The Pastor's Study -- Unpacking Mission and Vision Statements

Like many pastors of my generation, I have struggled with leading the congregations that I have served toward a coherent statement of our vision and mission.

Our forebears in ministry, those are have retired or are nearing the end of their tenure, didn’t have that pressure on their plate. The mission and vision were clear — to bring people to Christ while also marrying, burying, and conducting the business of the church. That task of pastoring was primarily about maintaining relationships, hoping and praying that those relationships would be enough to get the congregation to move forward in some sort of fashion. If there was a mission statement at all, it was found in the name of the congregation: “The Church of All Nations,” “Grace UMC,” or “Miller’s Chapel.”

With the rise of church growth consulting, modern models of church leadership taken from the business, and the trend of Protestantism since the time of Charles Finney to systematize revival, arose the insistence by many that congregations needed a concise and clear vision and mission to drive their ministry forward. These vision and mission statements would be derived through a variety of means, from coming down from on high from a visionary pastor, or arising from the grass roots through a variety of listening and discernment sessions.

As one who wants to see my congregations grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ as well as numerically, I too believed and still believe to some extent that any community needs a statement of mission and vision around which the group can coalesce. In every church that I have served, I have worked to get the church leaders to either take ownership of mission statements already in existence, or to craft a new statement of vision and mission for the congregation. And, in every church that I have served I have found it tough going.

The problem may be as much me as anything going on in these congregations. As one who favors the grassroots approach to ministry, I have wanted these statements to arise out of the congregation. However, the modern congregation has so many different agendas (thus the need for a mission statement) that getting even a majority to agree on the mission and vision of the church can be tough, and gaining consensus becomes even more difficult. This is even true at the Church Council level, with folks pulled in many directions about who we are and what God is calling us to do.

Adam Hamilton, a proponent of these statements, has suggested that United Methodists all already have our mission statement determined for us in the call to “make disciples for the transformation of the world.” I agree, but that statement is so broad as to be useless. Everyone would agree that we are engaged in the work of making disciples so that the world will be a better place, but translating that into a ministry evaluation tool with much meat on it gets tougher.

Perhaps part of my problem is that I am coming to a point in my ministry where I am wondering if we aren’t just spinning our wheels in trying to come up with these things when instead we simply need to go and let God guide us on the way. In a very real sense, I am becoming an advocate for the Abrahamic model of mission statements.

What is that model, you may be asking. Well remember the call of Abraham.

God: Abe, I want you to leave your home to go to a place that I will show you, and so that you can be a blessing to the world.

Abe: Where is that place God?

God: I’ll show you when you get there.

What would it mean to the modern congregation to throw out the mission statement and admit that none of us really knows where we are headed, but that we are simply going to faithfully follow God to a place that we don’t know about yet? This isn’t about sitting back and doing nothing while we wait for God to come through. Rather, this understands that we are probably going to drift all over the place in carrying out our ministry, with the understanding that God’s process of ambiguity is as important to our faith journey as the destination.

Maybe our mission is to simply sing: “Where He leads me, I will follow.”

For some, that may indeed be enough.

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