Mission and Meaning

An article for Dayspring newspaper of the Diocese of West Virginia, June 2011


Mission and Meaning

Bob Honeychurch, the Congregational Vitality officer for Church Center (though he works out of L. A.), flies a lot. He told a story recently about one of those inevitable airplane encounters, when he got seated beside a “compulsive communicator.” The man just could not shut up. But in the midst of all his verbiage, he shared with Bob a meaningful personal story. It seems the man came home one evening to find his wife all excited. On “Oprah” that afternoon, she had seen a program about the need for a family mission statement. Nothing would do but for the family to sit down at the dining table that very evening and hash out a mission statement for their family. Bob’s seatmate was not very amused, but he went through the process to keep the peace. At the end of the evening, they had a statement that said something like, “In all decisions, and in everything we do, we will put first the needs and well-being of the family.” It seemed obvious enough, but a big waste of an otherwise free evening.

“But you know,” the babbler said, “it turns out that our statement has made all kinds of differences in our lives for the good: in my job, my work schedule, where we live, what activities we participate in, how we spend our money, just about everything. It guides our whole lives.”

That’s what mission statements do. They guide.

A big part of my job is to go around working with congregations as they discover their unique mission, and help them express that in effective language. Listening to Bob, it dawned on me that, if I consider mission statements important, maybe I should have one for my own professional life. So I came up with one. This will guide, change, and inform how I do my job for the remainder of my active career:
My mission is to facilitate every congregation in the discernment, articulation, and implementation of its God-given mission.

Even more simply, my mission is to help others discover, state, and live into their mission. I can’t think of anything I could do that would be more important.

I encounter resistance to the idea of a mission statement. “We did that before,” people say, at work or at church, “and it didn’t amount to anything. No one could even remember it, and it never meant anything to anyone”

That happens, I find when:

A) The statement is too long, too detailed, too general, or too vague.

B) Only a few of the congregation had a hand in it, and others never “bought into it.”

C) The leadership gets lazy and fails to consult the mission statement regularly, and especially when making plans. There is no follow-through.

D) The statement is put on auto-pilot and allowed to get out-of-date. Things change.

In other words, it takes some discipline and work to make the statement effective. It takes time and effort to come up with a good one in the first place, and that is the source of much resistance also. It is easier just to pick something that seems like a good idea and do it. Unfortunately, that course of action results in wasted effort, directionlessness, lack of focus and direction, and perhaps even failure to accomplish God’s purpose. It is equivalent to an individual living day to day with no plans, no follow-through, and no reflection: satisfying within the moment, but where is the meaning? As Thoreau says, “The unexamined life is not worth living."
No congregation can do everything. A dib and a dab here and there is highly frustrating and ineffective. Worse, it fails to accomplish change, or to attract and hold commitment. “By far the most powerful force of attraction in organizations and in our individual lives is meaning,” writes Margaret Wheatley. If we hope for our church congregations to attract, they must convey meaning. To do that, they need to have a discernable, and a discerned, meaning to convey.

But we have to follow through. “Vision without action is a dream.” Says Joel Barker. “ Action without vision is simply passing the time.” To be effective, we must not have one without the other.

And I’ve learned to go against Episcopal tradition and the Vestry Handbook in this way: the work of discerning mission is not exclusive to the Vestry of the congregation. It is an activity for everyone in the community who wishes to participate. In fact, that breadth of inclusion is critical, for without it, we don’t get the buy-in necessary to make the mission statement work. “People will support what they helped create.” (Marvin Weisbord)

There is more to planning than just a mission statement, of course. The mission statement tells who we are, our identity and purpose. After that, a vision statement describes what we would act like if we lived up to our mission statement. Each is as unique and specific as God’s call. After that, there are objectives to implement the mission and vision, and goals to accomplish the objectives. Action plans lay out how the goals will be met, and then, of course, they must be implemented. Afterward, reflection and review let us know how we did, and how we can do better in the future.

All of this takes time and effort, but then, so does everything worthwhile. Our hope, in the end, is not just to spend our time wisely, or even to be a more successful church, by whatever measure. It is to be who God is calling us to be, and to participate in whatever ministry God is calling us to. There can be no better use of our time and effort than that.