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.