22 Facts On Why Pastors Should Passionately Fight For Their Church’s Vision

Proverbs 29:18 famously states, “Where there is no vision the people perish.”  Therefore, there are few things as important as protecting, preserving, and effectively communicating your church’s God-given vision.
When it comes to helping pastors craft, communicate, and organize their churches around vision, few are better than Shawn Lovejoy, the Founder & CEO of CourageToLead.com.  I recommend Shawn to all church leaders who need assistance with overall church health, maintaining momentum, pastoral coaching, preaching assistance, organizational development, and mission and vision construction.  If you are looking for pastoral coaching, click HERE or on the image above to reach out to Shawn and start a conversation.
To learn why I am so high on Shawn’s ability to help pastors, watch the video below and then read my recap.

To order Shawn’s incredible book Be Mean About the Vision: Preserving and Protecting What Matters, click HERE.
Now, the following are 22 Facts On Why Pastors Should Passionately Fight For Their Church’s Vision.  All quotes are from Shawn’s interview above.

1. Being mean about the vision is one of the most compassionate, Godliest things we can do for people.
2. The best thing we can do for people, the most Godly thing we can do for people is be mean about the vision – preserve and protect what God has given us.
3. Everything starts with vision.
4.  Where there is not a clear articulation of the vision and direction of the organization people will by default wander off in random directions.
5. There is a difference between learning from an organization and becoming a copycat organization.
6. There’s a unique vision He has given for each of our organizations.
7. We need to learn from organizations but lean in to who we are, who God’s wired and created us to be.
8. There’s a need in every single one of our lives to go through that terrible wrestling (with God over the vision).
9. If we’re going to be able to clearly articulate that vision, keep it from dying in us, and then protect it from potential vision hijackers out there in the future, we’re going to need to know that we know that we know that we have wrestled it to the ground.  We know what God’s called us to do.
10. I run across so many organizations today who are growing, who have healthy cultures, whose organizations may be 60-75% introverted.  But they wake up every single day committed to living the vision, communicating the vision, and preserving the vision in their organizations.
11. If vision is driving everything, vision is more important than personality in our organizations.
12. A vision needs to be worth dying for.
13. I do believe we’re going to be put to the test every day, every week, every quarter, every year as to what hill we’re willing to die on.  We will be tested.
14. I run across leaders everyday who unknowingly have allowed the vision to drift, to creep, or to leak, or be hijacked by a group of people in the church.
15. Vision hijackers are those people within an organization who intentionally or unintentionally try to take the steering wheel and drive it off course from the vision.
16. Have those last 1% conversations where we really say the last 1% of what people are thinking.  We allow it to be awkward.  We lean into a tunnel of chaos to preserve and protect courageously in those conversations the vision of the organization.
17. Sometimes we have to understand there are people who don’t need to be in the car in the direction we are going.
18.  When people start complaining that you talk about the vision so much, you’re probably approaching an acceptable threshold.
19. We must talk about the vision over and over again until everybody gets it.  It can’t be transferred, it can’t be communicate by others if they don’t understand the vision.
20. So many leaders think they will lose credibility when they don’t confront the fact that an organization has drifted.  I think they gain credibility by admitting that fault.
21. It happens in the leader first.  We forget why we’re doing what we’re doing.  And the moment we forget why we’re doing what we’re doing, we’ll eventually lose our passion.
22. Make sure everything is driven in our own heart not by “the what”, but “the why”.

What is one thing you learned which will make you a better leader?

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