Urban Ministry & Theology Project Newcastle East Deanery

Church Development – Key Objective

by John Sadler

“To use a process of consultation and reflection, both with faith communities and over a broader perspective, to develop a dream”.

Within church communities there have been many attempts to create ‘vision statements’ or ‘mission statements’ - but there are few that have ‘worked’ in the sense of providing a real ‘sense of direction’ and ‘something to aim for’ for the church they have been written for.

Why is this? – some suggestions:

• Mission statements/dreams very often have components within them which people think should be there rather than being there because they are ‘owned’ and agreed upon..
• In the literature and instructions provided in order to give people a ‘helping hand’ (to create the ‘dream’), the authors can give so much ‘help’ that the exercise simply becomes a process of giving the ‘expected’ answers to a number of pre-set questions and compiling the results into a final statement. For example, the material can simply require participants to engage in the sort of ‘comprehension’ exercises we used to do in school –such that there is very little challenge to individuals to do any thinking for themselves.
• Mission statements/dreams use theological jargon which make them sound very good and worthy, but which, without unpacking, provide very little sense of a way forward because, if pushed, people would have difficulty in being able to articulate what they actually mean (e.g. even words like ‘worship’, ‘unity’, ‘witness’, ‘gospel’, ‘wait upon’ etc. and definitely words like ‘salvation’, ‘redemption’ etc).
• Mission statements/dreams sometimes aren’t what they say they are. Such statements should be about intention – and could start ‘to be … something’ or ‘to do … something’. (There is some confusion about what we are talking about – and whether ‘vision statements’, ‘mission statements’, ‘purpose statements’, ‘dreams’ etc are all the same thing, or subtly different. Some have said that a ‘purpose statement’ is about what we are for, others have said that the same statement is about what we are to do. Again, some have said that a ‘mission statement’ is about what we want to become, others have combined a vision statement and strategic objectives and called it a mission statement).
• Inevitably, when trying to form some sort of statement, unconscious and preconceived ideas will tend to play a large part. The best statements come from the attempt to go right back to basics using, as it were, a blank piece of paper with ‘everything up for grabs’.

Related article by John Sadler:

A suggested process for articulating a vision and its strategic objectives

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