Mission and Vision (part 2)

Two weeks ago my pastor announced a new mission and vision for our church, and informed us that he would spend six or seven Sundays "unpacking" this for the congregation. For those interested, my church is here, and the first two sermons can be found here. I thought I'd track with these sermons here at In the Clearing, working out my own thoughts and perhaps soliciting some of yours.

Without further ado, here's the new mission statement for the church:

A passionate, Spirit-empowered community, who follow Jesus, celebrate God and expect his presence. We equip each other to serve and impact our neighborhood and the world.

My thoughts: first of all, I'm not sure how much mission-statements matter in the long run. I guess they matter only as much as we want them to. In some way they can serve as a giant organizational "post-it note of the mind," something to which one can look back often and check oneself against. But it should be said that, if this is to be its purpose, then it had better be spot-on. It had better be a fundamentally Biblical mission, grounded firmly and clearly on the core or essence of the New Testament's "mission" for the church.

My first reaction to this mission statement is that it shows the signs of trying to be a catch-all for all the buzzwords of the prevailing church zeitgeist. You have here passion, community, celebration, impact, all in one statement! As such, it seems a little dispersed and unfocused to me, a compendium more than a mission-statement. What after all is the main thing here? What is the fundamental reason for our church's being--as far as that can be ascertained from this statement?

Shall we assume that the most important thing must be that which comes first? Maybe "passionate" is given first place because it is of first importance. But passion is a tricky thing. Passionate about what? I guess I'm all for passion, and I'm not suggesting for a moment that passion about our mission is not important, but here we have passion extolled even before the mission is clearly stated. I have seen much passion expended on many misguided causes, inside and outside the church. To be quite honest, I think if I focus on the right things, passion will take care of itself. My mission is my mission, and if that mission is aligned with the purpose of God for me, for my family, and for my church, it's all the more likely that passion will accompany my pursuit of that mission.

The mission statement proceeds to collect several other descriptors, all of them commendable. Spirit-empowered, yes, that's fine (we are, after all, a Vineyard church). "Celebrate God." "Expect his presence." "Equip." "Serve." "Impact." All these are fine words, fine goals, I suppose, but again I ask, what's central here? What's the linchpin, the one thing upon which the life of the church hinges. The one thing, in other words, that makes ours a "Christian" church?

As a comparison, here's another mission statement. In fact, it's our church's own previous mission statement.

We at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Greater Portland are a community of people committed to loving God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. We want each person to know Jesus Christ personally and have the opportunity to grow to their full potential in Him. We are also committed to reaching out to the wider community, and the wider world, around us with the transforming power of God’s love.

One difference I quickly notice is the presence of an actual Scriptural mission statement right at the start. I also notice that the old statement seems to at least suggest a certain correspondence, if only loosely, with the great commission that Jesus himself gave to his disciples before ascending.

Another difference: where the old statement spoke of reaching out to the world "with the transforming power of God's love," the new statement speaks vaguely of "impacting" the world. "Impact our neighborhood and the world." What on earth does this mean? What kind of impact are they talking about? How more vacuous can any word be than this word "impact." If there is a specific kind of impact we Christians collectively are supposed to be having, why not spell it out?

So here's my point in a nutshell. If you need to have a mission statement at all--and I'm not convinced that you do--you might as well make it spot-on and exceedingly clear. Leave out the mushily fungible words like "impact." Be specific. Use key words and concepts that are also Biblical key words and concepts. Identify the one thing needful for a church to be, in fact, the body of Christ.

I'm not offended or terribly put-out by this new mission statement, but neither am I inspired by it. It is not my mission statement. But on the bright side, it's only a mission statement. And who pays any attention to those?

Tomorrow we'll take up the "vision" part, and then we'll be all caught up. Foretaste: my response to the vision is a good deal more positive than my response to the mission.