Ministry Journey Blog

Thoughts on Ministry

14 Feb

The ‘risk” of vision

Posted in Uncategorized on 14.02.15 by Merlyn

True vision comes with great risk. At times the risk is practical, other times it is emotion, it can be spiritual or a combination of the three. Unlike management or maintenance, there is a lot of unknown elements and at the very least some risk with vision. True vision is bigger than your own ideas, capacity and ability. It is by nature not something you are already being or doing. I have always been passionate about vision, for as the Proverbs accurately note, ‘without vision we perish.’ A church without vision is doomed to at best grow old together and close its doors. A church with vision can achieve, experience and become a wide variety of things, most of them grander than they could originally plan or dream. While I am passionate about vision, like many I do not enjoy failure. This is a function of personality, gender, ego and more. No one enjoys failure, yet good leadership means being willing and able to fail. For any individual or organization, sustaining a posture of vision also means being open to failure. The fear and reality of failure may be one of the more significant things that prevents vision, perhaps most profoundly so in the church. When vision happens in a church, the resistance is most rooted in change or the unknown, with the sources of this resistance ultimately being fear or grief (people do not resist change, they resist loss). The great irony is that without vision, the long term prognosis and end result will most certainly be failure, but not the temporary, painful failure that comes with vision, but the ultimate failure or death of the organization. Vision is risky and not guaranteed, yet the truth remains, with vision, we perish; this is the only guarantee that we can find when it comes to vision.

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