Visonaries, Delusionaries, and Growing as a Leader

This is more of a brain dump than a tight, logical article. A lot of ideas in here could be developed into something standalone, but I’m gonna give you what I got.

First, as much as I hate the idea of a visionary, I know that vision matters in leadership. What I mean by vision is simply a mental picture of a task complete. So when you cast a vision, you’re using words and other tools to show people what can be accomplished if we work together toward a goal. Money and people follow vision. And so if your church is struggling, a lot of times it’s because there’s a lack of vision.

For example, for our size, our church was undergiving. But after we sat down and put together some stuff to communicate what was normal and our needs to get into this building, giving has almost doubled. People just didn’t understand, and we lacked clarity, so we made clarity. This is what average giving looks like in a church our size in the Midwest. If we can get up to this, this is what we’ll do with the money and how it’ll be an application of our mission. That’s vision casting.

The reason we hate the idea of vision so much is that a lot of men who claim to be visionaries are what I would call delusionaries. These are men who don’t know the difference between reverse engineering a plan rooted in reality and attempting to execute their fantastic dreams.

Many well-intentioned people have mistaken the daydreams of delusionaries for vision and sadly wasted sometimes a decade of their life. Therefore, pastors don’t want to look anything like some cheap Christianese version of Steve Jobs. But you do need to have a vision. Matter of fact, I would argue one of the chief responsibilities of a founding pastor, or the pastor who is most experienced in leading an elders group, is to work with those men to create the vision and then keep everyone working toward it.

That brings me to my next thought. Though I’ve been adjacent to a lot of big-name or wealthy people most of my adult life, I myself was very much small-time until about seven or eight years ago, when I was in my late 30s. It was at that time my life took a pretty radical turn, and I quickly climbed up the leadership ladder in business, church, and broader society.

These days I belong to senior leadership in just about everything I’m involved in, and that requires that you think and behave differently. I can remember a year and a half ago when a bunch of employees were listening to me in a break room tell some really stupid jokes. And they just kind of stood around and listened and kind of laughed. And I remember thinking in my head, why are they listening to me like this? These jokes aren’t that funny. And then it occurred to me that in many cases I was their boss’s boss’s boss. It was a show of deference that you give senior leadership and a reminder to me that I’m not just one of the boys anymore.

And being one of the boys is fun. You can have a looser tongue. You can be less disciplined. You have less responsibility. But as you climb and gain more authority, with authority comes more responsibility. And responsibilities must always be dealt with soberly.

I remember watching some war movie where the general has to have the courage to send the army out to fight, even though he knows that the casualties will be extreme. But it’s what the battle requires. When he was a younger man, he was a doer. He was the guy at the bottom in the infantry. But now that he was an older man, he was the decider and director. And such authority, because of the power attached to it, required sobriety.

If you’re going to move up, you’re going to learn to speak differently, even dress a little differently, and recognize that while you must maintain a common touch and be reasonably accessible, the ladder is real and there’s a distance between the rungs by design.

To swing back to the delusionary just for a moment, most delusionaries are much more interested in skipping the doer floor-level rung and getting right to the decider-general rung, which is why their daydreams are so disconnected from reality. My years of laboring in obscurity and struggling were very good for me. Don’t resent where God has you.

Along with your responsibilities as a leader is the need to make sure you spend your energy in the right place and on the right people. A lot of people think of the pastoral ministry as almost like a spiritual first responder, as someone who prioritizes people in crisis. Therefore, many pastors develop a habit of giving attention to the most needy and desperate people in their churches.

The problem with this is that if you spend all your time on the needy and desperate people, who are often people who don’t actually have acute problems as much as chronic problems, you will overlook the people who are healthy and productive and, with just a little more investment, would flourish all the more and in turn create a more stable, healthy ministry that’s able to help the needy and desperate people.

First, as a senior leader, you will be the most visible, and those people will want the best help they can get, which is very natural. But you only have so much time, so you must be very careful how you spend it. I have found one of the best ways to help those people is to make them wait a little bit to see you.

Now, if it’s truly an acute situation, such as a death in the family, physical abuse, or something very dramatic, obviously that’s something you must jump on. But a lot of these things can wait a night or two, if not even longer. And by enforcing that boundary, you teach them a lot. You teach them to take responsibility for themselves and that the world doesn’t revolve around them. You also find that many times those people work it out themselves. It’s still good to follow up with them, even if just by a phone call and a prayer.

I will say also, as a senior leader, these are opportunities for you to help younger leaders get more experience in dealing with these sorts of problems. You simply tell that person, I’m not able to meet today, but why don’t we have you connect with this or that person? I’ll connect you by text, and you guys can at least have a discussion, and we can follow up.

You always have to be raising up new leaders. It never stops. The moment you stop raising up new leaders is the moment your church starts to die. Which is why it’s so important that you use your time to invest in the healthy people who often won’t ask for your time because of who they are. Those are the people you cannot ignore.

This brings me to our church building. We’re doing the final run-through on some things today, and we’ll close on it on Monday. This is truly incredible. We are a five-year-old church purchasing a 21,000-square-foot facility with 250 parking places and 19 acres of land.

The number of people involved in making this a reality is in the hundreds. There are the people who gave and prayed for it, and they’re foundational. And of course, there are the different laymen who are leading point on some of the cleaning, cataloging, and external renovations. And then there are those of us who have played a central role in negotiation, paperwork, design, and contracting with GCs to build our new sanctuary. It really is a team of people laboring with their various gifts to get it done.

If you can’t build teams, you can’t build. And if you can’t raise up other leaders, you can’t build teams. A healthy church has all different sorts of people involved with different roles, different levels of authority and responsibility, and different needs.

It’s really hard for a really talented quarterback to have success with a bad O-line. And the best O-line can’t compensate for a guy who can’t remember the plays and throw a ball well. You’ve got to find your place on the team. And sometimes it means you’re second string for years before you’re a starter. Sometimes it means you’re special teams. And while you’re not out on the field much, when you do go out on the field, it matters big time.

Whatever you are, you have to give yourself to it fully if you want to see a plan achieved.