Realigned Pt. 3
Another Vision Sunday?
“Vision needs to be repeated regularly. To make it stick, you need to find ways to build vision casting into the rhythm of your organization.” —Andy Stanley
I’m sitting at my desk writing this post as I prepare for Vision Sunday this weekend.
It’s the second of four we schedule each year.
Why so many?
Because, as one writer puts it, “mission drifts and vision leaks.”
This is perhaps more true now than it’s ever been before, given that the leadership landscape has changed drastically over the last twenty years.
Think back to 2006 for a second.
George W. Bush was President.
The first iPhone had not been released yet.
Facebook was still mostly for college students.
People were buying CDs, renting movies from Blockbuster, and carrying iPods with downloaded songs instead of streaming everything instantly.
What feels like ancient history was just twenty years ago.
Back then, information wasn’t as readily accessible, and attention was harder to steal. We weren’t walking around with an algorithmically powered device in our pocket, fighting for our focus every waking moment.
Today things are different.
We are flooded 24/7 with information, opinions, headlines, outrage, hot takes, notifications, podcasts, videos, reels, think pieces, political tribalism, conspiracy theories, productivity hacks, self-help frameworks, and other endless streams of content.
When I came of age and into leadership, I quickly learned that as church leaders, we are not leading people in a vacuum. We are trying to help people follow Jesus as they navigate an ecosystem of voices, values, and visions that are often at odds with the way of Jesus. Which means we cannot assume that hearing something once is enough, no matter how compelling the sermon or how clear the vision.
Twenty years ago, maybe one strong vision talk in January could have sustained momentum, but not so anymore.
The challenge today isn’t simply communication; it’s formation.
And formation, at least in my experience, rarely happens through a single moment of inspiration. More often, it happens through repeated reminders, practices, and invitations.
Which raises an important question:
If repetition matters, what exactly are we repeating?
This is where my understanding of vision may differ from others.
When most people hear the word “vision,” they think of strategy. Goals. Growth plans. Buildings. Budgets. Metrics. Future ambitions. In many leadership spaces, vision becomes shorthand for answering one question:
Where are we going?
And to be clear, direction matters. Churches should know where they are headed.
But in a formation-focused church like the one we’re trying to build, vision has to go beyond destination and into development.
Vision must be less about where we are going and more about who we are becoming.
One day, my time at Kingdom South will come to an end. There will come a moment when I hand this church to the next generation of leaders. When that day comes, I don’t think the question keeping me up at night will be how many people attended, how much money we raised, how many events we hosted, or even how many sermons I preached.
The question I imagine asking is, who did we become?
Did we become more like Jesus?
Did we become the kind of people who work the words of Jesus instead of merely hearing or admiring them?
Did we become the kind of people God could trust with His mission?
Those are the questions that matter to me.
But don’t misread me. I care about excellence. I care about healthy systems. I care about growth. I care about reaching people. But all of those things are a byproduct of formation, not formation itself.
That’s why I believe my greatest contribution to Kingdom South isn’t a sermon series, a clever idea, or even a particular ministry initiative.
My greatest contribution is my ability to faithfully cast the vision God has placed in my heart for this church and then do everything within my influence to create an environment where that vision can flourish.
That, to me, is the work.
Everything else I do is in service to that.
Sean
If you’d like to hear more about who we want to become at Kingdom South, I’d encourage you to join us for Vision Sunday this weekend.
Photo: Kingdom South
Every vision begins as a sketch before it becomes a structure.