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Pastors.com recently featured three great articles on developing and communicating your church’s vision. For starters, Nelson Searcy, the lead pastor of The Journey Church (New York City, NY), offers six tips on developing and communicating vision.

1. The myth of leadership as a position. Because vision is a requirement of leadership, you cannot lead based on position alone. With vision comes leadership.
2. Cultivating a vision. The key point on vision is that it is unique to every leader. My vision must be cultivated out of experience, inspiration, or analysis. If you borrow a vision, you are simply managing another person’s vision, you are not leading.
3. Defining a vision: vision and values. Your vision is defined by your values. Your values are those ideals that you cling to deeply - your core.
4. Vision waits on you. Once a person cultivates a vision there are only two options: containment or casting.
5. Casting a Vision.
   - Communicate clearly.
   - Let it stew.
   - Share with your trusted friends.
   - Implement cautiously.
   - Observe.
   - Never give up!
6. Work on your vision. Smart leaders do not waste their lives on directionless activity; rather they invest in a vision with purpose.

Follow that up with Rick Warren’s five ways to communicate your vision.

1. By personal example. People need to be able to see your own commitment and see you as a role model. In many ways, you must personify your ministry. The values you’re trying to say through the ministry ought to be seen in your life.
2. By verbal slogans. The power of a slogan is very important. People do not remember speeches, and they do not remember sermons. They remember phrases. You need to have phrases that sum up succinctly in a few words what you’re trying to do so people can grab onto it.
3. Analogy or metaphor. If you want to communicate the vision for your ministry or the vision of your church, you need to compare it to something that everybody already relates to.
4. Symbolism. Symbolism reaches people on an emotional level rather than on an intellectual level. Phrases and logos and things like that are very important.
5. Personal contact. Get one-on-one with key people, the people who give legitimacy to your ministry. Get alone with them. Share the vision with them. Then they’ll be your key supporters.

Lastly, add these nuggets to the stack as Andy Stanley, pastor of North Point Community Church (Alpharetta, GA), discusses how to communicate vision through your own example.

• If I was expecting our people to give sacrificially, I had to do the same.
• There is something inauthentic about someone who casts a vision for which he or she will not personally sacrifice.
• If God has birthed a vision in you, it is only a matter of time until he asks you to sacrifice. What you do at that juncture will in all likelihood determine the future success or failure of your vision.
• Sacrifice for the sake of a God-ordained vision paves the way for spiritual renewal.

Remember that these are only short excerpts. I highly encourage you to take the time to read the full text of all three articles. There is a wealth of wisdom to help encourage and equip you to successfully develop and communicate your church’s vision.

Microsoft has a nifty little tool that allows you to predict a person’s age and gender according to their search queries and website visits. Although it is a cool feature, it is not very scientific and probably should not be considered a practical source for researching the people you want to reach. However, there may be rare circumstances where its predictions are insightful.

Special thanks to Trend Hunter for highlighting this new tool.

Harvard Business School highlighted some great management principles from Peter Drucker. These principles can be applied to your ministry to boost your effectiveness.

• There is surely nothing quite as useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
• What we need is (1) a way to identify the areas of effectiveness, and (2) a method for concentrating on them.
• One question should be asked… “If we were not in this already, would we now go into it?” And if the answer is “no,” the next question should be: “How do we get out and how fast?”

No church is perfect, and many are wasting time on doing things they do not need to be doing. Remember your church only has so many resources, and you need to figure out which areas generate the greatest results for the resources you invest into them. If you evaluate your church and trim away unnecessary parts while improving upon inefficient parts, you will find that your ministry is capable of accomplishing far more than previously thought.

If you work at a church, Creative Pastors brought up an important task for you to add to your to-do list.

• This summer, visit your church.

Don’t go to put in 10 hrs of work on the weekend. Don’t go to get spiritually fed (although you should do this every week). This time, go to observe and experience your church. View your church through the eyes of a visitor. View your church as a child would. If you are able to, you will see a whole new world.

Because most pastors spend more waking hours at the church than at their own homes, they often become familiar with their surroundings. They no longer notice how dirty and old the facilities are becoming and how confusing the signage is.  Not to mention, that those on church staff seldom have a moment to actually pause and observe how people interact with the church. So this summer, do it. Visit your church. And when you do, ask yourself:

• How can we better serve our guests and congregation?
• How can we minister to people through every interaction and not just in the sanctuary?

“Visiting your church” should be a regular duty for someone on your church’s staff. For more on the subject, be sure to check out Creative Pastor’s post and read Church Relevance’s February newsletter, Marketability First.

This one is for all the church designers out there. Whether a print designer, web designer, or interior designer it is good to know about color. Most of you probably already know that colors appear differently depending the colors surrounding them.

Either way you should like the three fun color illusions featured at echalk.

Special thanks to Matthew Oliphant for bringing this to my attention. 

I love children’s ministry. However, a good children’s ministry and actually any busy church collects a good share of scuff marks along the way. Your church’s beautifully painted walls can quickly look like the slums if you don’t touch-up the wake of crayon hurricanes, shoe marks, and other grease and grime that seem to always find a way into the decor.

Now those touch-ups can be quick and painless with the Qwikie Paint Touch-Up Tool. The lid has an ingenious built-in brush. In a matter of seconds, you can touch-up the nicks and unsightly marks on your walls without the hassle of finding a brush and then cleaning it. You can buy a 3-pack online at BuilderDepot for $15.99.

Special thanks to Kevin Kelly Cool Tools for highlighting the Qwikie.

Catalyst Conference is offering uber sweet discounts if you register BEFORE June 28th.
Save $50 to $110 per person!

After August 30th, admission is $279.00 for an individual. If you register before next Wednesday (June 28th), you save $50. And if you really want to save, get a group together and enjoy-

$229/person for groups of 2 to 9
$209/person for groups of 10-19
$189/person for groups of 20+

They also have a discount for full-time students.

If you haven’t heard of Catalyst Conference, it is a conference developed by InJoy focusing on a new generation of church leaders. This year’s conference looks well-worth the trip to hear insights from Andy Stanley, Donald Miller, John C. Maxwell, Rick McKinley, Gary Haugen, Louie Giglio, John Stott, Kevin Carroll, Marcus Buckingham, and George Barna.

Remember you only have a few days left to take advantage of the uber sweet deal.

It is important for churches to realize who they are called to reach.

Once realized, it is important for churches to learn more about these people. Understanding their culture, their needs, and their lifestyles will increase your potential to effectively reach them if you use that knowledge to focus on their needs and preach in a way that is relevant to their lives. Keep in mind that this will increase your potential but not maximize your potential to reach them.

If you want to maximize your potential, your church must go beyond stereotypes, demographic trends, and similarities. You must focus on the individual. It is good for your church to be able to understand and meet the general needs of the congregation and community, but it is more important that your church creates opportunities to understand and minister to people one-on-one.

Last month, David Maister shared some excellent points on his blog about the importance of avoiding generalization and treating people as individuals. A few points were:

• People do not want to be treated as a member of a group, or class, or market segment, or subset. They want to be treated as individuals.
• The essential lesson is that there is no one thing that all clients want.
• How quickly can you or your organization find out what the specific client wants and adapt to that clients’ individuality? How well do you truly listen, adapt and respond?
• Really great client service doesn’t mean figuring out a bunch of neat things that most people like and then doing those things to everyone. Client focus means being good at figuring out, in real time, what each client would prefer, and adapting as much as you can to those preferences.

Keep in mind it is not practical let alone possible to customize every detail for every individual. However, you ministry should have some flexibility and be able to meet and minister to people’s needs on an individual level. Are there any rigid policies keeping your church from meet individuals’ needs? How can your church better reach people at a one-on-one level?

Special thanks to MarketingMonger for highlighting Maister’s thoughts.