[0:00]
all right very off road to you man you know so i'm going to talk for about 10 minutes on vision we're going to do strategy later on it seems to me vision has kind of become a bit of a holy grail there's this sense that if you can get the right vision for your church formulate it in the right way make a catchy pithy all those things then your church will automatically grow that's become the sense that people have um and then you get people uh who go oh we've never had a vision we've never had a vision statement and they've grown churches of thousands and you kind of it throws us out a little bit

[0:31]
i'm not a management consultant uh i've what i'm going to do is give you four things that in the last 20 years have i think become embedded in as principles for me around the idea of vision so i'm not going to give you everything there is to know about it but i think these four principles are the things i wish i knew 20 years ago the first thing is i think in terms of vision it actually has to be caught up in the gospel when you think about it we've already got a vision uh jesus has already given us the vision uh it's things like

[1:02]
the great commission it's the lordship of jesus in the whole world and i think that means that god basically wants very similar things for most of his churches um your church my church what god wants for us the vision he wants us to have is actually pretty similar isn't it it's the lordship of jesus it's that we love god with all our heart soul strength and mind it's that the gospel will go out it's that we're unified it's that we're maturing it's the people do ministry actually when you think about it most churches ought to have

[1:34]
very similar vision statements or very similar visions because jesus has given us the vision it's the gospel itself having said that i think there is something unique about mission when it comes to vision statements and i think this is actually around the idea of the gospel itself the gospel is the gospel that jesus is the lord of the universe and in the great commission jesus essentially says the extent of the gospel has to match

[2:05]
its content jesus says all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me that's the content of the gospel the extent is therefore you need to go and tell everyone the gospel by its nature is a message that has to be preached jesus lordship is universal and what i think i what i think that means is mission has to be at the very heart of everything that we're doing so i wouldn't put community at the heart of my vision statement i wouldn't put maturity evil

[2:36]
at the heart of my vision statement instinctively the nature of the gospel and the nature of jesus lordship for me drives us towards mission and i think instinctively christians want to be part of churches that do mission strangely enough the best way to grow by transfer growth is to do mission because every christian who walks in the door whether they feel comfortable doing mission themselves they want to be part of a church that's all about mission um counter-intuitively the more you're on

[3:07]
about mission um the more all of your other ministries actually get gassed the more they they get energy it's not that you're either a loving church or a mission church the more you're a mission church the more you become a loving church because the mission drives you towards that the more you're a mission church the more you're a ministry church in a maturity church because mission drives you towards those things and so i'd say yes we do have a vision from jesus it's the gospel but

[3:40]
the heart of the gospel i think is the expanding lordship of jesus what this means is i i'd want to say don't be afraid if your mission statement is a lot like everyone else's i think everyone kind of wants their mission statement to be a bit unique and we kind of get awkward if the vision statement in catingl is the same one as the one in dubbo and we're like oh do you know people are going to think we copied it's the same gospel and so of course it's going to look the same here are some things that i think will make your vision unique though

[4:11]
obviously the context katingle is different to dubbo newcastle and lake mac is different to everywhere else our language is therefore different i i worked at taramara now i'm in newcastle my language is totally different i drop my g's i use much smaller words i speak bogan up here the language has got to be different um our culture is different the denominational background i think shapes vision the shared history of the church for us

[4:42]
we've got a story of rising from the ashes in 1999 and growing and planting and all those things the shared story of a church actually does shape your vision and it's going to be unique the opportunities you've got for us here in newcastle there are particular opportunities we've got in a post-industrial city that others don't have and that's got to be kind of shaping what we're doing i think the leaders give some personality i think just the weird amalgam of the people who are in your church

[5:14]
all of those things are where you become unique but the vision really i think all our visions are going to be very similar because the gospel is our vision so that's the first thing the second thing much more quickly i reckon as we're coming up with vision we need to recognize that vision lives in the future and in the present at the same time so in a sense vision is where we're headed

[5:44]
vision is what we want to see happen vision is meant to be ambitious it's the future that we want to have but in a weird way our vision is also what we're doing now in order to get there so vision is kind of both endpoint and method so thinking about mission or evangelism evangelism is both our goal and it's also our present activity so our we would say a part of our vision is to be a really evangelistic church how do we do that

[6:15]
well by evangelizing um when it comes to maturity our goal is to be a mature church how do we do that well by maturing people what this means is that every vision is constantly living in this tension of both present and future at the same time um this is one of those things if you're where we're in m's church with mission magnification mission membership and treaty and ministry when people ask us what are you trying

[6:46]
to do our answer is we're trying to build a people who magnify god who do mission who build membership who mature people and do ministry and then they say how are you going to do that we go well by magnifying god by doing minutes by doing mission by doing membership by maturing people and doing ministry um every vision every vision i think lives in this tension between it's both present and future third thing to say i'm rushing through just because we've done it heaps time

[7:16]
this is something i'm really passionate about your vision statement if you have one is a rallying cry not an instruction manual lots of vision statements most vision statements that i ever read they read like an instruction manual or they read like a constitution that is their overriding concerns you can tell the overriding concern of the person who wrote them was we need to be comprehensive and we need to be correct theologically correct and i think it's

[7:48]
because we're all wondering who's going to come onto our website and read it we're all thinking which bishop or which of my peers is going to look at this website i'm going to say oh this is missing from your vision statement this is missing and so what we feel the need to do is chuck everything in say everything that we're concerned about and balance every theological principle and it ends up correct but really really boring what i would want to say is no one is looking at your web page

[8:18]
no one is even remotely interested in your web page except your people and so build it as a rallying cry for your church not as a defense of your theological correctness to your peers it has to reflect your passions as a church and it has to reflect your priorities as a church and who cares what any of your peers ever say about it i'll give you one that we've got at the moment later on

[8:49]
that is it's just unashamedly pentecostal charismatic it's mad i think most people would hate it but it's working like a dream for our church at the moment i'll tell you about it later so it has to be it has to be kind of caught up in the gospel it has to live in the present and the future at the same time it's got to be a rallying cry not an instruction manual my big point though is vision statements have to be deeply personal deeply personal in two ways

[9:21]
one if you're the leader people really have to see it alive in you personally so leaders who are really passionately driven by their by a vision they're really inspiring are they especially if they're just open books if they're they just kind of bleed out who they are and what their passions are and especially if they're particularly good preachers and communicators people will rally behind that person that is this is the single uniting thing of pretty much every great

[9:52]
leader i i see so i watch guys like philip jensen i watch andrew hurd i watch paul harrington i watch all of these different guys with totally different personalities but the one thing i think you can see in common between all of the muse they really do embody this passionate vision that they're just relentless in pushing their church towards i think this is why often you get leaders who don't have a clearly articulated vision but they're incredibly effective so so far as i can tell ev

[10:24]
has never had a vision statement but it's an incredibly driven church and i think it's because the vision statement is actually andrew's life and andrew is preaching that it just bleeds out of him it's really really clear because he has made the vision incarnate now that doesn't mean you wouldn't have one but you can imagine a vision statement that isn't visible really tangibly visible in the minister is basically worthless

[10:54]
the second way i think it needs to be personal is i think your people really should lean in and love it i think it needs to express the kind of christian that your people long to be i think inside the mind of everyone in your church they've got a picture of the kind of christian that they want to be um and it could be it's a christian who's really evangelistic it could be a christian who's really

[11:24]
prayerful that could be a christian who's really passionate but they've got a picture of the kind of christian that they really want to be that they're hungry to be and that they know that they're not and sometimes they've got the wrong picture they've got pictures that they've inherited from other places but we teach the bible every week we open the bible and so we're constantly shaping that a great vision i think taps into that ambition that people have of the kind of christian that they want to be that is a vision should tap into their

[11:56]
desire it should actually tap into their conviction and tap into their identity they should go that's who i wish i was that's that's the kind of church that i really really want to be part of it's got to be aspirational in that sense and this is where i think most vision statements actually fall down they're correct they're comprehensive they're theologically accurate but they don't actually tug at anyone's heart there's nothing aspirational about them there's nothing there's nothing that

[12:28]
reaches in to the person that they actually want to be it's just often a strategy so most a lot of vision statements that i read are essentially a strategy we want to be a church that does mission that evangelizes that grows people that it and they're actually strategy things i'd much rather a vision statement that says we are going to be this kind of people passionately driven towards this um this is where um i think it was a podcast that simon sharma did looking at

[13:01]
apple's vision statements and it was all down that end of we are passionately convinced of this um that's where i think vision statements have to live now i reckon this actually leads into whether or not you have a vision statement at all um we don't in 22 years of me being here we've never had a vision statement um because now for 20 years i i couldn't figure out why that was but

[13:32]
in the last two years i finally figured out why i've been allergic to vision statements the statement and that is i never see that they always feel to me to be too much about being correct and comprehensive and they never feel passionate um and so if you said to me what's the vision of hunter bible church i'd say let me paint your three pictures we're passionate about we are passionate about the people who love god recklessly they're just willing to give

[14:03]
god everything they make mad decisions for jesus they break friendships they give away their money that god is god blows up their weekend he dominates their whole life that's what we want to be and we also want to be a people who really repent and who the word is shaping our lives really challenging our hearts we want to be more like jesus and the third thing we're passionate about is the city we live in we so love newly and lake mack we we think the world of this place and most of them are going to hell and we're so gripped by those three

[14:34]
things and so there's no statement there but it drips passion and i can use it in a hundred different contexts so when we baptize i'll go what do we want for sally well we want started to grow up loving jesus like mad loving god like crazy we wanted to grow up looking like jesus we wanted to grow up as an evangelist that is by not having a statement but by having these three passion driven pictures it's actually enabled us to tap into what people

[15:04]
the christian people really want to be to adapt it and change it over time it doesn't mean i'm against the statement but for me if i could find a statement that that dripped passion i'd use it so maybe it would be worship god grow like jesus love the city but even then it just sounds too corporate for me here's the vision we've pitched for our church for the next 18 months so we'll tend to have the the ongoing universal vision for our church is those three pictures

[15:36]
in the next 18 months we have wanted to again rally our church around evangelism and the vision that we've kept putting towards people uh when preaching through our way through acts is be part of someone's story everyone has a story of coming to jesus and acts as fulham so axe works really well for us there and every christian really wants to be evangelistic at their heart they're terrified they don't know how

[16:07]
and they don't think that a lot of them most of them don't think that they can be the last part of someone's story but every christian wants to be part of when they see those um the testimonies up on the screen they wish they were part of that story somewhere and so we've been saying be part of someone's story you might be the person who talked over the back fence you might just be the person who prayed for the one for the friend in your growth group you might be the person who gave them a coffee on their first time they came to church on sunday you might be the person who crossed the aisle you might be the

[16:38]
person who prayed the prayer you might be the person at life who answered their questions be part of someone's story in the next 18 months i think it's one of those vision statements it's not theologically correct it's not comprehensive it's the sort of thing that i think most people in from my background would go oh that feels awfully pentecostal and charismatic but i tell you what evangelistically our church coming out of covert is pumped um life is full um and that's where i think it's because

[17:09]
it taps into that sense that it's a rallying cry and it's a rallying cry of the person i really wish i was in christ for me that's what that's what where vision really lives have i gone over time no that's fine no no sorry i kept you short there if you've got anything else to say you can throw in the other one oh that's it okay good this is all i've got you've probably got a thousand questions to throw agree but this is what we're going to do um we're going to go into

[17:39]
breakout room for eight minutes i want you to hopefully you'll have some sort of vision statement or either articulated or not in your head for your church or your ministry i want you to go to these breakout rooms and i am going to let me just put this on the screen i'll put this in the chat bar as well so that you can see it um i want you to talk with the other person in here about these these areas um raised here and where you're at with them you can talk about the questions that have come out of what greg said as well so that

[18:09]
when we come back in uh you can throw those at greg but just have a conversation around these things share your vision how does it fit with those four categories where do you think it's hitting home run where is it lacking and if you get time that third part how could you reshape it that might be a conversation for after but we're going to go to breakout rooms eight minutes i'll let you know with minute to come coming back and then we'll have a bit of time for q a in this part before greg talks about strategies and goals

[18:48]
all righty welcome back i realize that's not a huge amount of time to process and share a big topic but um two things anything that came out of that any uh any insights any things you realized or helpful discussion and as well anything you want to ask greg the next few minutes i think we're i think we're small or nothing number just unmute yourself and go now yes um thanks craig um jan here from

[19:19]
southside bible church we have a i don't know what you'd call it we have three words to capture our vision statement or mission statement or whatever it is uh it's we call it as uh build the body of christ in love reach people with the gospel of grace and make disciples who make disciples now you mentioned that you're going through a season where you are you're focusing on particular aspects of your of your vision statement how does it actually work like do you do you do a sermon series on that or do

[19:50]
you you just put on more events to target that area yep um one of the benefits of having been here so long uh is that those three pictures are really deeply ingrained in the psyche of our church and so everyone will be able to talk about passion for god passion for ourselves passion for the city blah blah that enables us to be able to put other things alongside it that don't necessarily threaten it and

[20:20]
so the be part of someone's story um uh how we're running that out we're running it out a lot in sermons so almost every sermon at the moment and axe works perfectly for it is being part of someone's story of coming to christ um and so it runs out of stories we then produce loads and loads of videos so i think there's probably been so far there would be a dozen videos that have been produced through this series of not just the

[20:51]
person coming to christ but the interview with the person who was part of their story and so you might have sally who became a christian and there's joe and jenny um being interviewed and they're going man you know i just kind of felt like sally was never going to get there it was just a hard slog and sally's going yeah you know the whole time i was really excited and interested in and just playing off those things so we'll use those a lot we've try and focus in on not

[21:22]
necessarily a slogan but something that we're going to say a lot it'll get put out in growth group material um we'll put it out a lot in um the social media stuff we do so sermon grabs all of those things by doing that um it's never it never contrasts with that big vision of passion for god passion for what we want to be in jesus compassion for the city it never um contradicts that

[21:55]
but in a sense it's always just a reframing of it in the present time um and i'll always lean towards the mission the mission aspect of that um because i really am convinced of two things one instinctively christians know that the gospel should be something we preach it's a message and instinctively christians want to be part of that and two we really have seen that the more gas you put into mission the more everything comes up

[22:26]
and so in those shorter ones we'll always lean on the mission one yeah although having said that just for the next month we have been talking a little bit more we can see people being tired in the covert thing and we are we are talking more about belonging we haven't come up with the the key phrase we haven't made it a visiony kind of thing

[22:57]
but just bubbling more to the surface is belonging that sense of who we want to be as a people but i would never make that i would never elevate that to vision um it's just too introspective for me too introverted where else all righty that's enough of a gap i'm going to keep going um

[23:28]
greg talk us about strategy goals yeah okay this is one of those areas where inevitably i'm going to get myself into trouble because people get really bullish about terms and defining terms so a vision is this not that and mission is different division and then you have strategy and then you have goals and all of those things um what we've found is every time someone new comes onto our team they bring their own bullish version of it and they end up fighting with everyone um i think you could be as simple as

[24:01]
what we're trying to achieve and how we're going to do it you could be as simple as that and it would actually work better than having constant fights about it we in our team have gone with the language of output goals and input goals i'll define them for you an output goal is what we're trying to achieve in this area an input goal is what we're going to try and do to achieve it so when it comes to

[24:34]
evangelism or mission an output goal would be for 20 people to become christians in the next six months the input goal would be we're going to try and run life four times and so we've found those two terms helpful because it's shorter language than what we're trying to do and how we're going to do it our whole team has come on board i again i with with a lot of things i would say who cares what the books say and who

[25:04]
cares how everyone else uses it as long as it's consistent in your team and makes sense um and as long as you can bring everyone on board so everyone on our team knows that an output goal is measurable it's the final uh is the the final state of affairs is the result the input goal is something we're going to do try to do to get there that i think is a helpful distinction but you need one when it comes to um strategy and goals you need one other element

[25:34]
to make it work and that's what we call trend data trend data is essentially your historic record of your inputs and outputs in other words it's what happened before um it's what you did and what happened as a result so here's some trend data for mission um how many evangelistic events or things we did last year

[26:07]
how many people came what percentage of those people became christians what percentage of people came back to week two um the trend data that you measure will be what you choose so i'm not saying these are the ones you have to do but these are examples of trend data essentially it means that over time you know that if we run this structure this many times

[26:37]
generally this many people will come and we're actually now at the point where we've been running life for 15 years our 15 years of data suggests that one quarter of the people who come become christians now that's not a promise there's no promise of god in there but statistically the trend data for the last 15 years says one person in four who comes to life becomes a christian that trend that's trend data for membership it might be how many new people walked in the door

[27:09]
last year how many times did we run our joining structure what percentage of new people did we get into that structure what percentage of those people joined our church that's trend data um so that when we go okay that means we can count on roughly these many people per year over the last 10 years that's our average new if we run this structure at these times generally this many people will join our church in ministry it might be how many people

[27:40]
are in church what percentage of people in our team how often did we run our recruitment program how did the percentage of people in teams change so what trend data is really doing is measuring our inputs and our outputs and it helps us to see what's reasonable what that means is for us when we're doing goals strategy and so on we start with trend data so what's the trend data in this area of

[28:12]
church historically over the last 10 years and then we'll say based on that what is a pretty ambitious output goal and then we'll say well what input goals do we need to have based on our trend data to achieve that output goal and then there's the action steps so i'll give you an example of that when it comes to mission here is the trend data of mission at hunter bible church

[28:44]
historically one quarter of people who come along to life will become christians and i'll say again there's no promise in that it's not a theological statement it's just measuring for the last 15 years historically that's generally been what happens anecdotally over the last 15 years it's harder to measure this we think it takes five invitations for one person to come to life so five different people will be invited one of them will come to life that seems to be the trend data there

[29:17]
last year about 170 people came to life and 40 people became christians so you can see we're pretty close to that one in four thing say we then to say okay there it is last year trend data 40 people what's a um what's a goal for 2020 the output goal that we might set is 50 people to become christians in 2020 um it's a stretch it's improving by

[29:48]
25 10 more that's our output goal it's measurable it's clear we'll know whether or not we reached it the input goal then based on our trend data is we need to get 200 people to life that means we need to get a thousand invitations to life in 2020 then some of the actions that we're

[30:19]
going to take is we'll sell people and be part of someone's story we'll tell lots and lots of stories we'll run life twice more this year than we did last year that means we're gonna have to train more life leaders it means we're gonna have to train people and and we're going to improve in people's skill in inviting people so that maybe we can bring that one in five down to one in four so you can see what we do the trend data helps us to see what we've been doing how successful is it generally what are

[30:52]
the numbers that helps us to build a stretching output goal and from that output goal we can reverse engineer from the trend data what the input goal needs to be and then we build the action steps to achieve the input goal without trend data our goals either end up all input goals or they're just guess work so um i talk to a lot of guys about

[31:23]
evangelism in their church and i'll say how many people became christians last year and they'll go don't know i don't know if anyone became a christian last year and i say what are your goals for evangelism this year and they'll be one of two things they'll say we're going to train 20 people in two ways to live that's an input goal there's no output there um or they'll go we want a hundred people to become christians

[31:54]
and it's just plain guesswork um but you can dress it up as faith but there's no reason at all to think that they're going to get there there's no input goal for it there's no strategy it's just i don't know 100 feels good and so without trend data your goals will either all be input or they'll just be plain guesswork without having clear output goals that you stick numbers to you'll just do things and you'll

[32:24]
never measure whether or not they're working so if you go we're going to train 20 people in two ways to live this year unless there's an output goal you don't know whether that was the right thing to do you don't know whether it was successful you just know that you trained 20 people in two ways to live you don't know whether it's actually working and whether it's the best use of your time the measure of success then becomes we ran it but really who cares so you need output goals in order to be able to measure the success and the worthwhileness of

[32:56]
spending your time on this without input goals all you have is this big ambitious kind of number floating out there and you just hope that things will happen in order to get there um you're just kind of hoping we'll do what we keep on doing and maybe we'll reach that number we'll see what happens but the input goal actually has to lead towards that output goal and then without the action steps at the end you never actually get going

[33:27]
so for us those four things knowing the trend data we're pretty obsessive about data um building the output goal based on that building the input goal to achieve the output goal and then the action steps for us that's how we do that's how we do goal setting strategy each of our teams has to come up with this uh every august for the following year and every team

[33:59]
is measured against the output goals um from the year before and saying well okay if we did reach it was it an accident uh or was it that the input goals actually really were the right ones and it worked um how does this year change our input data now um how does this add to it if we if teams didn't reach their goals then we'll start saying well was it an unreasonable one did we have the wrong input goals where we were operating on the wrong data that's the sort of thing that we do

[34:30]
every august and then there's the next four months um where our year kind of begins in august really in terms of teams so they're rolling on all right they're my thoughts on setting uh goals um yeah back to you derrick all righty here's what we're gonna do so i suspect you've got questions on this i'm gonna give you five minutes just in the breakout room uh to to do one of two things really on the

[35:00]
screen you can see a couple things if you've brought strategies goals priorities that that you know you want to share that'd be really helpful to share with the other person and just analyze are they input goals are they output goals what are they based on just running through the grid of what greg has said um you can do that if you get time well there's questions that greg has raised that you're really grappling over kick those around and we'll bring them back in five minutes and you can throw them greg off for one for five minutes time but you can bring them back as well so five minutes breakout rooms we are

[35:31]
going to go slightly over 12 o'clock i apologize um for that if you want to come back if you've got questions if you can hang around that'd be excellent um but i'm going to send you to break out rooms just to start to keep that around now here we go well we're going to do a bit of q a i want to throw my question at the grades that i had um uh one of the things that when i'm talking to guys uh in smaller churches and the church i'm a part of in prison which is revitalization very small um many old people some younger people

[36:04]
is this talk is often quite confronting around inputs outputs measuring because there's not much momentum at the moment so it is it's can feel confronting and dispiriting in points when you're thinking i should be doing this but i don't know what to measure and even if i did measure the numbers are so small that i'd cry myself to sleep at night um so how do you kind of navigate that um i think even if i started again i would still be pretty obsessive about measuring trend data but i would be more low-fi in the way i

[36:36]
collected it and i would collect less i think the general rule is collect as much data as you can get your hands on um then you've got to learn how to assess it and all of those things but there's five pieces of data that i would just be collecting from the word go um i'd be wanting to collect the percentage of member attendance across this year so of people who call themselves members of our church or people who we would call members what percentage are coming on a sunday

[37:06]
that's a huge thing the percentage of people of members in growth groups and whether that's going up and down you're measuring it year on year you're taking snapshots throughout the year in terms of are they actually coming as well but the percentage of people in growth groups the percentage of people in ministry teams and is that going up and down the percentage of new christians who end

[37:39]
up in a growth group um so in order to do that you've got to know how many new christians have come along to church but really what you want to know is did they join what percentage of them have ended up in our in our structure that says they've really joined so for us what percentage of new christians end up in a growth group that tells us whether or not our joining structures are working and then the last one bit confronting the percentage of non-christians who we have contact with

[38:10]
who become a christian we kind of want to know that in that we don't have complete control over it but we want to be always trying to find the thing that's working best um and so you know we're not going to hold the mission team to gun point and say why isn't that 80 um but if it goes down we want to know why um it's one of those things where in terms of outputs and inputs

[38:40]
we don't control the result but we do influence it we do know that we have influence over the results of things even when we can't control them and i want to take ris i want to be responsible and um i i want to be concerned about the effect of what i'm having the effect that i'm having on by what i do um and so for instance um if it turns out that no one came back to the second week of life because the guy we've got preaching at it is really dull well that's on me

[39:12]
i want to know that um yeah so i think there's a difference between controlling an output and influencing it but they're the five things i would be um constantly um in uh constantly wanting to find out and then as my resources increase i'd be wanting to measure a lot more as well um giving you kind of want to measure giving um you know there's a whole heap of things that you can measure as well but

[39:43]
yeah that's where i'd start