Developing a Chruch Vision

The following was sent by Rev Ric Thorpe from St Paul’s Shadwell in response to a question sent via the website about church vision development:

“Tricia sent it to me as we have been through a similar process recently as a 5 year old church plant from HTB. Let me address your specific questions by describing what we’ve been doing here.

We planted 100 from HTB into East London 5 years ago and have grown to about 350, though we have had 700+ active members (London throughput). About 12 months ago we needed to redefine who we were, no longer as a plant per se, but as a more established church with its own identity – though we still have the same DNA as HTB (values, etc). We have been driven by a sense of mission that calls for all our activities to have missional focus (only 1% of people locally go to church).

Three recent influences personally have been “Simple Church” (great book by Rainer & Geiger) which commissioned research into growing churches in the US discovering that the simplest churches were most able to grow (in terms of vision and structure); Mike Breen’s “Lifeshapes”, as described in “A Passionate Life”, where he uses a triangle to describe balance in church life between worship, fellowship and mission – he uses it as an audit on all church activity; and the growth of understanding of missional communities – we have turned all our church groups into missional communities where we have a balance of worship, fellowship and mission, but we have added that each group must have a missional purpose.

These three influences have led us to a simple way of approaching our vision: initially as a play button (triangle pointing right) where we think of up, in and out as the three movements (love God, love one another and love your neighbour). We have introduced a fast forward symbol to add a fourth dimension which is about legacy and church planting. All our activity is audited using these movements (up, in, out, forward).

We then give one further filter which is related to centralised or decentralised activity – if centralised we get behind it; if decentralised it is run by non-staff. We try to get as much decentralised as possible apart from leadership training and equipping. We talk in terms of high accountability (submission to vision (up in out forward) and church leadership) and low control (do it any way you think is best for you and your group and your context).

This has enabled us to have different missional activities which thrive alongside each other, mainly because they are decentralised and owned by their own stakeholders. This enables us to multiply leadership and for church leaders to concentrate on training and discipling leaders rather than focussing on individual ministries too much. This also enables us to focus our resourcing on core missional activity that is regarded as centralised (for us Alpha as the centralised “out” activity and a borough-wide youth ministry called XLP which is a key part of our “forward” activity).

So, in summary, we are about seeing the transformation of Shadwell and East London by the love of God in 4 dimensions: upwards (loving God – worship); inwards (loving one another – fellowship and discipleship); outwards (loving our neighbour – mission); and forwards (loving our city – generational legacy). We do it through high accountability and low control.

I recommend the reading books above.”