Ownership? Time Shares? Renters?
Monday, February 1, 2021
10:35 PM
One of the things that hit me during the interview for Senior Lead Pastor at Vineyard Church – Kansas City was that God builds strong churches when we transfer ownership of the mission and vision of the church to as many people as possible. I sensed that we had great people on the team, with somewhat misplaced ownership. I think that every move of God that He initiates and leads has a uniquely inspired fingerprint. It is the uniqueness of each church that is intended to be something of an intersection of God’s timing, the strategy that He has for His kingdom work in that moment in history, along with the specific people He’s bringing together around this uniqueness. We should listen carefully, therefore, to the words that God speaks when He breathes a vision and mission into a church. For you see, it is this unique vision and mission that should be at the very heart of EVERYTHING. It should fuel motivation, shape strategies, encourage action, and prevent distraction.
We should spend time understanding our vision and mission. We should spend time transferring ownership to everyone involved, of the vision and mission. Everyone who attends a church shouldn’t go any length of time, without understanding exactly how everything in the church is geared toward the unique vision and mission that God has deposited.
Instead, what we usually do, and what we mistakenly think is successful church leadership, is we transfer ownership of the strategy, tactics, way, or processes of the church to as many people as possible. Then, we can’t understand why taking away a strategy, or changing a process, or the way we are doing something is so damaging and disconnecting to people. We created the situation that becomes painful. Because when ownership is in the wrong part of the church – the execution or consumption or flavor; people misplace their connected hearts to the wrong things.
What we should be doing, is twenty-four hours a day, connecting people’s hearts to the vision and mission of the church. If you can connect a heart to the vision and mission, then ways can change, tactics and strategies can be scrutinized, people and processes can be moved around and developed, styles can change, and people will embrace it as part of more effectively reaching the vision and mission.
The mistake we make is as Senior leaders, really OWNING the vision and mission, and thinking that our ownership will carry people forward. It does in a sort of “come with me” way. But one of the problems with only the Senior leader or leaders owning the core vision and mission is that the next tiers of leadership may have ideological agreement with the vision and mission, but their ownership is misplaced into lower, supporting processes, and tactical areas.
When ownership is misplaced in the church, growth and dynamism rise and fall in pockets, based on the leadership capacities and skills of individuals successfully executing and gathering around an event, process, or way. You have successful programs, and if you have enough resources, you’ll have successful groups in a seemingly healthy competition for people and resources. You can achieve a measure of success if you can develop enough talented staff to accomplish this. So, you’ll see waves of programmatic attractional wins throughout a church like this. It can be a model that is sustainable, if it is built in a diverse, corporate, conglomeration sort of way.
What happens though, is this “healthy competition” among various sections of the church can be mistaken for body life and the diversities of the different pockets can be mistaken for the beauty of a cohesive, unique, created individual. In some ways, kind of like the trophy wife you see on the reality TV shows, who spends her time chasing perfection with plastic surgery to every part of their body, face, hair, eyes, lips, etc. What one enhancement seems to help eventually turns into a competition between attractional features, with each vying for attention and crying out for resources to be invested in improving that feature. The oneness of a body ends up being a set of enhanced “features” that at one point may have been made beautiful, but eventually don’t age well and can not look cohesive.
The underlying, bigger and perhaps all too avoidable question is “Why don’t I trust the Lord to put together the beauty of this church expression?” or “Who is it that actually builds the church?” What is our role in the drawing together of the unique individuals that make up a church body?
Structure for consideration:
Mission comes from within through the Spirit and is unique to each body of believers
Own God’s Mission – it isn’t yours until He deposits it and gives it to you
Once you have gotten it, it can’t be consumed, kept, used, only by you. It is isn’t yours to keep, only steward.
Make it part of your every prayer, your every day, your every being. Make it your one thing
Culture is agreement on Mission along with adoption and practice of values
The combination of ownership of mission and adoption and practice of values begins to impact the forward movement of the body.
The ownership and adoption needs to develop a tipping point, where values and behaviors are aligned. The management of self begins to happen. One another begins to hold each accountable to ownership and values.
This tipping point may take a few years to achieve.
Creating a wave of “vaccinations” or inculcating of values can help, but should not be assumed.
Discipleship of culture needs to be a daily routine.
Time Shares:
There are some who have an “all-in” mentality to what they are about, but also have a spiritualized out that God may lead them down the road some day. Always hedging the downside risk, and in doing so, keeping from the upside potential. Many of these people can be similar to a time share owner. They loved the presentation of the dream, and enjoy the experience of the getaway, but it isn’t really where they live day in and day out.
In the time share mentality about vision and mission, you will have people who can seemingly perform at high levels of ownership, but only inside the boundaries of their own making. They will claim that they do “own” the vision and mission, and will have the appearance of working toward that mission and vision, until it is time to move to something else, and seemingly, the mission and vision are no longer important. The mission and vision do not ever get them up to pray and call out to the Lord for it to happen. They instead, get up and pray about execution, strategy, outcomes of an effort, management of their reputation, etc. So – there is a disconnect from people sold out to a vision and mission and those who are time sharing one.
Renters:
Renters are transactional about vision and mission. The vision and mission is there to be used, and to serve the needs of the renter, but only as far as it doesn’t require real ownership. Unlike the time share person, a renter has not even invested much of their own capital into a vision and mission. Instead, they will take it when it is convenient and helpful, and jettison it when they either encounter difficulty or their own personal mission and vision misaligns with it.
In this case, renters can not be counted upon to wake up and be compelled to accomplish vision and mission. It will be a constant struggle to overcome inertia with a renter. They’ll perform fine once, and inconsistently a second or third time. There will be frustration managing a renter, because they’ll always evaluate what is being asked of them against some sort of internal filter, which many times they won’t even know exists. They will say they are committed and in, but will always have something held back.
Owners TimeShares and Renters: What to do?
First – Pray
Second – Pray some more
Third – Know what unique vision and mission God has given your community. (small group/family/megachurch)
Begin to invest in key leaders and everyone, telling the stories of the vision and mission. Develop a single, laser focus only on the vision and mission and expect everyone to own it.
Avoid developing ownership in strategy, execution, plans, and methods with anyone who has not first and foremost demonstrated ownership in the core vision and mission. Once they do own the core, then the working out of it can happen safely. They will see the strategy, execution, plans and methods as simply areas of deployment in accomplishing the vision and mission and will have a healthy willingness to change whatever is needed whenever it is needed.
