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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the power of God-directed vision. He explains how mission, vision, and values work together to help ministry leaders understand where God is leading and inspire others to pursue that vision.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. One of the fun things about doing this podcast is traveling around country and speaking in various contexts and meeting those of you who listen to the podcast on a regular basis. It is incredibly, encouraging to me and also frankly humbling that you take time to listen to this podcast. And what's even more remarkable than the many of you who listen are a few of you who are remarkably unique.
Jeff Iorg:A few weeks ago, I met a podcast listener who's a teenager. And I told, I told this young person, you may be the only teenager in America who listens to my podcast, But thank you. And after we talked and laughed about that a little bit, I said, I'm gonna give you a shout out on the podcast. So to my one and best teenage listener,
Jeff Iorg:shout out to Ellis, and thank God for you.
Jeff Iorg:Well, you may not be a teenager, and you may not be the only listener in some category, but you are a faithful listener, and I'm thankful to you
Jeff Iorg:and thankful for you. Today, and frankly, I think for two weeks today on the podcast, I wanna talk about vision casting. I wanna talk
Jeff Iorg:about the importance of vision, the power of it, the biblical grounding of it as a concept, and then I wanna talk about vision culture and why it is so incredibly difficult then to not only cast vision, but to rally people, if you will, to the fulfillment of a vision. You know, I've been casting vision in leadership organizations for a long time now and doing it in several different contexts. And in each of those, I've learned some different things about what it means to cast vision. For example, I started out as a senior pastor in a smaller to mid sized church in Missouri. Looking back on that experience, I would say that I did everything wrong in casting vision in that context.
Jeff Iorg:Now, I'm probably being too hard on myself. I probably got some things right because the church in many ways did prosper and, grow, but nevertheless, when I look back on it, I think about my attempts at casting vision and I see a lot of deficiency in the process. Then I moved from there to be a church planter in Oregon, and that's different than being a pastor because you're in more of a solo visionary role. And as a visionary in a church planting context, you're looking to recruit early adopters, people who hear vision, embrace it, and want to pursue it, willingly. As I've said on other occasions, when you're a church planter, you don't have a facility, you don't have programming, you don't have legacy, you don't have reputation.
Jeff Iorg:When you're
Jeff Iorg:a church planter, about all you have is vision. And so it's very important to
Jeff Iorg:be able to articulate that vision. And in my context, it was almost in a solo capacity, so that I could lay it out for people, communicate it from my heart and then call people to join me in fulfilling it. Now, fortunately, that solo capacity didn't last very long because I did have some early adopters who committed themselves to helping fulfill that vision. And then I took a turn. I moved out of church planter and pastoral roles into a very different kind of vision casting, and that was casting vision for a network of churches, the Northwest Baptist Convention.
Jeff Iorg:Now in Baptist life particularly, networks of churches are collections of churches, conventions, or associations. There's no hierarchy. There's no compelling anyone to do anything. It is purely a voluntary association, and any attempts they make to come together around a shared vision are entirely motivated by and the choice of the participants themselves. Even more so than in a church family where people have actually joined a church to band together as community to do something together, a convention of churches is a much more challenging, context, if you will, in which to cast vision.
Jeff Iorg:And then, of course, I went to the seminary. The seminary is a very different kind of organization. It was a very mature and complex institution. It had a much more rigid hierarchy. Now that didn't mean it was rigid to the point of being, intractable.
Jeff Iorg:It was it was still pliable, but there was definitely a hierarchy of trustees and staff and faculty and others who had their silos, if you will, and multiple silos, multiple regulators, multiple audiences, multiple people demanding different things from the school. And so that made casting vision in that setting complex in different ways than it was even for the the Northwest Baptist Convention. So all I'm saying is that I've been casting a vision in different contexts and in different ways with different organizations and different kinds of organizations for a while now. Beyond that, I've spent a good bit of time studying this concept. And out of all of that, let me see if I can share with you some ideas about what it means to cast vision in a ministry organization, what it is, why it's important, and, some barriers to accomplishing or fulfilling it that come out of the culture in which we're working.
Jeff Iorg:So first of all, let's talk about what is vision. Thinking about a definition
Jeff Iorg:of that and what that might mean. Let me introduce you to three words. Mission, vision, values. These are three words that are used in almost any strategic planning process. Mission, vision, and values.
Jeff Iorg:Now, quite honestly, the first two, mission and vision, often get lumped together or are often defined in ways that are contradictory or opposite depending on the definer and the situation. In other words, in some context, what one person calls mission, another person might call vision, and the opposite as what one person might call vision, another might call
Jeff Iorg:mission. Now values can be interspersed into either one of these or stand alone. But these are the three big words that form the foundation of strategic planning. So what is mission? Well, I define mission this way.
Jeff Iorg:It's the general statement of God's intention. It's the mission, meaning the reason to exist, the purpose for being.
Jeff Iorg:The mission of the church, for example, is the great commission in the spirit of the great commandment. That's mission. It's the general statement of God's intention for your church organization. It's the one sentence, if you will. When I ask people to write a mission statement, particularly in a classroom experience or something like that, I ask them to write a single declarative sentence with no commas or conjunctions.
Jeff Iorg:I often say if you have commas in your mission statement, you have a list of strategies you've not yet discovered your true mission.
Jeff Iorg:What is your mission? The single sentence. The one simple statement, the declarative expression. This is why we're here. This is our purpose.
Jeff Iorg:This is our reason to exist. This is our mission. Now, you accept my definition of mission, then you'll be able to understand better my definition of vision. A vision is the specific statement of the application of the mission in a unique setting. Let me say it again.
Jeff Iorg:Vision is the specific statement of the application of the mission in a unique setting. So you might think of
Jeff Iorg:it this way,
Jeff Iorg:vision is what we will see if we live out the mission in this particular context.
Jeff Iorg:Vision is the description, if you will,
Jeff Iorg:of what we're going to be like if our mission really is fulfilled. Now, I said often when I was a state executive director that all the churches of the Northwest Baptist Convention had the same mission. That mission was the great commission in the spirit of the great commandment.
Jeff Iorg:Now, people could express that in any number of different ways. That was fine with me. I wasn't trying to get everyone to adopt the exact same sentence, but quite honestly, the mission of the church is not that complicated. The mission of the church is the great commission in the spirit of the great commandment.
Jeff Iorg:That's the mission of the church. But while I would often say in the Northwest that each church of the 400 plus that were in our convention had the same mission, no two churches had the same vision. Because as you applied the great commission and the spirit of the great commandment in one particular community, the following church was going to result. But if you applied the commission and the commandment in a different community, a very different kind of church was going to result. Vision is what happens or what you envision happening, what you dream of happening, what you see the possibilities being.
Jeff Iorg:Vision is what happens when the mission is fulfilled in a context. So for example, when I was in my first pastorate,
Jeff Iorg:I was in a city of about 80,000 people. I was in a
Jeff Iorg:working man's church. I had a lot of blue collar employees, very few college graduates. I had a context that reached a strata of people, if you will, in our community. Then I moved to Portland, Oregon, planted a church in a suburb there. I had
Jeff Iorg:a different educational level, different employment base, different set of cultural expectations, even different dress codes and different ways of thinking about scheduling. When we fulfilled the great commission and the great commandment in that context, a very different church resulted.
Jeff Iorg:And this, by the way, was a good thing.
Jeff Iorg:When we come together to work as a convention of churches, for example, we all need to have a similar mission and then give everyone the freedom to express that mission in ways that produce visionary progress in every community. I've seen this so many times expressed in so many beautiful ways. That's why two churches can be on the same block in the same community and have very different expressions of successful ministry because they're fulfilling the vision of what they're supposed to be in very different ways. So mission is that single statement of why we're here, that reason to exist, that purpose for being. It's a single declarative sentence with
Jeff Iorg:no commas or conjunctions. It's a statement of God's intention. And I think the mission of the church is He intends us to live out the great commission and live out the great commandment. Now when we do that, if you're doing that in inner city East Los Angeles, if you're doing that in suburban Kansas City, if you're doing that in rural West Virginia, you're going to have very different churches. And the pastors of those churches should have a vision for what can happen when the mission is fulfilled in their context.
Jeff Iorg:Cast that vision, communicate that vision,
Jeff Iorg:live out that vision, and see God make it so in each context. Now I mentioned mission, vision, and values, and this podcast is not about values, but let me just comment on that briefly. A lot of times people get hung up on value statements because they want to write values that are the values that are going to mark an organization, every aspect of it, comprehensively describing for the rest of time. Well, that's really unrealistic. And that's why you sometimes see lists of eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, 20 values in an organization.
Jeff Iorg:A few years ago, I came across some help on this issue and changed my perspective from trying to write value statements or find words that expressed values that were a comprehensive of everything the organization could ever possibly value to doing a different approach, which
Jeff Iorg:is this. And that is using value statements to emphasize what needs to be important right now in the organization.
Jeff Iorg:So, thinking in terms of values as the right now statements that we need to implement with great priority in order to fulfill this vision to accomplish our mission. So for example, at the seminary, we we rewrote our value statements every five years. Now you say, well, did your values change? Well, no, not really. Not the core ones that really motivated us.
Jeff Iorg:But we used value statements differently than trying to encapsulate all the things that mattered to us. And instead, we wrote value statements to say, these are some things we value highly right now. And in order to experience this vision fulfilling this mission, we need to value these things particularly right now. That's why one year, for example, for one five year window at the seminary, we had a value that was statement that said this, we are spirit empowered. And when I brought this forward as a proposal, one of our faculty members said, I don't really like that.
Jeff Iorg:We're we're a Trinitarian school. We should make a Trinitarian statement. I said, okay, just hang on a second. I said, remember, a value is not everything we believe all the time, everywhere. A value statement for us is something we need to emphasize in the right now.
Jeff Iorg:And one of the things we've been talking a lot about in our school is that we need to be open to God's activity, be willing to make flexible changes, be willing to go boldly into the future. And for all of that to happen, I'm saying that for right now, we need to be emphasizing that we are spirit empowered. And this same faculty member said, man, I get that. And that is exactly what we need to do right now. And we adopted that as a value.
Jeff Iorg:Now, you went to the seminary today, you wouldn't see that as one of its value statements. You might say, well, are they not caring anymore about following the spirit? No, you're missing the point. Value statements don't have to be comprehensive statements of everything we believe or everything we want to practice or everything we want to do or all
Jeff Iorg:time. Instead, they need to be within this mission and this vision, what are some things we need to emphasize right now that will really accelerate us toward fulfilling these things? So mission, vision, values. We've talked about what mission is and what vision is. Now let's talk a little bit more about some key components of a healthy vision.
Jeff Iorg:The first one won't surprise you.
Jeff Iorg:I believe vision is God directed.
Jeff Iorg:A vision statement must be developed in an atmosphere of prayer and an attitude of submission.
Jeff Iorg:If you ask God to help you write a 150 to a 175 word statement, a two or three short paragraph statement of this is our vision, if our mission is fulfilled, this is what we envision resulting from that. This is not just pie in the sky dreaming. This is not focus group thinking. This is not trying to get everybody in
Jeff Iorg:the same room and come up with something. This is you as a leader, your leadership team around you, your staff or maybe elders or maybe deacons, your church planting partner if you're in that context. Getting down on your knees and calling out to God and asking Him to direct you to a vision for the work that He's assigned you. To pray over that and say, God, you've given us a clear mission to make disciples and to love our community. You've given us a clear commission and commandment to live out in this context.
Jeff Iorg:God, open our eyes. Show us what it will look like if we really do fulfill this mission in this context. Give us a vision of what that would look like in an atmosphere of prayer with an attitude of submission. Second, a good vision statement is a perception of the future. Now, a good vision statement is suggestive of the future that could happen, not oppressive about what must happen.
Jeff Iorg:A good vision is focused but flexible, and it's definite but not necessarily definitive. This was one of my biggest mistakes in my first pastorate.
Jeff Iorg:I set out to create visionary documents to guide us into the future. We identified our mission clearly and then we said, what will this be like when it's fulfilled? What is our vision?
Jeff Iorg:And I started making a list with dates and with prescribed methodologies and with steps of accountability.
Jeff Iorg:Now all of that has a place, but that is not vision, but I made it into vision.
Jeff Iorg:In other words, it wasn't about us fulfilling some grand dream and seeing something come to fruition, it was about us checking off boxes to mechanically achieve what was before us. Man, I made a huge mistake on that. And, actually, it led to one of
Jeff Iorg:the most disruptive and negative church meetings I've ever attended. It was it was not good. We had worked for a long time, for several months on this new document. We brought forward our mission, and that was well received. But then we brought forward this vision of what we're gonna become, which was really just a multi page checklist of to dos that I was demanding that we get launched on, and the people reacted negatively.
Jeff Iorg:They they didn't want that kind of pressure put on them, and they didn't want that kind of straight jacket approach to leadership. It was not my best. It was really poorly done, and it got turned down. I was so discouraged about that in the beginning because I thought, well, they're turning down God's vision, but they weren't turning down God's vision. They were turning down my legalistic list of expectations of how that vision had to be fulfilled on a month by month basis over the next five years.
Jeff Iorg:Man, I made so many mistakes on that. Eventually, we backed up, rebooted, got a much, much better perspective, and
Jeff Iorg:did go forward to fulfill some significant visionary dreams that we had as a church family, but only after I had
Jeff Iorg:to back up, in a sense, start over.
Jeff Iorg:Because rather than create a perception about the future of how this mission could be fulfilled, I created a legalistic document
Jeff Iorg:that was so defining and so controlling as to choke the life out of
Jeff Iorg:the mission, not energize it for the vision. You know, I think about one of the funny ways of considering this is, Paul's Macedonian call. He had that vision of the Macedonian man saying, come over and help us. Remember that in the book of Acts? The vision of a man saying, come over and help us.
Jeff Iorg:Then he got there and who's the first convert?
Jeff Iorg:A woman. A woman.
Jeff Iorg:I sometimes laughingly say that Paul shared the gospel and she was his first convert and he said, hold on. Not no. Not you. I'm I'm looking for
Jeff Iorg:the Macedonian man. Well, I probably would have said that if I'd have,
Jeff Iorg:applied the same strategies I applied in my first bastard because I didn't understand that vision was perception, not legalistic steps of action. And then I've said something about a description of your vision. It's not only God directed and it's a perception, but it it does have to be specific enough that you can write it down, that you can actually communicate it. It becomes a a tool that you use to give people a word picture, if you will, of where you wanna go. Now I think that good vision documents are usually a 125 to 200 words, no more than that.
Jeff Iorg:Just three short paragraphs of three to five sentences each explaining, here's what we're going to become as we fulfill the mission of God in our community. Now, there's other ways to communicate vision that are written and communicated. You can use visuals, videos, other kind of media. But in some concrete clear way, you've gotta be able to get the idea of a vision in a communicative form that you can actually share with another person and they not only grasp what you're saying or communicating or showing them, but they embrace it. So it's a good visionary document is is God directed, it's a perception of the future, but it is clear enough that it can be written and communicated, and perhaps written and communicated not only in words, but in visual media and graphics and other things.
Jeff Iorg:And then the last thing,
Jeff Iorg:a good visionary document draws people toward its fulfillment. There's something compelling about it. The document must own its own merit, enthuse people, and compel them to take some action. Enthuse, the word enthusiasm, comes from in theos, meaning in God. So the best kind of enthusiasm is that which is generated in us by God giving us insight into passion for and commitment to His mission expressed in a clear vision.
Jeff Iorg:I've had two or three examples of this that have been very moving to me over the years. When I moved to Oregon to plant the church, I
Jeff Iorg:spent the first month just meeting as many people as I could and then organized a launch event, if you will. We invited everyone that we had connected with to come to someone's home for a Sunday night get together. We were going to serve some food, get acquainted with everyone, and then I was going to share what I believe to be the mission, vision, and values that were going to be the foundation of the new church that
Jeff Iorg:I had come to Oregon to launch. Well, that night,
Jeff Iorg:to our surprise, about twenty, twenty five, somewhere in that number of adults showed up for this meeting and about that many children were out in
Jeff Iorg:the yard playing, by the way. About 20 or so adults came to the meeting and more
Jeff Iorg:than half of them were people that I met the first time when they came to that event. People that I had invited, had invited other people, some church people who were thinking about helping us plant the church and invited some friends. You get the idea. Well, one family that came were the Franklins. First time I met them was that night.
Jeff Iorg:Gary was the father and husband and Roberta, his wife, and then they had their children with them. Gary came in and sat really close to me in the event. Now imagine this, we're in a living room of a house, so people are sitting around in the chairs around the outside of the perimeter of the room like you would in a home, but we had too many people. So we had to set up some chairs in the in the in the center. So it turned into almost like little church rows, you know, about four or five seats in each one.
Jeff Iorg:And I'm backing up making more room for people and I'm standing up against this fireplace. And so it's it's getting pretty tight in there. And Gary and his family arrived late at near the at near the starting time, and they got the worst seats,
Jeff Iorg:which were the ones right up front, right by me. And they
Jeff Iorg:sat there and I got up
Jeff Iorg:to share my mission, vision, values, presentation. And we started out, Gary was just kind of
Jeff Iorg:slumped back in his chair, just kind of listening like, okay, whatever. But the longer I talked, the more his body language changed. He went from slouching back in his chair to sitting up a little straighter and then a little more erect. And then finally he was sitting straight up, moved out on the edge of his chair with his hands on his knees, leaning forward, just staring at me. Now this progression of his body language took place over about, you know, fifteen or twenty minutes while I'm teaching and talking and and I'm kind of watching him.
Jeff Iorg:He's about three or four feet in front of me as I'm giving this talk and and frankly, I'm thinking this man is going to explode in just a moment. And it doesn't look pretty to me. And I've never met him before, but he's about to say something that's probably gonna ruin the whole night because quite frankly,
Jeff Iorg:he is not looking very happy. I was totally misreading the situation. I finished my presentation and I said, well, I promised you at the beginning that I would take questions tonight, and so I wanna do that now. Does anyone have a question? And of course, no one in the room raised their hand except one person, Gary.
Jeff Iorg:And his hand shot up in front of me and he's like sitting there and it's kind
Jeff Iorg:of waving a little bit
Jeff Iorg:and shaking it. I'm like, oh, you
Jeff Iorg:know what? I'm looking around the room like anybody but this guy. And finally I said, okay, Gary, what's
Jeff Iorg:your question? And he didn't ask
Jeff Iorg:a question. He said, and I quote, he said, finally, a pastor with a vision.
Jeff Iorg:And then he just sat back
Jeff Iorg:in his chair with a smile. Well, it's hard for me
Jeff Iorg:to put into words what Gary and Roberta and their family came to mean to our church.
Jeff Iorg:After that night, there was no holding them back, especially not Gary. Man,
Jeff Iorg:he served faithfully and sacrificially for the next decade, making an incredible contribution to our church,
Jeff Iorg:serving in so many practical ways, evangelizing, teaching, praying, contributing financially. He was in theos, enthused because he saw vision and wanted to be a part of it.
Jeff Iorg:Listen, I don't know a lot about how to talk people into following a vision or fulfilling a vision, but I have learned a few things over the years about casting vision and about doing it in such a way that it's clear enough that the people who connect with it in theos, in God, can't be held back from passionately trying to fulfill it with you. So casting a vision. It starts by understanding the difference between mission, vision and values. Mission, one sentence statement of what we're here for. Vision, the larger description of what it will look like when this mission is fulfilled in this community or context.
Jeff Iorg:It's a God directed perception that's written and communicated in such
Jeff Iorg:a way that
Jeff Iorg:something supernatural happens as God connects with people and envious happens. Enthusiasm is generated. And when that takes place, the power of vision becomes a reality in the lives of a church, an organization, or a community. Well, thanks for listening today about Vision Casting. I'm gonna pick up on the same theme and talk about it from a little different perspective next week.
Jeff Iorg:As we think about what it means to cast vision in such a way that it compels transformation in communities. I know you can do it as you lead on.