Why We Need to Be Mean About The Vision

A Personal Conversation with Shawn

I remember having a conversation with Shawn Lovejoy a year after starting my new position with LifeWay Christian Resources. I had moved my family down to Nashville, TN to figure out how LifeWay was going to resource church planters, multisite churches, and multiplying churches (we started NewChurches.com as a result).

So we were together at the Exponential conference, and Shawn asked me, “How’s everything going?”

I just responded the way I normally do with a big grin, “It’s going great!”

But then, he stopped, looked at me straight in the eyes and asked me one more time, “How’s everything going?”

I remember thinking to myself, Shawn’s a really nice guy, and I enjoy working with him, but why is he asking me this question again?? We’re in a public place at a conference…does he expect to “counsel” me here?

Sure, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed, but who wasn’t anyway? After all, in the previous months, I was rewriting Planting Missional Churches with Ed Stetzer, developing and launching the strategy for NewChurches.com, leading a major software redevelopment initiative with the North American Mission Board to better assess, train, and coach their church planters, launching The State of Church Planting research project, and now speaking four times at the Exponential conference, but this season was eventually going to pass, right?

I was at a conference and had to put my “game face” on, so who was Shawn to be confronting me like this? Well, the reality was, Shawn was just being himself. He was acting as a wise mentor who had travelled this path many times, and was seeing someone else who was heading down the same path.

So he looked at me and said, “I’ve been where you are bro, I’ve burnt the candle at both ends, and it just wasn’t worth it.”

At that, I decided it was time to sit down and have a real conversation with him.

A Mentor and a Guide

While reading Shawn Lovejoy’s, Be Mean About The Vision: Preserving and Protecting What Matters, I felt like we were back at that table all over again. In this book, not only does he share leadership wisdom and experience from his years of planting and leading a multiplying church, but he also guides the reader through this incredibly important topic of vision and leadership through questions at the end of each chapter, like this one,

Could my pace be silently killing off the vision in me?

In this book, Shawn serves as a mentor and guide to the reader through his honest stories and masterful questions. As a result, this book feels less like an information dump, and more like a transformational journey.

Ultimately, being mean about the vision is about being intentional. Shawn defines it well, “Being mean about the vision is about keeping our organization so focused on the goal that people are willing to sacrifice for it.”

Systems in Leadership

While there’s much to be gleaned in every chapter of this book, like how to identify and prevent vision hijackers from damaging your church, or how to transition your church from being attractional to being missional, or even how to simplify your church so that you are clear and focused on your vision, my favorite chapter was the sixth one because it was all about systems and structure.

In order to “keep the vision alive in others” (the title of chapter six), you need to first have a vision statement that is short and simple. Shawn suggests that the vision shouldn’t take longer than 10 seconds to share and that it shouldn’t be longer than one sentence. After all, “a vision is only as strong as it can be shared and applied.”

Once you have a simple and compelling vision statement, it’s important to communicate it so often and in a variety of different ways so that it becomes contagious and unstoppable. Here are a few of ways that Shawn suggests you can do this:

• Have multiple mission moments. This is about sharing your vision and mission every Sunday during your worship service in a creative manner. You can also do this via email, video, and in your everyday conversations.
• Orient the newbies. This is about ensuring every newcomer and staff member understands the vision, sees the vision, and has the chance to experience the vision. You can do this in your newcomer class as well as in your staff orientation.
• Circle the wagons. This is about meeting with your leaders on a regular basis because “vision alignment among leaders requires two fundamental things: proximity and consistency.” When Shawn was pastoring Mountain Lake Church, he would meet with his direct reports weekly, the other pastors bi-weekly, the staff monthly, and the finance team and advisory team on a bi-monthly basis. He would also make sure that his pastors were meeting monthly with their own leaders, while meeting as a church semi-annually with every leader in all of their campuses.
• Teach on vision. This is about aligning your preaching calendar around the vision statement of your church. For example, Mountain Lake’s vision was “Giving people a place to belong in a healthy relationship with God and others; become more like Jesus; and bless our world.” As a result, every teaching series they did was about either helping people belong, become, or bless.
• Celebrate it constantly. This is about making celebration a regular part of your culture. After all, “what gets celebrated gets done, because what we celebrate communicates what we value…Being mean about the vision requires celebrating every time we see the vision happening in and around our organization.”

“All pastors are interim pastors. Every leader is an interim leader.”

In the last chapter of Be Mean About The Vision, Shawn shares how he transitioned from founding and leading a multisite mega church, Mountain Lake, to his new efforts with CourageToLead.com. The insights in this concluding chapter are worth the price of this book because thousands of churches in the upcoming years will have to figure out succession. After all, over 10,000 boomers are retiring daily in America! So imagine what would happen if we all began to see our current leadership positions as temporary ones, since “every leader is an interim leader”?

Here’s a sobering question,

If you knew you were leaving your organization in one year, and had no fear of losing your job, what decisions would you make? Here’s a thought: Why not make those decisions now? Leadership requires the courage and the character to do what needs to be done, regardless of the perceived costs or outcomes.

If I haven’t convinced you to get this book yet, let me just come right out and say it. Buy the book here and start Being Mean about the Vision!