my next post we'll discuss the strategy for ministry. I call it Milestones.
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