Personal Visioning

• Our serving teams inherit a ton of overarching vision from the top leaders
• But how many teams vision on their own? Do we even encourage them to do so? Or are they simply treated as tools that we micromanage?
• Going down to the personal level, do we encourage our leaders to vision on their own, about their personal growth and the growth of their ministries?
• "Where there is no prophetic vision, the people are discouraged," Proverbs 29:18 (ESV)
• How many of our teams, how many of our leaders, seek and receive their vision from God? How many receive them from us?
• Worse yet, how many simply receive instructions/strategies from us and never own their ministries, never own their personal growth?
• Looking into their personal lives, do we encourage people to connect with God personally? To cast their own visions of their walk with God; where they need to go with Him in the next little while.
• Or do we always tell them where they need to grow next, what they should do to get there?
• Not dissing our maturity ministries, heck I oversee them, but there is no formula. We must vision WITH them how they are to grow.
• "Transforming non-Christians into disciple-makers for Christ"
  
• Do people even know this?
• I had to look it up, and seeing the amount of disciple-maker making that is actually happening (e.g. not just people being transformed, but people leading others to transform), I'd say people don't really know this.
• Also, when we say that's our vision, what does that mean for the ushering team? What does that mean for the worship team? What does that mean for our harvest team? How does each of those teams' visions (hopefully they have one), fit in with the overall vision?
• We are constantly trying to raise organizational leaders to head up ministries, but how intentional are we in raising spiritual leaders?
• The great commission says that all of us are to disciple others, we should focus on that first, rather than getting people to lead ministries, and expecting that they get their spiritual leadership to catch up somehow. 
• We should seek to invest in the spiritual lives of emerging leaders first; which ultimately means seeing a disciple maker raised up first, rather than a head usher, or worship leader, or bible study teacher first.
• "Out of your intimacy comes your ministry." Do we stick to this when we raise emerging leaders?
• What is point A? What is point B?
• Ultimately all our ministries (this applies to personal growth too), at any point in time, are moving from point A to point B.
• Visioning is understanding point B (where we are going), and strategizing is understanding point A (where we are right now).
• So many teams start making/improving their strategies, all the while doing very little visioning (or having little understanding of their catch-phrase vision).
• Without vision, without point B, how would you know what "better" is?
• How do you set goals and milestones, how do you gauge progress, if you don't know what the end goal is?
• Going back to personal growth, do people understand that being a disciple-maker is the end goal?
• Maybe that's why we have such a hard time finding discipleship leaders, because people think that being discipled forever is point B.
• It all starts with us (top leaders)
• We always complain that people aren't stepping up to own ministries, that people rely on us to grow
  
• We must cast, recast, recast, recast (see the pattern here?) our visions as ministry overseers, our visions for them as their discipler, otherwise our guys would have nothing to work off of, nothing to look forward to in expectation.
  
• Then we must encourage them to vision on their own, to own a piece of the puzzle, to call that piece their own.
• If all we ever do is make them do what we want, how would they ever own it? How would it ever even FEEL like its theirs?