In this inspiring book, Erwin McManus uses the biblical account of Israel's war with the Philistines (1 Samuel 13 and 14) and the characters of Saul and Jonathan to demonstrate the difference between living a life of purpose and adventure, and living one of apathy and missed opportunity. In the midst of a less-than-hopeful battle, Saul-who should have been leading-rested beneath a pomegranate tree as Jonathan seized the divine moment that would impact the future of Israel. Through this story McManus artfully illustrates the eight characteristics of an adventurer's heart, what he calls "the Jonathan factor." Using powerful examples from his own life and ministry, along with fresh biblical teaching, McManus asserts that God crafts divine moments specific to each of us-priceless opportunities for us to actively engage in God's big-picture plan. Apathy and apprehension prevent us from being all we are meant to be for God's kingdom. But by developing the characteristics McManus outlines, Christians can move from mundane to miraculous living.



Making Vision Stick
Andy Stanley
Thursday, 4-5 pm.
Kids’ Stuff – Northpoint Church in Atlanta
Question: Are you willing to let it go? Are you willing to lay it down? Are you willing
to sacrifice into order to become a leader?
No sacrifices that we’ve made can compare to the joy God gives us in living a life
committed to Him and to the wonder of building the local church and seeing lives
changed.
If the followers don’t get it, is because the leader hasn’t gotten it across.
What do I need to do to make sure it sticks with the people closest to me and then on
down through the levels of leadership?
Where the vision is not clear there is no focus and then there is randomness and
complexity.
You will ask the question: would I go here if I didn’t work here?
When you are the senior pastor and you are driving in the car and your wife asks, “Would
we go there if you weren’t the pastor?” What has happened is your vision has leaked,
there is randomness. There is sideways energy and you will wake up and not like the
organization we started.
Successful – complexity is the enemy of vision.
Everybody is busy but you’ve lost
Failure – there is a temptation to confuse your plan and strategy fails people assume it
was the wrong vision. Plans and strategies must always be changed. But visions are the
same and have to be refined.
And everything in between.
Vision is about what could be and should be.
In light of what is now, no wonder vision doesn’t stick. The legitimate needs of today
take away vision.
The vision doesn’t change.
I. There are three things you must do with vision to make it stick.
A. To make your vision stick:
1. Cast it strategically - Provides definition.
If it is a mist in the pulpit it is a fog in the pew.
Forces you to define.




2. Celebrate it systematically provides inspiration.
Regular ways to celebrate it.
3. Live it continuously
B. Each of the three provides a critical element
1. Casting a vision provides definition
2. Celebrating a vision provides inspiration
3. Living out a vision provides credibility.
When people understand that you are doing to do it anyway, this is part of who they are,
all of a sudden you are leading from the point of influence.
II. Cast It
None of us cast it enough.
Why? We’ve already said that!
As a communicator I feel I have to say it differently.
We feel like we are repeating something.
For vision to stick it has to be cast over and over.
A. Be strategic about when you cast vision
Not Labor Day
Not tax day.
3 Sundays in January
Strategic service Sunday – in May
By newsletter
By email
Etc.
Once a year is not enough!
How do we drive this throughout the organization?
B. Be strategic about how you cast vision
All of us are vision casters – we are keepers of the vision.
Whenever you cast vision work through these three things…
If you do you will become compelling.
1. Define the problem!
What problem does my organization or my piece of the ministry designed to solve?
If we don’t do what we do something won’t be accomplished.
There is something that won’t happen if you don’t do what you do.
Why is it we exist?
2. Offer a solution!
Your vision is a solution to a problem.
The truth is that your vision is the solution to a problem.
When your vision solves a problem that people feel emotionally about you will capture
people’s hearts.
3. You have to present them with a reason to do it and to do it now!
Willow is the solution to a problem.
If you don’t know what the problem is
And you can’t state the solution
And you don’t know why you must do it and do it now then you don’t have
vision.
If you can develop terminology and phraseology that do the three above then you are on
your way to developing a compelling vision.
What is it that needs to be done and no one is doing anything about it?
Andy is going to do it with or without us.
When you can talk about it in this way people will come alive.
III. Celebrate it
A. Make celebration a part of your culture!
You celebrate the vision spontaneously!
You need to built into the system time to celebrate your vision.
Celebrating your vision puts skin on the vision!
If you don’t do this vision becomes what anyone wants it to be.
Celebration let’s everyone know what the bullseye looks like.
Advantage – email lets us communicate with each other.
B. Illustrations:
1. Story telling
Is there anything that happened this last weekend that
2. Baptism
The way we do baptism.
In our church you must, in addition to being a Christian, you must produce a 2-4 minute
video of your story!
You have to built it into the schedule celebrating your vision.
Share these stories Sunday after Sunday.
IV. Live It
A. Your willingness to embody the vision of your organization will have a direct impact
on your credibility as a leader.
Invest and invite strategy!
How do people know that it is a genuine value and passion of the pastor?
I’m doing the best I can to live this out.
The first people to leave will the be smartest people who know that you aren’t doing what
you say is your vision.
To lead as God has called you to lead, it must be a part of your life.
They would do it anyway.
B. The primary thing that will keep you from living the vision is life.
C. If you loves your burden you lose your passion.
If you lose your passion who will lose sight of your vision.
V. Checking for leaks!
A. Keep an eye on programming.
Think steps, not programs!
We measure every addition to programming in reference to steps to accomplish your
vision. Every program needs to take people somewhere. We don’t add anything that
doesn’t get people into small groups.
B. Listen to three things
1. Prayer requests – it will tell you if people are locked into your vision.
Everybody is going to get sick and die. That gives us job security.
Woo! Is anybody burdened for a lost person.
Are sick people the only thing we are burdened for?
We have 12 sick people
Help them all get well or get sick and die and go on to be with you.
A huge indicator of vision.
2. Listen to great stories.
3. Listen to what people are complaining about.
Indicates what they are concerned about.
We are so committed to building relationships with unsaved people.
We are here to be an influence.
We are here to connect.
You asked me to comment on Bill Hybels’ talk on These Things We Must Do—from last year’s Leadership Summit; and you particularly want me to say what his talk means for church leaders here in New Zealand.
I loved his talk! I think it’s the hardest hitting talk I’ve ever heard him give; and in drawing out lessons for us, I don’t want to soften his words to make them more palatable.
Bill began by noting the sailing magazine he’d read that mentioned the 35 things you’ve got to do to win sailboat races, the 50 facets of leadership one book said you have to master to lead people, John Maxwell’s 21 irrefutable laws of leadership, Jack Welch’s eight leadership basics for growing a great organisation—and two colleagues’ request to talk at the Summit about the four things (just four!) we must do to grow prevailing churches.
So to help him get clarity and urgency, Bill imagines his colleagues sitting at his deathbed with a microphone as the doctor comes in and tells them Bill’s only got four sentences left in him! So his colleagues, Jimmy (Mellado) and Steve (Bell), tell him not to waste words saying goodbye to his family, quoting Scriptures or singing a final song to God—just ‘give us the four points, and then die.’
Here’s a brief summary of Bill’s talk about his ‘dying’ moments—followed by the reflections you requested.
Keep the vision clear
Get the people engaged
Make your gatherings memorable
Pace yourself for the long haul
What Bill’s talk means for us
The local church—the hope of the world
To discuss at leaders meetings
And for denominational leaders
Download
Keep the vision clear
His first dying sentence to his friends is, ‘keep the vision clear’, because as Proverbs 29:18 says, ‘Without a vision, the people perish’—that is, their dreams of doing something great for God die, although they themselves still live.
Bill paints an alarming picture of the crippling paralysis that sets in within months of vision getting fuzzy, and he warns us that this is what happens to ‘God’s sons and daughters’ when we don’t cast a compelling Christ-honouring vision that grips our people—they perish, die on the inside!
Then he comments on how congregations give up believing their pastors and leaders will ever paint a picture that will give them passion about something—as they still gather on Sundays and sing their songs, endure mindless and heartless sermons, and drive away ‘wondering why they bother with the whole thing. They just perish.’
So from his imagined deathbed Bill urges us to keep the vision clear, talking about it at our team meetings till it burns like a fire inside us, preparing for the day we share it with our whole church family ‘like prizefighters preparing for a heavy weight fight’, and putting ‘every last ounce of energy and emotion into it knowing it’s the most important talk we’ll give all year.’
Then he tells us what happens when leaders do this. People’s eyes get bigger, their posture straightens, their smiles get wider, and they start to soar—at Willow Creek, standing in long lines at the end of his vision talks as they sign up for the new vision. They’re captured by it; and Bill says we owe it to our people because they’ll perish without it.
‘Vision’, says Bill, is ‘the most potent offensive weapon in the leader’s arsenal …. So…. Keep the vision clear.’
Get the people engaged
Bill’s second deathbed whisper is, ‘get the people engaged’—just as in Nehemiah 4:6 ‘all the people worked with all their hearts.’ We’re to get every single person in our church working with all their hearts.
Bill illustrated this ‘ownership’ principle with the amazing story of a U.S. Navy captain turning his ‘ship and crew into the most unified, highest performing ship in the U.S. Navy.’ Then for the next 10 minutes, 20% of his talk, he walked us through the utter tragedy of his dad that no pastor ever engaged—and what would have engaged him!
I’ve never heard Bill talk so movingly about his non-engaged dad. In the church Bill grew up in, pastors came and went every four years, and as a boy, Bill secretly hoped that just one of these pastors would engage his dad and make him ‘a stakeholder of some sort. But it never happened, and he went to his grave without ever feeling the thrill of being a part of a Kingdom dream team,’—although he was one of the best leaders Bill has ever known. Still today, if he thinks about it too long, he breaks down—the utter, terrible waste of a gifted life!
So what would have got his dad on board with a pastor or leaders in a local church? Here’s Bill’s list.
1. His dad would have needed to be quite sure that ‘the pastor of that church was totally committed to the future of that church’—because his dad was a high commitment guy and would never sign on with a low-commitment leader.
Then, assuring us he doesn’t want to be disrespectful, but using the strongest language I’ve ever heard him use with leaders, he tells us if he we’re not in the pastorate because we have a burning vision to see God do something in our church, we should ‘Just get out …. because the Kingdom cannot proceed with leaders like that.’ His ‘dad would never have followed a half-hearted, kind of peacekeeping, neutral individual’; he’d only have responded to someone with a vision firestorm burning inside them.
2. His dad would ‘never have signed up for a small dream … a safe, sanitized, low-risk church vision’—because high capacity people like him don’t ‘sign up for tidy, little, easily achievable missions.’ They need dangerous ones, and we have to provide them.
3. His dad would never have ‘stepped forward, just kind of voluntarily, to offer his services’, never have raised his hand in a service, or gone to a table to sign up for a little committee—because ‘Leaders respond to other leaders, and he would have had to be asked.’ To sign up the high capacity people we need so much, we should be up front and ask them for their help. We shouldn’t say ‘no’ for them before they’re asked.
4. To become involved in the local church, his dad ‘would have had to have had a crystal clear idea of what he was being asked to do’—and the space to do it in. He wouldn’t want you checking over his shoulder every 15 minutes.
5. To be a volunteer in the local church, his dad ‘would have needed feedback and evaluation’—confirming when he was on the right track or helping him back on course when he wasn’t.
6. Finally, like every volunteer in every church, his dad would have needed an occasional reminder that what he was doing ‘really, really matters, and it matters for all eternity.’ Volunteers who work at their jobs for 50 hours a week, come home to a host of family tasks, and then pour themselves out for the local church, need to hear that they’re ‘not crazy’ doing this—just as Jesus used to assure his followers that they weren’t crazy for giving their lives to follow him.
In summing up, Bill said that if the pastor and leaders of the church had offered those kinds of things to his dad, he would have given his everything for it, and probably pulled in half a dozen of his high capacity business buddies with him. But, sadly, it never happened. Instead, he just warmed a pew his entire adult life, and dropped dead from a massive heart attack at about the age Bill is now. And Bill says there are millions of people like that in our churches—just waiting to give the Kingdom task their best shot … if only someone would ask them. So he urges us to do something and engage our people!
Make your gatherings memorable
Bill’s third deathbed recommendation is, ‘make your gatherings memorable’—that is, create such great church services that our people would never think of missing them and ‘regularly kick themselves around the block for not inviting more friends with them.’
Bill then reflected on the early days of the Willow Creek story when he went door to door every day, six days a week, for six weeks, asking people why they didn’t go to church. People gave him one main answer—they were bored to death by the services; they couldn’t stand them, wouldn’t subject themselves to them, and found them irrelevant to their lives. Then, he says, ‘Things haven’t changed.’
Building on Acts 2:43, ‘And everyone kept feeling a sense of awe’, he illustrated the ‘awe’ principle from a large service in London—and one at the little church he attends in the summer time. Both were awesome.
Then he added that the older he gets, the more he realises that when people now come to our services, they come hoping against hope that God will touch their lives—that He’ll meet them, His Spirit will whisper to them, and something awe-inspiring will happen that day. So, he says, all of us involved in services should ‘work really, really hard to make our services as memorable and as potentially awesome as we possibly can’, because people don’t want services as usual. And using several further illustrations from their ministry at Willow Creek, he repeats his plea to make our services memorable.
Pace yourself for the long haul
Finally, from his imagined deathbed, Bill urged us to pace ourselves for the long haul—that is, ‘to run in such a way as to win the prize’ (1 Corinthians 9:24).
To make his point, Bill dwelt at length on the Ultra Marathon Man who worked up to running extraordinary distances—and his own ministry crisis at the 15-year mark.
Then he commented how in that 4-year crisis, Willow Creek took the (then) daring steps of going to team teaching, team leadership, and giving him summer study breaks—and how now, reaching the 30-year mark, his passion is to finish well, even as the One he’ll stand before one day finished His race well.
So, with the Summit ending, and to drive this fourth point home, Bill told one last story about attending a pastor friend’s celebration to mark 50 years of being a senior pastor.
Bill spoke first; then the aging, white-haired pastor rose to his feet, and as he went to walk off the stage the church cheered and applauded him. Then he turned to Bill and the congregation, and told them how God called him to the ministry when they were singing a hymn in the country church he attended as a boy. Then he recited all four verses of the hymn that changed his life … ‘I love thy church, O Lord’—right through to ‘For her my tears shall fall. For her my prayers ascend. To her my cares and toils be given till toils and cares shall end.’
And there on the stage, as this aged pastor spoke, Bill broke down as he looked at this man who’d ‘given his guts’ for the church God loves and calls His bride. For that church, said Bill, ending his talk and the Leadership Summit, is ‘The hope of the world.’
What Bill’s talk means for us
Dave, nearly a year has passed since Bill gave his profoundly moving talk; and since you’ll need something on paper for your leadership meetings, I’ve written this brief summary so you can talk about it together—then discuss the lessons and questions I’ve added.
As I’ve pondered his talk over many months, still moved as much as the day I first heard it, I believe he’s touched on four things that deeply trouble the New Zealand Church—and on which its very survival depends.
Starved of vision, our churches are perishing
With a few notable exceptions, our churches are starved of vision—so they languish, with few people finding and following Jesus. Yet God intended His church to be the hope of the world. So what needs to change?
To grow our churches again, we’ve got to grasp that the visions that change churches (like the vision that burned in the young Bill Hybels’ heart as he listened to Dr Bilezikian) start in a senior leader’s heart, spread through the leadership team, and burst into flame in the congregation—just as Bill described in his talk, because as he says elsewhere, ‘vision is a picture of the future that produces passion in you.’
But even great visions die in 30 days. So when we’ve found and shared our vision (or dream), and got our people on board, we’ve got to give great vision-casting messages at strategic times of the year and work at keeping the vision alive and growing in people’s hearts—through our praise and worship, our service prayers, our notices, our testimonies, and especially our preaching. When it comes to churches and church services, we reap what we sow!
If you haven’t got a compelling church vision or dream yet, start today. Read website Letters 10, 11, and 13; and begin with all urgency because your church’s very survival may depend on it. Worsening denominational statistics remind us that more of the same will not do; our churches must change or face a slow and painful death.
Let’s each therefore determine that from this moment forward, we’ll go all out to find and implement the compelling vision that will change and grow our churches—because the local church is the hope of the world!
Without engaging our people, we’ll never win
We know from long experience that a pastor can only care for a small group of people; and today we’re a land of small churches—with dedicated pastors pouring themselves out for their little flocks, hoping against hope that something good will happen one day. But as the statistics show, it rarely does, because one person can’t grow a church on their own, no matter how dedicated or godly they may be.
Churches grow when leaders find a compelling vision and come to their congregations with the vision firestorm, Bill mentioned, burning in their hearts—and so share it, that the people sign up for it, and gifted individuals like Bill’s dad sign up for it when approached to do something ‘crazy’ for God! And even if you feel you don’t have any ‘gifted’ people at the moment, God can make up the difference … if your people are on fire for God—like John Wesley’s Methodists and General Booth’s Salvationists!
So our first challenge is to find a vision that overwhelms us; our second challenge is to so share it with our people that they sign up for it with enthusiasm and commitment.
To grow a local church, we must engage our people—even if we’ve only got a few!
Without great church services, we’ll never grow
Our church services have let us down for years, and are still the biggest reason for people not coming to church—or dropping out of church when they leave.
The great mid-twentieth century theologian and preacher, Helmut Thielicke, wrote about them as the crowds began emptying out of the western churches. Later, people told the young Bill Hybels they were the main reason why they didn’t come to church—and as he said in his talk, things haven’t changed and may even be worse.
In fact, some years ago, a Kiwi church got graduate business students from the local university to survey the many thousands of people who lived near their church; and the students found ‘the overwhelming majority’ of those who responded said they’d attend a church like the one doing the survey—if invited by a friend or relative to something special. Out there, it’s not the people who’re reluctant to come; it’s us who aren’t ready to receive them!
To grow our churches, we must, as Bill says, work very, very hard at putting on the best services we possibly can—using the great special Sundays of the year to invite people to a service they’ll connect with, and closing the ‘style’ gap between our special and ordinary services because God wants His church to grow.
So we get a compelling vision, we powerfully engage all our people, and we put on great church services to connect with the people we’re reaching for Jesus. Without great church services, we’ll never grow.
Without pacing ourselves, we won’t last
Ministry, whether paid or voluntary, is a marathon—not a sprint.
And whether it’s paid, or voluntary, we can launch into it with such energy and lack of self-care that we burn out, and unlike Jesus and Paul, never complete our course—dragging our church down with us because we didn’t pace ourselves for the long haul.
So let’s lead with vision, engage our people with enthusiasm, put on outstanding services, and so run as to complete our course—these are Bill’s ‘deathbed’ challenges!
The local church—the hope of the world
Dave, I’m glad to comment on Bill’s great talk.
And if perhaps it is a far cry from the Leadership Summit and Bill’s big church in Chicago, to your small but growing church in New Zealand, the things Bill shared are as important for you here as they are for him there.
You do indeed just have a handful of people at present, but you’ve started the journey to a new future.Give top priority now to finding that vision that will transform your church. Share it with your people with all the grace and passion God gives you. Give your services a ‘mission wash’ so they really reach and hold newer people—as well as holding your present people. And take a little time for yourself out of each day, your day off each week, a little extra time if possible each month, and your full entitlement of holidays each year. Aim, like Jesus and Paul, and Bill and his aged pastor friend, to finish your ministry with joy.