#1 Spinning Wheel Decision-making. Sometimes a team can have a great vision process only to get bogged down in complex or ineffective decision-making after the fact. On a car ride of a thousand miles, the spark plugs fire a thousands times each mile. If the little steps to make the vision happen don’t fire, you’ll only putter along.

#2 Courage-on-empty: Clarity is no good if there isn’t courage and conviction to act on it. Sometimes the team or the point leader get fired up about the next ministry chapter or new direction only to hit the brakes if a few people push back. This lack of courage may be just another way to describe approval addiction.

#3 Ego Side Trips: Sometimes a team of strong leaders create sideways energy. Maybe two senior leaders have different operating philosophies. Or, maybe youthful vigor on the team insists on going in its own direction. Sometimes leaders gets distracted with building their platform outside of the organization or use a ministry position in a way that promotes personal hobbies and interests. While I don’t often run into ill intent in ministry, I do see lots of strong egos that don’t harness together well.

#4 Communication Breakdown: The best vision in the world will die fast if people are left out of the loop. Meaningful connection to the vision must be sustained by dialogue, vision-soaked media, and vision dripping from the core leadership. After you map out the vision, make sure you map out your communication processes and systems.

#5 False Start: Every now and then, I see a team so anxious to execute that they move to quickly. It may be inexperience, or over-optimism. Sometimes a leader grows to or moves to a larger organization, where implementation requires more steps and nuances to bring everyone along. Sometimes a leader has a mountaintop experience and fails to get the key lieutenants together and on board for a great start.

#6 Running Too Hot: Having clear vision is one thing. Getting there in God’s time is another. Sometimes leaders have the right vision but want to achieve it too fast. In their drivenness, people suffer from burn-out. In times of stress and extreme performance other temptations come to the table. It’s critically important not to let the work for God hinder the work of God in the personal lives of the team. God’s vision should never eclipse the godliness of the visionary.

Related posts:

1. Tyranny of More: 6 Common Myths that Drive Churches to Do Too Much
2. The 11 Minute Difference: 7 Checkpoints to a Great Guest Experience at Your Church
3. Thinkholes: 6 Common Hazards that Inhibit Thoughtful Leadership

Consider who created the pattern, the model, “the how” of your particular ministry area or ministry responsibility. Did it come from a book, another church (conference), the previous pastor? Someone was the designer. Who was it?

Step Two: Ask “Why?”

Consider the motives and the intent of the person who designed the ministry you lead. Why did the originator of the ministry make the decisions they made? Why is your ministry designed the way it is? What problems were they trying to solve? What were their assumptions?

Step Three: Ask “What’s Changed?”

Somewhere between the original design or latest modification of the ministry you are leading, things have changed. Make a list of things that are different. Is your ministry reaching the same people? Who is coming now? Who has left? How has communication and technology changed? How have peoples’ values changed. What’s new in our community? Is your leadership style different now? Obviously these are a small sample of the countless questions you may ask.

Step Four: Ask “What Change Can We Make?”

After the list of what’s changed, consider how you can modify the pattern, design, for strategy of your ministry area or responsibility. What new problem needs to be solved today? What new challenge or new opportunity is most important to address? How do you need to add value? How can it be done less expensively? How can you reach more people? How can you reach different people?

In the end you want to be able to answer, “What is the most important tweak to our ministry that we can make today?”

Step Five: Engage Flux

Flux is the new reality. And flux is good. Fast Company magazine’s cover story this month is on Generation Flux. It’s not about an age segment demographic, but a way of thinking that successful people of any age must embrace.  Prepare yourself to change and to change things. Think not like a fast follower or best practicer, but like a future designer and better experimenter. This last September I released a little digital experience with Leadership Network called FLUX: Four Paths to the Future. If you want to keep thinking and pushing yourself as a courageous tweaker of ministry, I recommend that you check it out as part of the Leadia App, for iPhone and iPad.

Related posts:

1. 6 Extremely Powerful Questions for Simple Ministry Design
2. 6 Radical Steps to Learning What You Don’t Know
3. 12 Steps to Recovery for Vision Statement Addicts

Near the end of Church Unique, I describe your leaders as the engine of your vision. Without leaders that are aligned with (actions) and attuned to (emotions) the vision, you’re destined for failure. How do you keep your key leaders aligned and attuned over time? You’ve got to drip vision daily in your conversations and interactions.

Here are a few simple questions to see how well you drip the vision.

• Have you drawn your strategy on the back of a napkin in a restaurant to explain it to someone in the last month?
• Can all of your key staff and volunteer leaders recite your mission and talk about why it matters?
• Have you spent time in the last month during a staff or leadership meeting to revisit your Vision Frame?

If you answered “no” to any of those questions, you need to do a better job of dripping vision daily. This is where  your Vision Frame language, tagline, and key messages can help. Start using this language all the time—in every meeting, during every conversation. This language should infiltrate and permeate your conversations, becoming a part of your normal vocabulary. By talking vision daily like this, your vision will start to become ingrained as a part of your culture rather than just some language you developed once to be framed and put on the wall.

Here are three practical suggestions for ways you can drip vision daily.

1. In the next conversation you have with a key staff member or volunteer leader, work in at least 3 phrases from your Vision frame, tagline, or key messages.
2. Add “Vision Frame Review” to your leadership meeting agenda for sometime in the next month and take 30 minutes to reflect together on one or two parts of the Vision Frame (I’d suggest reviewing your mission and your strategy).
3. Consider using the Vision Deck as a tool in your regular meetings. It’s a tool we developed with 52 suggestions for ways you can better integrate your vision into your culture during normal meeting rhythms.

The main thing you need to do is start dripping vision daily right now…if you’re not already doing it. You’ve got to be intentional about doing this at the beginning, until you develop it as a habit. Soon, talking vision should become a natural part of your daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms.

If you keep these six steps in mind: fill the pool (by articulating your vision), boil it down (by developing your tagline), describe the water (by crafting key messages), tap into the thirst (by communicating the Big Why), break out the hose (by leveraging every medium), and drip, drip, drip (by talking vision daily), you’ll have vision-soaked communication that will move your church or organization toward being more effective for your mission. And that’s the goal, isn’t it?

Related posts:

1. Taking Vision Public, Step 3: Crafting Your Church’s Key Messages
2. Taking Vision Public, Step 2: Developing Your Church’s Tagline
3. Taking Vision Public, Step 5: Leveraging Every Medium

• Step 1 – Articulating Your Vision
• Step 2 – Developing Your Tagline
• Step 3 – Crafting Your Key Messages
• Step 4 – Communicating the Big Why

Now, it’s time to break out the hose, leveraging every communication medium as an outlet for your vision. This is a crucial step as we move from strategy to implementation, from planning to practice. This is also the step where far too many ministries drastically limit their effectiveness because of their unwillingness to make changes to their daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms.

Communication in any organization is built on certain rhythms and rituals, and churches are no different. A church’s normal weekly rhythm (a weekly worship service) drives many of its communication rituals. Each of these rituals need to be examined, evaluated, and reshaped in light of the work you’ve done in prior steps. This is where the hard work is really done, where the rubber meets the road, where difficult decisions need to be made.

Don’t Make the Big Mistake
The biggest mistake I see churches make at this point in the process is that they don’t leverage every medium to its fullest for the sake of communicating the vision. Here’s what I mean. You can redesign your weekly bulletin and overhaul your announcements to be built on vision, but if those things are disconnected from all the other things you do every Sunday, the effect will be minimal. Remember, your entire worship service is a communication event. Every word that is said, every song that is sung, every message that is preached is telling people what you think is important. If the only “vision language” that people hear is during the announcements or in the weekly bulletin, it will fall flat. That’s why I like the image of “vision-soaked communication.”

Your vision—articulated in the language you developed in steps 1-4—needs to permeate your weekly worship services. Why do we sing? Why do we pray? Why do we spend so much time reading the Bible and trying to understand what it means for us today? Why is community important? The answers to these questions must be articulated all the time and in every medium, using the vision-soaked language you’ve developed. Use the language until you’re tired of it. That’s when people will start to understand it.

There are three stages to vision becoming engrained in the hearts of people: awareness, understanding, and appreciation. First, people will slowly become aware of the vision you’re presenting and the consistent language you’re using to present it. Next, people will begin to understand what you mean and why it’s important. The final stage is appreciation, when people value the vision and can tell others why it’s important. These stages only come as you break out the hose in every area, not even just your entire weekend services.

Leverage Every Medium
Here’s a list we’ve developed over the years of many of the possible mediums you can use to communicate your vision. It’s not comprehensive, but it should certainly give you a good start. Each of these mediums should have vision running through it all the time.

• weekly bulletin
• verbal announcements
• message or message series
• videos (used during services, on website, etc.)
• information center (physical place people go with questions)
• pre-service announcement slides
• photos
• website
• Facebook (and other social media)
• e-newsletter (monthly or quarterly)
• print newsletter (monthly or quarterly)
• pastor’s blog (or other staff members’ blog)
• mailings (letters, postcards, etc.)
• billboards
• newspaper ads
• sign(s) outside church building and/or offices
• posters (inside the church and in the community)
• invitation cards (tools for people to invite friends)
• welcome brochure
• other print pieces highlighting programs and events
• environmental design (photos, banners, etc. within your meeting space)

Special Note
Churches are historically bad at leveraging visual media like photos and videos. With the tools available today, decent videos are within the reach of every church in America. By definition, photos and videos connect with people on an emotional level long before words alone will. (Check out the book Flickering Pixels for a more detailed exploration of this topic.) Who are the people in your congregation that love to take pictures? Ask them to take high-quality photos at least once a quarter in all of your different environments (not just the main worship services!). Use as many of these photos as possible across every medium, showing people what the vision looks like. (Make sure to get permission from people to use their photos. Check with your lawyer on specific guidelines for this.)

When you take your vision public, you need to break out the hose, leveraging every medium to share your vision-soaked communication. There’s one more step to taking vision public, and it may be the most underestimated step of all. We’ll cover it next time.

Related posts:

1. Taking Vision Public, Step 4: Communicating Your Church’s Big Why
2. Taking Vision Public, Step 3: Crafting Your Church’s Key Messages
3. Taking Vision Public in 2012: Six Steps to Vision-Soaked Church Communication

I once heard it said, “There is no motion without emotion.” I believe that’s true. People get involved with things that they care about – things that connect with them on an emotional level. I’ve mentioned Simon Sinek before and his book, Start with Why, which goes into how this concept of inspiring action by connecting with people emotionally is actually wired into our physiology. If you’re the type of person that’s looking for the Cliff’s Notes, check out his TED talk.

So when you take your vision public, you need to remember to c0nnect with people emotionally by communicating the Big Why. I’ve been using a metaphor of vision-soaked communication – fill the pool (by articulating your vision clearly), boil it down (by developing an effective tagline), and describing the water (by crafting your key messages). Within that framework, I think of the Big Why as tapping into the thirst that exists within the hearts of people.

You would think that this is something that church leaders would do more consistently than those that work in the business world. But that’s not always the case. Think about your announcements from last Sunday or the blurbs in the weekly bulletin or the ad you run in the newspaper or the billboard promoting your services. The vast majority of churches spend 90% of their time communicating about “the What” instead of communicating “the Why.”

Here’s a perfect example. I know of a pastor and his preaching team that are planning to preach through the Bible as their first sermon series of 2012, choosing the 20 most significant stories and passages. When asked why they chose that topic, the first response was, “Biblical literacy has gone down significantly in the past 20 years.” Not very compelling, right? Why should the person in the pew (or padded seats) care about that…or, even more importantly, why would they invite their neighbor to come and hear that sermon series? They haven’t connected on an emotional level!

What if, on the other hand, the preaching team of that same church presented the same 20 stories and passages of scripture within a different framework? “God is telling a story and it is only within the context of that larger story that the every day issues we face like pain, suffering, hope, the longing for peace, and the desire for love and acceptance make any sense at all. In this series, we’ll get a handle on the larger story that brings all of our lives into perspective.” Makes a difference, doesn’t it? And, by the way, this framework is directly connected to their vision as a church…a vision they had already articulated (inviting people to experience and share the whole, new life available in Christ).

The Big Why makes all the difference. But so many churches brush right past the why to the what. Take a look at the key messages we developed for Vanguard again. In this case, we have built some of the Big Why ideas into the paragraphs that support the specific messages. Can you find the “Big Why” language?

This idea of tapping into the thirst that exists in the hearts of people is so crucial to vision-soaked communication that it must be at the core of everything you communicate. It doesn’t matter what you’re communicating, you should always answer the question, “Why should I care?” The people who are listening are always implicitly asking that question. If you give them an answer that connects with them emotionally, they will dive in, step up, or whatever other metaphor for participation you’d like to use. Tap into the thirst by always communicating the Big Why.

And then, you need to break out the hose. We’ll cover that next time.

Related posts:

1. Taking Vision Public, Step 2: Developing Your Church’s Tagline
2. Taking Vision Public, Step 3: Crafting Your Church’s Key Messages
3. Taking Vision Public in 2012: Six Steps to Vision-Soaked Church Communication

If your vision is like a pool, your key messages describe the water. What makes your pool unique? What will it be like when people jump in? Good key messages begin to answer these questions. Below are 5 stages of vision-soaked key message development. Let’s dive in. (I couldn’t resist.)

1. List key words and concepts.
Start the key message development process by gathering a long list of words and concepts that are a part of a church or organization’s brand. This list may have 70-100 words and include descriptors like energetic, warm, and diverse and concepts like transformation, discipleship, and service. You can pull these words from your Vision Frame and other language you’ve developed for your church. It’s amazing how different churches end up with lists of words and concepts that are very different (with some overlap, of course), which reflect their unique personalities.

2. Force-prioritize the list.
You can’t have 70-100 key messages. You can realistically only have 4 or 5 (6 at the most). So, prioritize the list of words and concepts you’ve developed, weeding out words that don’t convey your unique mission and personality. Also, look for different words or concepts that convey the same idea like “transformation” and “life-change.” Delete one of them from the list, keeping the one that is more consistent with your Vision Frame language and internal vocabulary. Repeat this process until you have only 7-10 words left in the list.

3. Define the categories.
Usually, by this point, the final 7-10 words from your list will fall into 4 or 5 categories. Those categories are the foundation of your key messages. List the categories on a separate page—don’t worry about specific wording yet, just capture the concepts. As you look at this list, ask yourself, “Are these true of us?” The last thing you want to do is develop key messages that sound good but describe something your church can’t deliver.

4. Create the language.
This is where you need to tap into your creativity. Each key message should stand on it’s own, but the best key messages also have a connection with the others. Symmetry in structure is good (adjective/noun like “Inspiring Community”) and memorable is even better. Memorable messaging usually involves some sort of interesting twist on language that makes the audience pause and say, “Hmm. That’s interesting.” Even the phrase above, “inspiring community” has a small twist in that the word “inspiring” can have multiple meanings. If you’re not a writer, find one in your church who can help with this. Remember – the key messages are primarily for your external audience, so try to stay away from Christianese and phrases that people outside of your congregation won’t understand. Make sure to remember to articulate the problem you exist to solve. This is so important that we’ve devoted the whole next step to it – Tap into the Thirst. We’ll look at that in more detail next time.

5. Revise, revise, revise.
The first draft is only rarely the best draft. When you invite others to review and give comments, hold your ideas with an open hand. If there are things about them that aren’t resonating with the team, that’s fine. Always remember—there’s another idea. The ones you’ve come up with to this point aren’t the only ideas that exist…you can find new ideas. So, with humility and openness, listen to feedback and make adjustments. The end result will be much better, and the team will have a different level of buy-in.

At the end of that process, you should have key messages that reflect your unique personality and are consistent with your Vision Frame. If you’ve been following along with this series, you might be interested in seeing Vanguard University’s key messages that were developed by using the process described above. You can download the one-page PDF here.

You’re almost ready to break out the hose and start drenching people with your vision-soaked communication. But next, let’s look at how to tap into the thirst that exists in people’s hearts.

Related posts:

1. Taking Vision Public, Step 2: Developing Your Church’s Tagline
2. Taking Vision Public in 2012: Six Steps to Vision-Soaked Church Communication
3. Taking Vision Public, Step 1: Articulating Your Church’s Vision

In our last post, I shared the Vanguard Vision Frame. With that as background, let’s look at Vanguard’s new tagline.

This tagline was born in a unique way – it came when one of our team members was listening to a Vanguard alum present a work of art she had recently created. It was a video that chronicled the stories of a few Vanguard students and alumni—how God was using their lives to make a difference in the world. She made a statement in her introduction that immediately jumped out at us as the core statement and invitation that Vanguard is making with their vision. She said, “Your story matters at Vanguard.” The team member scribbled it down as soon as she said it: “Your story matters.” Although we eventually landed on “your story matters” as the tagline, it was one of dozens of ideas we brainstormed and considered as a team.

If you remember, the mission statement of Vanguard hangs on two words: “equipping students.” The word “equip” comes from a sailing term that was used to describe the process of preparing a ship for a journey. But why is equipping students important? Why is it worth being a part of? Because the story of every student matters.

As we worked through “your story matters” as the potential tagline for Vanguard, we developed a paragraph that articulates the compelling nature of the tagline, illustrating the direct connection to the mission.

Your Story Matters
At Vanguard, your story matters. Where have you been? What are the experiences God has used to shape and prepare you? We care about your story, about who God is making you to be. And we want to equip you—to give you the skills, knowledge, and experience you need—for the journey God specifically has for you. More importantly, your story matters after you leave Vanguard. Our alumni are making a difference in education, the arts, ministry, business, and more. They’ve been prepared for a Spirit-empowered life of Christ-centered leadership and service here at VU, and God is using them in powerful ways to shape this world. Your story matters. Where will it take you next?

Do you see how the tagline functions as both a statement of fact and an invitation to discover more? And, by pairing it with the simple question, “Where will it take you next?” we set the foundation for the specific key messages we want to share with Vanguard’s audiences. (We’ll look at the key messages next time.)

When you take your vision public, your tagline needs to boil your vision down to its essence. Why should people care that you exist? How will you invite them to be a part of what you are doing? The tagline can’t answer every question in great detail, but it should serve as an emotive and compelling invitation for your audience to learn more about who you are and why you exist. It can become a kind of rallying cry that reminds people of your mission and vision that you can return to again and again.

Now that we’ve filled the pool and boiled it down, next time, we’ll talk about how to describe the water by crafting your key messages. Each of these pieces is critical to vision-soaked communication.

Related posts:

1. Taking Vision Public, Step 1: Articulating Your Church’s Vision
2. Taking Vision Public in 2012: Six Steps to Vision-Soaked Church Communication
3. How to Develop a Compelling, Gospel-centered Tagline for Your Church

I’ve been writing and speaking about assessing and articulating vision for years now, so I’m not going to try to summarize Church Unique here. Instead, I’d like to share a couple of pieces of my recent experience in leading Vanguard University through the Vision Frame process. Over a period of about nine months, I facilitated an assessment and articulation process for a group of Vanguard’s key leaders. Each month, we would spend a day or two together, wrestling with different aspects of their Vision Frame to more clearly articulate the unique mission God has given Vanguard. I was honored to work alongside these committed, passionate leaders who have dedicated their lives to Christian secondary education.

By using Vanguard as an example, I’d like to answer the question I am most frequently asked about the Vision Frame process.

Why does it take so long to articulate vision clearly?
Many people assume that clarity means simplicity. That’s not usually the case. The best kind of clarity—clarity that provides fuel for the organization—is only find by slogging through the complexity. Only after wading into the complexity of organizational history, internal dynamics, multiple priorities, personal callings, and, most importantly, listening for God’s voice together, can a leadership team emerge with unified clarity. If you just want a nice mission statement, you can do that in a couple of hours. If you want a fully-formed vision that fills your leaders with an unquenchable fire to do whatever it takes for the cause…it will take a big longer. You can’t microwave clear, compelling vision. Period.

With Vanguard, there were many complex issues that needed to be discussed openly and honestly in the process. We included key people from these different constituent groups (faculty, staff, administration, etc.) in the core team, but at significant points in the process, we needed to hear from the wider group as well. In order for us to be able to move forward confidently, it was absolutely critical to hear the voice of the larger group. And (this is important), we had to be willing to go back and make adjustments to the way we had articulated things based on their input. There are times when a leadership team must listen and adjust and other times when a team needs to set the direction clearly, inviting everyone to join in. A wise leader knows which is which and leads accordingly.

Do you see why it takes longer than you think to fill the pool with a clearly articulated vision? You’re going to need people to help you maintain the pool and invite others to jump into the pool in the future, so you can’t do it all yourself. Articulating vision clearly is a collaborative effort, not an individual task.

Vanguard’s Vision Frame
After months of work with Vanguard, here’s the result…their Vision Frame. Over the next few posts in this series about Taking Vision Public, it’ll be important for you to have their Vision Frame in mind so that you can see how all the different pieces work together and are built on this foundation.

Mission
Equipping students for a Spirit-empowered life of Christ-centered leadership and service.

Values
Truth – We pursue truth by knowing Christ who is Truth.
Virtue – We honor God by committing ourselves to the person and model of Jesus Christ.
Service – We develop our talents to their potential and discern God’s purpose for our lives.

Strategy
Cultivating the Spirit-empowered life in Christian experience and service
Promoting academic excellence that integrates faith and life
Providing professor-mentors in a dynamic community environment

Measures
Spiritual vitality
Academic excellence
Institutional health

As a part of articulating the Measures, we developed what we called the Vital 9, a grid of more specific mission marks in the life of each student. The Vital 9 were developed by placing the values on one side of the grid and the measures on the other side of the grid and describing the resulting attitudes and attributes that Vanguard wanted to see in each student.

This Vision Frame articulated the unique vision and approach of Vanguard, filling the pool with clear, refreshing water. That meant it was time to move on to the next step of vision-soaked communication…the tagline. We’ll cover that next time.

Related posts:

1. Taking Vision Public in 2012: Six Steps to Vision-Soaked Church Communication
2. Life in Generica: Your Vision is Outdated
3. Vision is Your Greatest Asset

This is what the best organizations in the world do so well. Apple. Starbucks. Target. Every piece of communication or interaction you have with these organizations is absolutely soaked in their vision, mission, and values. Just when you read the names of those organizations, colors and feelings were evoked inside of you, weren’t they? That’s the power of vision-soaked communication.

And, just in case you’re tempted to go here, this  approach to vision-soaked communication is not just about “secular marketing strategy.” These same principles fueled the way Jesus and his first followers used as they announced and demonstrated the Good News. “The kingdom of God is here!” they announced. And then they used all sorts of imagery and compelling language to tell more about what they meant…and they invited people to live in this new reality.

And although the communication tools at our disposal today look very different than they did 2000 years ago in the towns and villages of Israel, the ideas and the approach are still the same. How do we invite people into a vision that could change the world? I believe it’s a part of our calling as church leaders to wrestle with this question and find creative methods to share the message God has given us in the most compelling, grab-you-by-the-heart-strings, kick-you-in-the-gut ways possible. That’s why communication matters so much in the church.

Through a series of posts, we’ll look at six steps to vision-soaked communication. Here’s an overview.

Step 1: Fill the Pool – Articulating Your Vision

Step 2: Boil it Down – Developing Your Tagline

Step 3: Describe the Water – Crafting Your Key Messages

Step 4: Tap into the Thirst – Communicating the Big Why

Step 5: Break out the Hose – Leveraging Every Medium

Step 6: Drip, Drip, Drip – Talking Vision Daily

As we walk through these steps together, we’ll look at a specific example of an organization we recently worked with: Vanguard University. Although this series of posts will speak specifically about church communication, there are many parallels and, hopefully, a non-church example will help you to focus on the approach I’m presenting and not the specific language in each step. (Vanguard is a Christian university in southern California with a great vision for training and equipping Christian leaders.)

I truly believe that if you can learn to leverage the power of these six steps, your communication will be soaked with vision and your church will gain more momentum toward achieving that vision.

Related posts:

1. 12 Steps to Recovery for Vision Statement Addicts
2. Vision to Reality First Steps
3. The Cardinal Sin of Church Communication

#1 Keep it about the walk.

Whatever the decision, remember Jesus is walking next to you and your life belongs to Him. How will the decision affect your relationship with Him? This question alone should be the only one you need to ask. During this season, I have been reflecting on the pattern of big decisions in my life and relishing the memories of Jesus guiding me for 30 years. Prayer this way becomes more than an act, it’s an expression of long relationship.

#2 Don’t get advice, get better questions.

Getting advice is a no brainer. The real pursuit is getting better questions. You will have the top three or four people from whom you receive general wisdom. What about the next 15-20 who can give you special, very specific insight? With each person, ask, “What other questions do I need to consider about _________?” or “Here is an assumption I am working from, but what question am I not considering?” I have had some big explosions of insight by asking these questions.

#3 Create a tug-o-perspective-war.

It’s important to “mine out” the conflict and tension of the decision. I even imagine a tug-of-war of different perspectives. Who can you enlist to pull on the different sides by offering new perspective? Of course you’ll have to live with the internal battle in keeping the first and last “move” of this list in mind. In the last month I have different sides “winning” as I stack each side of the rope with new people offering new points of view.

#4 Travel in time, while watching time.

God gave you an imagination so that you could dream forward and exercise faith. While we can’t predict the future, you can play out your decision, and practice in your minds-eye the blessings and byproducts of your big decision. How does the decision change your life in the next year? In the next ten years? How will the tone of the hours of your day be affected? How will all of your key relationships be affected? The list goes on. Remember there are times when your creative mind is more active, like the fringes of sleep and hypnotic states, like taking a long shower or driving. I intentionally use these times. But remember to watch your time. Don’t make a decision to quickly, and don’t forget that some opportunities expire. You only have the lifetime of the opportunity to leverage the opportunity of a lifetime.

#5 Do the trust fall.

In the end, every decision is an act of trust. Remember that crazy thing you did at camp when you were a kid? You really didn’t know if your buddies were going to let you hit the ground for a laugh. But you did it. You let go. You trusted. The final act of the decision-making process is the moment of commitment. How does this act of trust feel for me? I simply tell God, “I have listened and discerned as much as possible and I am making this decision for you. If this is not the right decision, I trust you to show and to direct my path. Everything I have and I am belongs to you.”

Related posts:

1. The 5 Defining Questions for Every Visionary Church Planter
2. The Trust-Objectivity Dilemma
3. Inspiration or Emulation? – How to Build Your Message