One of the most crippling incapacities to strike the leader of any group or organization is the loss of a clear sense of vision. With the loss of one's vision to be someone, and to actually do something consistent with that vision, comes the corresponding involuntary loss of direction, motivation, and the deep sense of enthusiasm and loyalty once felt for the mission that grew out of the vision. Besides these losses, something even more basic dissolves: ones essential sense of the "meaning" so inevitably associated with a worthy vision. The loss of vision in the leader inevitably affects the everyday outlook of the people of the organization being led, until life within the organization dwindles into a state of hand to mouth existence, with organizational death knocking more and more insistently and unabashedly on the front door.
The word vision was a religious word long before it was surrounded with its contemporary secular meanings and connotations. Yet in recent years the church has adopted the strong tendency to take on the worthy, yet limited notion of secular corporations, that "vision" is simply an inspiring sense of where a person or enterprise should go. It is in tending to adopt this limited view of visioning that the thrust of what is indisputably a spiritual organism the church has begun to lose its sense of direction, destiny, meaning, and mission. There is among many Christian leaders the uneasy and unfocused feeling that a vision that seeks to have significantly transcendent or spiritual underpinnings is not practical enough and is not congruous with what is politically correct among the corporate pundits who have designed the latest in prevailing state-of-the-art visionary leadership and management. This uncomfortable sensation is seldom openly articulated among us but shows itself most often in our neglect, as Christian leaders, of a thoroughgoing visioning process in the church, which embraces a careful and meaningful encounter with God, as crucial to the visioning process. We seem to feel that such dynamics are fruitless, theoretical, and the worst sin of all, "impractical."
We live in an age that inappropriately lauds the practical. We do this even as our humanity cries out for something that will feed its starving, materialized spirit. It seems to me that much of this penchant for the practical grows out of the contemporary materialistic, rationalistic, humanistic view we hold of life and reality. Consistent with this, financial and political dynamics are seriously overvalued, even in the church. Ecclesiastical political process and financial consideration absorb the visioning process of the church from top to bottom. We are so oriented to these dynamics that any supernaturally transcendent reality has a difficult time actually influencing, to any determinative extent, the direction or action of the church. The church simply can no longer afford to imitate the limited notions of vision and visioning that may be ample in a business environment but are not adequate in the light of the ultimate understandings of reality with which God has illuminated the church.
Although I am all for the practical, a worthy vision of biblical quality always springs up and out of what is transcendently spiritual. This should certainly be uniquely and particularly true of Christian visioning. The visioning of the church is not something that is first born into consciousness on the winds of human need, crucial as human need is. It is not even something that, first of all, grows out of the challenge to baptize X number of people worthy as that challenge is. Authentic Christian visioning occurs when we fully embrace the definitive presence and direction of God in our life, personal and corporate.
Paul talked of the guiding vision of his life as being a "heavenly vision" (Acts 26:19), and the way he received that vision was certainly transcendent (Acts 9:3-9). All of the guiding visions of the Old Testament prophets, which escorted the practical movements of ancient Israel, are clearly identified as coming fresh and substantive from God through prophets (and as pastors, ours is distinctly a prophetic role). Moses' terribly practical vision for Israel in Egypt was one he received in the throes of a transcendent rendezvous with God Himself at the burning bush. Isaiah's vision (Isaiah 6) was bathed in spectacularly Divine revelations, yet it resulted in tangible, practical behavior in Isaiah's life.
There are no shortcuts in our journey to discover an authentic Christian vision. Excellent as many of our "visioning" techniques are and unbecomingly impractical and over-spiritual as conventional secular influence among us may pigeonhole such concerns, they are by Christian definition crucial to real life, meaning, and the ultimate fulfillment of the mission of the church.
We can no longer afford to neglect the grandeur and functional power in this kind of "visioning." We need clear conceptions of our marching orders from God. We cannot dismiss this concern as empty and impractical simply because we have been unsuccessful in storming the battlements of heaven with the ineffective attempts of the past, or because no one seems able to definitively describe in everyday terms exactly how such storming is to be done.
As we pray and work toward a clearer vision for this magazine, please join us. I would invite you also to join in praying and working toward and within a clearer Christocentric vision for our churches and for our church as a whole.
