Play Church Staff Summer Bingo

by: Bryan Rose

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Ahhhhhh Summer… when the days grow progressively longer and church staff meetings grow regressively shorter.

Some weeks – Thanks VBS! – they do not even happen at all.

In the end, most of us agree with every idea, good or bad, just so we can leave for a “long lunch” by the pool with our family. Like an Old Testament Prophet I implore you with these words: do NOT waste another summer church staff meeting!

Instead, wake up your humidity-drenched life…
Liven up your depressingly-empty office…
Spice up your dutifully-curated social media feed… 

…and play Church Staff Summer BINGO!! 

Here are 5 steps to surviving summer staff meetings:

1. Download the Church Staff Summer Bingo PDF, making sure every staff member has a copy.

2. Decide on a really valuable prize, go ahead and pull it from the VBS budget somewhere.

3. Winner is first to phone-pic 5 of these moments across one row, column or diagonal on the card.

4. Start every staff meeting (that you manage to actually have this summer) with updates.

5. For even more fun, share your moments with all of us on instagram using#staffbingo

Posts also tagged #auxano will be eligible for random vision swag all summer long!

Go ahead, and do more than survive another Summer church staff meeting.

Tags: Bryan Rose, Church Staff Summer BINGO

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Leaders Love the Front Seat, Not the Back Window

by: Bryan Rose

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Nothing compares to the moment a hearty laugh with a church team immediately shifts into a deeply poignant moment of congregational insight.

For one team, this happened in the midst of a common exercise on the front end of Auxano’s Vision Framing process. A connecting exercise that begins with a simple, yet insightful question…  If our church was a car, what make and model would we be?

Of course, the only appropriate follow-up question, if the answer has not already been revealed, is “Why?”

In this instance, the Pastor began to describe an older model Station Wagon. The team then developed the rest of this polariod-era picture, complete with plastic decal “wood” paneling, a black-cloud emitting diesel engine, and stick to your bare summer legs vinyl seat covers. For every leader in the room of appropriate age, the third row back seat evoked knowing smiles of michevious childhoods. Who didn’t love that rear-facing view as a kid?

As the laughter waned, the Pastor then went on with his “Why” explanation.

“Many of our leaders would rather be more focused on where we have been. And if we were honest, many really enjoy harassing others who moving faster than us down the road ahead… There are days when I feel like very few of us are facing the same direction looking forward.”

It is not scriptural, but still accurate to say that “where there is no vision, the people cherish.”

• They cherish the past, because they do not have a clear picture of the future.
• They cherish where we have been, without a vision of where God leads ahead.
• They cherish the comfort of the known, without hope that transcends the unknown.
• They cherish the tools and resources provided to accomplish our calling, rather than the actual calling.

The magnetic attraction of a living and active vision of the future, much more than just a one-liner vision statement, becomes instantaneously clear.

Calling leaders to face forward through the windshield toward the horizons of God’s preferred future, is not easy. Getting a fast-moving team to slow-down and think long feels impossible.

After all, looking backward from the third row was pretty fun… but leaders look forward.

Let us help you look forward – connect with an Auxano Navigator today.

> Read more from Bryan.

Tags: Bryan Rose, Leaders face forward, leaders, preferred future

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Three Practices to Help Reframe the Heart of a Disciplemaker

by: Bryan Rose

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When asked, there are many reasons church leaders give for lack of effectiveness in making disciples. Here are a few common responses:

“We have uncommitted volunteers”

“We reach many distracted families”

“We suffer from ineffective curriculum”

“We find ourselves with unavailable leadership”

“We are experiencing diminishing giving”

“We need to get beyond our under-performing staff”

“We are stuck through over-complex processes”

While the above may be resonant, they are likely not the actual reason your church continues to struggle to make disciples. From observation of hundreds of churches over the past few years, disciples are not made for one singular, and strikingly simple, reason:  actual, biblical discipleship takes much more time than expected and produces very little immediate return on investment.

Herein lies the problem. Rather than thinking long-term process, and setting expectations five to ten years down the road, we lead through short-term programming. We lead by constantly changing the discipleship curriculum, schedule or structure every few months. We lead with the expectation that discipleship requires only a season, rather than years of nurture and growth.

The approach and practice of making disciples is more like running a tree farm than tending a backyard vegetable garden.

Vegetable gardens, while taking some time – maybe a few summer growing months – yield a rather immediate harvest and tangible results. Within weeks, seeds germinate, vines grow and blooms emerge. Soon after, windowsills and countertops are overflowing with vegetables and fruit, ready for eating, canning and freezing.  And as the cool mornings of fall consistently make their annual appearance, plants are removed, soil is turned and beds are prepared for a new, fresh season of production.

Tree farming requires a completely different process and outlook. Saplings take root – not with an expectation of months-long nurturing – but years of grooming, tending and shaping. The average 8-foot Christmas Tree takes seven to twelve years to mature and be ready to stand proudly as the centerpiece of holiday celebrations. Running a tree farm requires a commitment to think long-term and necessitates a patient discipline for measuring results in observable quality, through the health of the plant, rather than numeric quantity.

When we treat discipleship as a seasonal activity, expecting immediate results we produce undernourished and unprepared followers of Christ. We then blame volunteers, travel baseball, or ineffective systems for our own misunderstanding of the nature of discipleship.

Here are three practices for 2017 to help reframe the heart of the disciplemaker through the mind of a tree-farmer.

1. Mark time in seasons of a life, not seasons of the year… because discipleship takes more than two or three semesters of study. What would we develop in a young married husband if we pictured a healthy tenth anniversary? How would an incoming sixth grade girl be biblically prepared for the upcoming challenges of high school? What are the spiritual habits of a senior adult that develop a next generation of Christ-likeness?
2.  Measure health of each individual, not the number of individuals who appear healthy… because not all growth is spiritual growth. What are the marks of a growing disciple in your context? What are the daily habits and practices of growing followers that produce and reproduce dependence on Christ? What small indicators can be identified that build to big steps of growth
3. Celebrate annual multiplication of a few, not seasonal addition of the many…because what is celebrated gets replicated. How might you point beyond collective programs toward individual development? What rites of passage in your culture would mark significant progress in spiritual growth? What consistent language can you develop to encourage participation from every church member?

Want to learn more about developing disciplemakers? Connect with an Auxano Navigator.

> Read more from Bryan

Tags: Bryan Rose, Disciplemaker, Disciplemaking, Discipleship, Making Disciples

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When Words Get in the Way

by: Bryan Rose

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John F. Kennedy from Rice University at the dawn of the Space Age.
Dr. Martin Luther King Junior on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Ronald Reagan in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

All three of these iconic moments share one critical ingredient: words that created worlds. A language of vision has the power to move people to reach the moon, cross racial divides and tear down political walls. But, words can also get in the way.

Auxano has more than 13 years of walking alongside hundreds of church leaders seeking clarity of identity and direction. As a part of this team, I am more aware than ever of how the right vision language, or the lack thereof, can make all of the difference in the world. Here are 3 painful ways that I have seen words get in the way:

1. When there are too few vision words to foster alignment. Your leaders are leading to a vision. If you have not invested time and team resources into articulating identity and direction for your top level of leaders, their vision leadership is siloed and not shared. Conflicting ministry vision always leads to sideways energy and wasted resources. A senior leader with too few words likely spends more time mediating staff conflict than meditating on God’s preferred future. Jesus did not hesitate to paint a clear and detailed picture of the crucifixion, fueling sacrificial alignment in each disciple’s life from Pentecost forward.

2. When the vision words are too generic to inspire hearts. Safe vision language is actually dangerous to the health of your church. We live in a world of competing messages, in which skilled marketing practitioners move your congregation to buy their latest product or vote for their latest candidate. Many leaders fail to realize that their safe, yet sound words, either fly under the radar or over the heads of busy families and distracted people. Jesus never shied away from powerful words that struck the deepest nerve in the hearts of His listeners: “From now on I will make you fishers of men” wasn’t a slick marketing tagline, it was a vibrant and specific picture of His compelling calling.

3. When there are too many vision words to create confidence. The team cannot execute if the play keeps changing. Overhauling your language and vision with every new conference method or leadership mantra leaves your leadership confused. If everything changes every six months, why should they ever be involved to begin with? The fast-following leader’s desire for “new” starts to get old very quickly. Instead, seek to emulate Jesus as He consistently deployed a simple message of faith and repentance, to the point of rejection and ultimately, death.

Vision Headwaters is a two-hour trek designed to safely start the right conversations among your leadership. This engaging tool will calibrate your vision language using challenging assessment questions and memorable church-personality profiles.If you are not sure which, if any, of the above fits your church, you can be sure that the rest of your team does! To employ an honest assessment of your vision language, download your free copy of Auxano’s latest tool for break-thru leaders: The Vision Headwaters TeamUP .

In this TeamUP tool you will:
– Unpack your communication baggage in order to properly prepare for the vision journey ahead
– Plot your “Headwaters Profile” using key waypoints of missional language and church age
– Step onto the clarity pathway with experienced guides cheering you onward

Don’t continue to let words get in the way of the world God is calling you to create!

Tags: Bryan Rose, TeamUP, Vision Headwaters

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The REAL Front Door: Guests Visit Online Before Onsite

by: Bryan Rose

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Imagine if it was your first day on staff and you just discovered that your church’s front door was:

– hidden from view and hard to find

– still decorated from last Christmas

– covered in dirt and cobwebs

– cluttered with ministry flyers and notices.

Without hesitation, you would clean and repaint it immediately. You would then find a way to use people and signage, while leveraging every resource possible, to make the entrance beautiful, easy and obvious to find.

Your church website is more important than your front door. 

In fact, nine out of ten first time Guests visit online before visiting onsite, so your church website IS your front door. In 2015, the number of networked devices (phones, tablets, laptops) more than doubled the global population. Today, your church website is your digital front door for nearly everyone who will consider visiting your church, and then reconsider based upon what they find, or don’t find.

Here are 23 ways your website may be driving away first time Guests: 

1. If it projects an “us vs.them” dynamic, using a term like Visitor instead of Guest.
2. If it has your Christmas graphic on rotation… in February.
3. When 80% of your web content is actually geared for members, making it little more than a very expensive calendar for a select group of people.
4. If there are too many written words and the menu navigation becomes complex and confusing.
5. When there are too many ministries and activities… because we all know today’s average family sits around looking to be busier.
6. If your stock photography of diverse people projects an image far from your congregational reality.
7. When you do not have a picture of the church building or of the front door.
8. If your photos and videos are poor quality and improperly sized.
9. If you have not given the Guest a clear next step to take in visiting.
10. When you are missing a clear and obvious welcome of Guests with a link to critical information on visiting.
11. If your service times are anything less than large and obvious, because that is really the main thing a Guest is looking for.
12. When you have different service styles but they are unexplained… remember, one Guest’s idea of traditional worship might be another’s idea of contemporary.
13. When your worship services or small groups have cute and creative names that are ultimately meaningless outside of those circles.
14. When the pastor’s welcome letter is more about a Reformational Theology than a Great Commission Cardiology.
15. When the pastor’s welcome video is too long and too creepy, and therefore not too inviting.
16. If your photos are of lobbies and hallways instead of worship gatherings and people groups.
17. When you are assuming that free coffee (which doesn’t taste all that great) is still attractional to lost people.
18. If you have forgotten that social media is a great connector, because you still have a church directory and yellow page ads… it’s called Facebook.
19. When you have made an obvious choice toward a low-cost and generic “church website” over a useful and attractive “digital front door.”
20. If your content requires updating from multiple people, which never actually happens.
21. When you post links for giving money when you have not linked giving to a vision beyond money.
22. If the primary URL is a tagline or slogan instead of your church name.
23. If there is no responsiveness to mobile device viewing, because smart phones are the new desktop computer.

At Auxano, we love serving as strategic outsiders to help churches realize breakthrough effectiveness on their website, through the lens of vision clarity. No service style or theological treatise will impact a true First Time Guest more than a clear sense of “who we are” and “what we are called to do” will.

Start a conversation with an Auxano Navigator today to learn more about our Vision and Communication services.

Tags: Bryan Rose, Digital Doorway, First Impressions, church websites

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14 Compelling Reasons to Get Away with Your Team

by: Bryan Rose

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Finding the time and money to pull the staff offsite for an annual vision retreat challenges every leader.
The temptation to lay-up and schedule yet another week in the church conference room lulls us into yet another year of marginally effective visioning. In the name of stewardship or saving money, we are actually sacrificing the development of the team – as a team – in an exponentially effective environment. In reality, many church teams cannot afford to NOT get away for a short-term, focused season of team and vision development. With intentionality and planning, I believe every team can find some way to get away together.

Here are 14 reasons why your church staff retreats are better, and will accomplish more, offsite:

1. Focus drifts in the church conference room, you have 50% of the staff’s attention, at best, inside church walls

2. Relational roots grow deep on uncommon ground, late nights and early mornings are where teams are formed

3. Team building exercises are cheesy but effective when no one outside the team is around, just remember that adults hate the Trust Fall

4. Distance provides perspective, and getting away from the church building often right-sizes ministry challenges

5. Too much rhythm dulls our senses, forced breaks can be a healthy disruption to status quo ministry activity

6. There will always be a ministry fire burning, they will flare up before you leave and there will be plenty of firefighting to do when you get home

7. Investment in growing and being a team compounds exponentially, because retreats are not a dollar for dollar investment

8. Celebrating ministry wins offsite extends far beyond the moment, leverage memory of place to reinforce mission accomplishment

9. Most church conference rooms are boring, God’s creation work in nature resonates with the nature of the Creator in us

10. It’s healthy to schedule some unscheduled time together, meeting agendas are a means of an offsite rather than the ends onsite

11. Your team faces significant ministry challenges every day, fun times away can be life-giving and sustaining

12. Looking forward to a shared experience creates team synergy, as the weeks leading up to a retreat bring energy and focus

13. Stories from offsite meetings become a part of leadership cultural folklore, memories and laughter carry forward indefinitely

14. Putting effort and resources into planning time away with your team communicates their value

Here are three guidelines for selecting a location for an offsite vision retreat. As you are planning, think about…

…Someplace Beautiful. Unless you live in Houston TX you will not have far to drive to find the wonder of God’s creation.

…Somewhere Interesting. Find a place with a story and bring home as much inspiration from it as you can.

…Somewhat Away. Get enough separation from the everyday to nurture focus on the one-day of God’s preferred future.

> Read more from Bryan.

Tags: Bryan Rose, Staff Retreat, get away

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The ONE Truth Behind All Successful Leaders

by: Bryan Rose

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Thirty pages in, the realization hit.

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin is not only one of the best leadership books I have ever read, it may the only leadership book I have ever read cover to cover. Typical books on leadership, especially church leadership, leave me uninspired… at best. At worst, a few seem to me as simply a series of notions stretched thin to create chapters.

Using the U.S. Navy Seals as their frame of reference, Extreme Ownership kept me turning pages by unpacking the depth of ONE astoundingly simple truth behind any successful leadership enterprise: take responsibility. In doing so, the highly effective church leader is no longer a mythical being, existing on a higher plane than the rest of all mere mortal pastors. But with responsibility, every minister at every level of the staff structure, fulfills their duty to ensure success in leading toward the most important mission of all mankind: the Great Commission.

In this, Willink and Babin’s book is practical: Every minister, in every staff role can appreciate and live out the principles of Extreme Ownership. Additionally, actual stories from their leadership during the Battle of Ramadi in Iraq, illustrating these principles in action, keep the reader connected becausetestimony is the currency of transformation. Finally, a sense of gravity is felt throughout the book as effective leadership for these authors was a matter of life or death. The obvious parallel for leaders in the church, is that extreme ownership could mean eternal life or death in our theater of operations.

Here is a summary of Extreme Ownership in 3 sentences:

1. Leadership is taking total responsibility for the effective execution of what you are called to accomplish.
2. When you are a leader, success always belongs to the team, failure always belongs to you.
3. A clear, simple, actionable mission that everyone believes-in is critical to the success of every team.

My Top 15 Quotes for Church Leaders from Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

• Without a team there can be no leadership.
• For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission. Ineffective leaders do not.
• For leaders, the humility to admit and own mistakes and develop a plan to overcome them is essential to success.
• The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how to best accomplish it.
• Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.
• The leader bears full responsibility for explaining the strategic mission, developing the tactics, and securing the training and resources to enable the team properly and successfully execute.
• If an individual on a team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer… But the leader must be loyal to the team and the mission above any individual.
• When it comes to standards as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.
• There are no bad teams anywhere… Only bad leaders.
• It is incumbent on senior leaders to take the time to explain and answer the questions of their junior leaders so that they too can understand why and believe.
• Leadership isn’t one person leading a team. It is a group of leaders working together up and down the chain of command to lead.
• A broad and ambiguous mission results in lack of focus, ineffective execution, and mission creep.
• If your team isn’t doing what you need them to do, you first have to look at yourself. Rather than blame them for not seeing the strategic picture, you must figure out a way to better communicate it to them in terms that are simple, clear and concise, so that they understand.
• A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority at all levels. This is catastrophic to the performance of any organization.
• If your leader is not giving you the support that you need, don’t blame him or her. Instead, reexamine what you can do to better clarify, educate, influence or convince that person to give you what you need in order to win.

> Read more from Bryan

Tags: Bryan Rose, Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink, Leif Babin, Take Responsibility

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5 Ways to Learn and Lead from Failure

by: Bryan Rose

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It’s not really how you got lost as much as how you lead back to the right path.

Every great leader has experienced failure at some point, well… except one glaring exception.
So yeah, you are not Jesus, but remember:
     Steve Jobs, the man behind the iPhone, iPad and MacBook (likely what you are using to read this), was once fired from Apple
     Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player ever (not even a question Kobe and Lebron), was cut from his middle-school team
     Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph (making him the great-grandfather of hipster music), was partially deaf
It is not a question of IF a pastor will fail in some ministry endeavor; it is a question of how they will lead as they learn their way back up. 

Some failures in pastoral leadership require a deeper investment in time, repentance and healing to overcome. Especially those failures that erode pastoral authority because of immorality or sexual sin. However, for the majority of pastors, recovery from everyday ministry failure is a matter of learnership as much as it is one of leadership. 

Because moving beyond a failure involves learning and advancing as a leader, after all:

• Steve Jobs went on to build the NeXT computer with no real customers.
• Michael Jordan went on to miss 12,345 shots in his career, more than half of all he took.
• Thomas Edison went on to build 1,000 light bulbs that didn’t work before one finally did.

Failure happens to everyone and for those that refuse to learn and advance, it often happens over and over again. Here are five sure-fire ways to guarantee repetitive pastoral failure:

1. Ignore It – Leaders destined to fail again refuse to acknowledge failure when it happens. When the conversation turns toward what went wrong, they become defensive or change the subject altogether.
 Advancing leaders talk about their failure openly and freely share what they are learning from it.

2. Prevent It – Do everything you can to never allow failure to happen in the first place and you can be sure that when it does happen, you will never see it coming. If you never allow your leaders to fail, there is actually a better chance that they will never succeed.
 Advancing leaders create an environment for safe failure to happen and even celebrate failing forward when it happens.

3. Invite It – It is surprising how many pastors fail to ever plan, and inadvertently plan to often fail. Simple principles of leadership like calendaring, setting meeting agendas or leading toward a consistent vision are a great step toward making sure failure, when it happens, is not repetitive.
Advancing leaders are intentional in their planning, especially if it is not in their nature to begin with.

4. Overlook It –  Making excuses for failure, sweeping mistakes under the rug or simply minimizing the reality of the situation is a great way to find yourself with the broom again soon. A great strategy to repeat failure is to not get outside eyes to help reveal critical points of failure and create a plan to move forward.
 Advancing leaders invite strategic outsiders in to help see what was unseen and bring fresh perspective toward moving forward.

5. Magnify It – Publicly dwelling on your mistakes and failure seems, at first to be humbling and sacrificial. Under the surface though, giving undue and inordinate attention to ministry failure often masks insecurity and fuels ego. Over-magnifying a mistake happens in cultures where failure is easier to recognize than success.
 Advancing leaders define success of their Great Commission calling and celebrate those wins first, while appropriately handling the misses.

You may not go on to revolutionize the digital age, become the greatest basketball player of all time, or hold more than 2,000 U.S. patents, but God does have something significant and eternal for you to accomplish… no matter how hard it might have been up to this point.

How you learn from failure will directly affect how you lead after failure.

Failure happens in ministry, there is no guarantee against it. Therefore, when failure does occur, we must learn and lead from it, advancing to ensure that it does not happen the same way again.

Tags: Bryan Rose, Leadership, learn

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Permission to Dream Again: Granted

by: Bryan Rose

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Have we reached the end of pastoral visioning by dreaming of what should be?
Does a church leader in 2016, surrounded by marketplace professionals seeking a strategic plan, even have permission to dream anymore? Is a less-than-precise path to a God-honoring future unacceptable to staff members looking for immediate action initiatives?

Is it safe for pastors to dream about a future day, or should we continue to just keep the focus on the Sunday to Sunday mechanics of ministry and making budget?

Unless you were on a mission trip or under a rock last week, it was hard to miss the incessant media buzz about the 1.5 BILLION dollar lottery. Hundreds of thousands of people bought more than 635 million $2 tickets in the hopes of the immediate acquisition of a life of extraordinary wealth.

And what made last week’s Powerball drawing even more interesting is that I know of quite a few pastors, some of them prominent and actively justifying it –see Perry Noble’s post here, who were even drawn in to play the lottery. I’m sure many pastors who played the lottery instead chose to navigate what would inevitably be a hard question of “Why are you gambling Pastor?” with what would in the end be a rather easy conversation with their congregation… provided that they won: “Yes, I played… Here’s my tithe”

But here is what was really going on behind the scenes with most people who played the lottery last week.
The most fun in playing a giga-jackpot lottery is the dreaming. 

What would you do… Rather what couldn’t you do with more than one and one-half billion dollars? Just look at all these zeros! $1,500,000,000.

Even though I never bought a ticket, I still channeled my inner John Nash with many nights of pre-sleep mental mathematical operations. I will readily admit, it was fun to dream about how I could giveaway hundreds of millions of dollars.
100 million each to NAMB and the IMB… because that moment of handing David Platt a giant check from lottery winnings would be epic… and there would be a giant check.
10 million to every church I have ever worked for, or attended. Let the heated deacons meeting commence!
1 million dollar education funds for my kids, my nephews and every child of a first second or third cousin… With the stipulation that it’s an SEC school and anywhere but Auburn.
Buying that hilltop acreage in Wilson County that call out to me for our family homestead every time we drive past.
And a beach house at Seaside, a Colorado mountain lodge AND a Chicago loft apartment.

You see, for those who did not ruin their family finances on a statistical near-impossibility last week, the lottery incited something written deep into our creation… The powerful ability to dream of a better day. To think long what could be beyond what actually is.

The problem with the lottery, one of many to be sure, is that every one of those dreams are disconnected from an ever achievable reality.

But for many pastors, the opposite struggle is real: the need for an achievable reality disconnects many from ever dreaming. 

Today’s pressures mount for many ministry: Pressure to perform. To make budget before the big missions offering saves the day. To have a cool hairstyle like that guy in Nashville. To reveal bulging biceps as you open the Bible. To increase attendance faster than last year. Or even to once and for all relocate the church.

The pressures of Sunday often mute the dreaming of one day.

Will Mancini recently addressed the subject of pastoral dreaming, thinking long about the future, in this blog post… It’s even in the name of his new book: God Dreams.

And for any in ministry, it was the capacity to imagine a better future, to picture God’s redemptive movement, to see beyond what is to what could be that got us us here to begin with. Everyone called according to God’s purpose does so with a Great Commission Dream branded on our mind and buried in our heart. The everyday-on-call mechanics of ministry and the overlooked-in-seminary reality of leadership serve to squelch our permission to dream as we did at that first moment surrender.

It is a great irony that we would commemorate perhaps the most famous dreamer in American history the week after we celebrate perhaps the biggest lottery jackpot of all time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. should forever remind us that the capacity to dream and align people toward a better day may be the greatest human capacity of all.

So here’s to dreaming again…

Here’s to proudly using work hours to think long about Gods call and not have anything tangible to show for it.

Here’s to making time to truly vacation with your family because you’ve been spending time walking under open skies as a part of your day-to-day leadership.

Here’s to thinking out loud with a leadership team about something that may require more than one staff meeting to plan and just a few weeks to execute.

Here’s to being able to say “I don’t know yet” on how to get something Gospel-sized accomplished.

Here’s to what God used to get into this calling in the first place.

Here’s to the permission to dream again.

Tags: Bryan Rose, Dream again

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The Official 2016 Church Vision Generator

by: Bryan Rose

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It’s that time of year again.

Time to resolve and time to budget. Time to exercise and to excise. Time to engage, and especially, a time to envision.

It is this time every year, that leaders across the Church landscape will dream, plan and inspire toward God’s preferred future. A few will dig in and collaborate with their teams to develop a viral language of vision. Others will read a book that explains and guides them to craft vision, like Will Mancini’s upcoming release God Dreams.*

But unfortunately, many well-intentioned church leaders will simply imitate successful statements from other congregations. Or even worse, they will piece random visionish-type words together that sound catalytic… yet remain catatonic.

For those in the later category looking for a bit of help, once again this year, with tongue firmly-in-cheek…

Here is your Official 2016 Church Vision Generator:

(Click image to enlarge)

*God Dreams, is the anticipated follow-up to Will’s first book on crafting vibrant vision: Church Unique. God Dreams releases January 1, from Amazon and other retailers. Download a preview PDF of Chapter 1 here. 

Tags: Bryan Rose, Church Vision Generator

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