A Broad Vision Seen in the Smallest Details   

  What made my transition into college lacrosse hardest was a factor that made the team great. The team had a comprehensive vision—a system—that extended all the way down to the smallest details. In the church world, we talk a lot about vision, mission statements, purpose statements, and the like, but they don’t always translate into the smallest details of the church. In contrast, our team never had a pithy vision statement, but we had a really clear system of play that taught us what to do in any situation. It extended to how we played defense, how we played offense, and how we did everything in between. And the style that we played, while difficult, was also simple. It wasn’t hard to grasp once you had been exposed to it long enough. But being easy to grasp didn’t mean it was easy to do. It required coupling aggression with discipline and intelligence.   

This system wasn’t just an overall theory of how to play. There was consistency between the overall vision and how it extended to details. Without elaborating too much here, over time there were few situations where we didn’t know how to react. Was the ball rolling out of bounds, and we had to knock it back in? We knew when to knock it back in, what direction to knock it, and when to let it roll out of bounds. We played a controlled system based on knowing where we were at all times, and where others were. Before picking up a ball, which would initiate play immediately with a referee’s whistle, we were taught to survey the field and see where everyone was. We knew when to push a situation and when to slow things down. We knew what we were supposed to do, and learned the details to allow us do it.   

Churches are no different. Successful churches have a strong, simple vision—actually, a system—that extends to the details. A problem among too many churches, and the pastors that lead them, is that they may have a vision, but they don’t know how it extends to the smallest details in the church. Their vision may be too general and amorphous. It may be something like, “growing in Christ,” but they haven’t thought out the details of how to grow in Christ in church school, in meetings, in the youth group, in mission, in care of the church building, even in the cleanliness of the bathrooms.   

One of the things I did when I came to Calvin Presbyterian Church was to set a simple vision of “seeking God’s calling in all we do.” I don’t know that I always articulated my vision in this way, but it has influenced everything I do. In preaching I not only sought God’s calling about what I should say and how to say it, but I preached about how to do that in my sermons. I called on all committees and the church board to seek God’s calling. I pushed the idea that our church only does in mission and ministry what we are called to do, not what people think we “should” do. I pushed people on an individual level to seek God’s calling in their personal lives. We pushed this idea in budgeting and stewardship, asking “what are we called to do and to give?” This idea of seeking God’s calling even extended down to how we treat the church building: What level of cleanliness do we sense that God calls us to have? It led to a massive cleaning of the church soon after I started there 16 years ago in which we filled a tractor trailer dumpster with junk collected over 50 years prior to my coming.   

The point is that the vision, whether articulated or not, has to be able to be simply grasped, yet extend to the smallest details. It needs to be more of a system than a vision. In fact, I’ve noticed that the churches that seem most successful have a simple vision that extends to details throughout the church so that it becomes a system. Does your church have a vision that becomes a system? Is it simple enough to be grasped easily? Is it carried down to the details of the church.     

Stressing Fundamentals, Especially When Under Stress     

  No matter how good a team is, it always has several games where it stinks. As Bob Johnson, the coach of the 1991 Stanley Cup winning Pittsburgh Penguins, once said, “You’re going to lose 10 games no matter what you do, and you’re going to win 10 games no matter what you do. What matters is what you do in the other 62 games.” Similarly, I learned that no matter how good you are, you’re going to lose some games, but it’s what you practice afterwards that matters. In our championship season, we lost two games against teams I know we were better than. Those lessons taught me about the importance of fundamentals.    

My experience, both as an athlete and as a sports fan, was that when teams lose games they should have won, lesser coaches yell at them, run them to death in the next practice, and then think the problem is fixed. The practice after those losses taught me what really good teams do. They don’t get yelled at. They don’t get run to death. They go back to fundamentals.    

The next practice after one loss in particular was a long, 2 and 1/2 hour practice that entailed nothing more than the basics: catching and throwing, picking the ball up, working on footwork and one-on-one play, and basically being reminded of how to do the simple things well. And it worked. We got back on track.   

In a church, we can easily forget what the fundamentals are. One reason is that in seminaries we aren’t necessarily schooled in fundamentals. We are exposed to so many complex thoughts and ideas, theological explorations we love to dig into, that we forget what really matters. The fundamentals in a church are the basics of worship, and the quality of our relationships. The fundamentals are the factors that go into forging a strong connection with God and with each other.    

As senior pastor, my role is somewhat similar to that of a coach. I’m not responsible for barking out orders from the sidelines, but I am responsible for making an ongoing assessment of how we are doing from week-to-week. As part of my assessment I have to determine how our fundamentals are doing. It’s easy to mistake a church’s fundamentals with its bottom line—it’s numbers. The fundamentals of church aren’t how well the offering did, or how many attended. The fundamentals have to do with quality—to what extent did people encounter Christ in worship and how much did we show that we cared about people.   

It’s surprisingly easy to take both for granted in the overwhelming crush to do everything else that needs to be done in a church. Still, each time I sense that things aren’t going as well as I think they should, I focus on those two areas, even if it’s not apparent that the problem is worship and compassion. My sense is that if giving is down, the question we need to ask is how our worship and caring are, not “how do we get people to give more.” If people aren’t showing up for our programs, the question is how we can improve our worship and caring, not “how do we get people to show up.”    

I also focus on my own fundamentals. How’s the quality of my preaching and overall presence in worship? What do I need to do to improve them? I’ll also make a greater effort to visit people, chat with people on Sunday morning, connect with people who might be struggling and so forth. In sports, a failure to score or prevent someone from scoring generally doesn’t come from a lack of desire or effort. More often it results from a lack of attention to the details that go into scoring or preventing a score. I’ve played sports on some pretty crappy teams with coaches that yell. All they do is make things more confusing to an already confused team, making things worse. For us, focusing on the little things made us better.     

Building with Baby Steps Rather than Giant Leaps      

Not only during that championship season, but every season after that, we had a definite rhythm to how we progressed from the beginning of the season to the end. We took a series of baby steps that accumulated into great transformation, but we rarely took giant leaps. In early season practices we spent most of our time working on fundamentals and getting into shape. Then we progressed to one-on-one drills between offensive and defensive players. Days later we moved on to two-on-twos, three-on-threes, until we were doing well enough to start working on plays. It was really only after we had mastered these that we started doing regular full-field scrimmages. And even as we got to that level, our daily practices had a similar rhythm in which we moved from individual drills in the beginning to team drills at the end.   

In my work as a counselor, spiritual director, and mentor to pastors, I’ve been consistently disturbed by how often pastors demand that their churches make giant leaps to mastering ministries and missions that they are poorly prepared for. The pastors become frustrated and disappointed with their churches because of their lack of progress. But the real problem is that they ask too much of their members too soon. They ask them to take giant leaps instead of helping them take baby steps. They forget that these     

people haven’t gone to seminary, nor to all of those seminars and conferences that they have. Successful teams move on to complexity only after proper preparation. And when teams are overwhelmed, then the coaches simplify the game for them because they know that’s where success lies. Healthy churches are very similar. They don’t push people beyond their abilities, but move them at a level at which they can grow in confidence and ability. They help them take baby steps that turn into giant leaps.