In our consultant training, we call mission “God’s plan for all churches,” and vision “God’s plan for a particular church at a particular time.” When a church combines the two, it executes its unique calling to obey the Great Commission.

Chapter 17 of Will Mancini’s Church Unique deftly tackles the differences from another angle. Will granted me permission to post the following excerpt from his book.

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Mission and Vision: Clarifying the Difference

A clear mission never creates heroic sacrifice in and of itself.  It is vision that moves the heart on a deep level and engages the imagination with God-sized dreams.

Mission    vs.   Vision
Compass   vs.  Travel brochure
Defines the direction   vs.  Describes the future
Informs  vs.  Inspires
Doing    vs.  Seeing
State in one breath   vs.  State of breathlessness
Directs energy    vs.   Creates energy
Integrates activity    vs.   Encourages risk taking

Making Missional Milestones

Don’t give us a scorecard with 5 or 10 or 20 metrics on it.  Don’t take all the many metrics that your organization can generate and present [them] as a “balanced scorecard.”  Balancing your scorecard might make you happy because you, the analytical leader, have succeeded in imposing some order on your complex world.  But we, your followers, don’t really care how balanced your scorecard is.  It may be balanced or it may be not.  Either way it is still too complex.  It contains too many scores.  And as such it tells us that we should look here and here and here to gauge our journey.  This complexity confuses us and makes us anxious.  It saps our strength and undermines our confidence…If you want us to follow you into the future you must cut through its complexity and give us one metric, one number to track our progress.   (From The One Thing You Need to Know, by Marcus Buckingham â€“ 2005)

Earl Crepes coins the term “assessment drift” to more precisely show how mission drift begins. It happens because we have no real way to feel as though we are on track.  This is why milestones are so important.  Give your people bold and solid milestones so they can feel the progress and know they are not drifting but instead are striding toward God’s better future.

Discovering Missional Vision

The success of advancing vision is directly proportional to the degree to which the vision is first aligned and integrated.

Nourishing internal culture must precede expanding outside influence.  Real change is inside-out.

Lyle Schaller, perhaps one of the most respected church consultants of the 20th century, whose observations and work span five decades, supports this principle.  Of his forty-some books, one of the most important observations about growth trends is this: “The crucial issue [for growth] is not the central theme of the strategy [for the church].  The crucial question is whether the congregation, including the configuration of the paid staff, is organized to be supportive of a clearly defined and widely supported central strategy.” In other words, the central strategy you choose is not as important as whether there is ownership and integration around whatever strategy you choose.

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It follows, then, that the general biblical mission for all churches should inspire an individual church's vision of the future. God reveals this vision through Scripture, prayer and obedience to his calling. He also reveals it through the needs of a church's community.

Ultimately, unique vision drives strategy, which is what our daily to-do list is made up of.

Mission cannot be separated from vision, and vision must remain connected to strategy.

What do you think?


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