The Business of Church: Mission and Vision

When you have a business, it is key to have a mission and vision statement. These statements are the basis of how you make your decisions and where you are planning to be heading in the years to come.  To give a better example and the difference between these two statements, the American Marketing Association has two definitions that make these concepts understandable.

Mission Statement: It is used to guide the company’s decision-making and strategic planning.

Vision or Vision Statement: A guiding theme that articulates the nature of the business and its intention for the future.

The fact that the mission and vision statement are important is not a difficult fact to grasp. In fact, the concept is exceedingly basic and seems like it would be a no-brainer for a company to create one.

Now, I’m not going to be explaining the definition of these two or why they are important. Those are easy to grasp. What I will be discussing is why it is so vital to have them in the church.

Most churches or their general denominations have mission/vision statements. That is not really surprising. The fact that I find exceedingly interesting is that local churches may have different mission/vision statements that are different from the greater denomination that they are a part of. To me this is intriguing because aren’t these statements supposed to guiding a company (or church) into the future?

Like most companies, the church creates a team that helps develop the mission and vision statements, but there are some differences. In a company, the people on the team are selected and only a few people have input to what the final results will be. At the church though, you can create a team but many can throw input and make noise loud enough to stop progress. There is a fine line of being on a committee and effecting a committee decision, which can be good and can be bad.

It is good that churches can receive input from people outside the committee, but these people may have not been asked to voice their opinions for a reason. Think about it in business terms. If you know that someone is wanting to stay the same, believe that the old ways are the best and does not want to adapt to changing times, do you want them to effect your strategy for the future? Of course not and in business you can find a way to move them out of the way, sometimes providing a golden parachute or buying them out of the company or something along those lines.  You can’t do that in the church, because it is all volunteers.

Having a volunteer committee is honestly a double-edged sword, especially when it comes to strategic planning with a mission and vision statements. A pastor can plan a meeting, but the committee members don’t necessarily have to show up since it is not technically their job. If they are able to come and attend then that is good, but if they are not able to come then there is no consequences. There is not necessarily a solid base, which in turn makes it difficult to make strategic decisions when you are not having the same committee meet each week, because of absences.

 Another item to consider with this is something that I brought up a couple paragraphs ago: different mission/vision statements. There are many churches that belong to denominations that are very well organized. These denominations create mission and vision statements for what they want to achieve. To make sense of it in business terms: imagine a corporate retail stores headquarters as the church denomination and the stores as the local churches. Now imagine the headquarters having a different mission and vision statement than the local stores. It doesn’t make any logical sense.

Now having said this example, not every church differs from their denominations mission and vision. For example, the church I attend has a different mission statement from the denomination (having the idea of being much more specific with the ministries they want to achieve) and have the same vision statement (because they belong to the denomination and want to ultimately follow them in that direction). I agree with this stance, because the mission should be tailored to the specific area in which you are located.

Having written all this, it is easy to say that the Church and business world are not so different when it comes to the importance of the mission and vision statements. It is in the development stage that they differ to the fact that the Church relies more so on a volunteer committee verses ones that are getting paid to create these strategies. This does have an effect on how successful these statements are, because how invested people are. A business must follow their mission/vision to survive and so does the church. For some odd reason people do not put the connect together that for anything to survive it must have a purpose and thus having a mission and vision for the reason of its survival. 

What to Expect:

    Week 3: Church Finance

    Week 4: Church Marketing

    Week 5: Church Strategic Planning

    Week 6: Church Force- Volunteers

    Week 7: Personal Experience/ Wrap Up