Lesson 2: Vision is Crucial to Leadership

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When I first became a camp director, I went to a workshop that taught that the leader of an organization should spend 85% of their time in the future. This emphasizes the importance of vision. A leader has to be thinking about the future or it will just happen to them and the church they lead.
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Your role as a leader is not to come up with your own vision, but to discern God’s vision. This doesn’t happen without prayer, meditation and an understanding of scripture.

The reason the leader’s vision is important is that people look to the leader for direction, even if they don’t agree with it. The most important thing about a leader’s vision is not that it is correct, but that the leader expresses where they believe God is leading.
People don’t have to agree. But if there is no vision, anxiety will increase. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the lack of vision is a leadership vacuum that gets filled with angst, distrust and dysfunction.

Vision helps people to imagine a future or preferred reality. It is not a plan. Rather, it is a way for the leader to express their values as they apply to the future. As Simon Sinek said in his “How great leaders inspire action” TED Talk: “Martin Luther King did not give an ‘I have a plan speech.’ He gave an ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

Dr. King’s speech was all about his own values of equality as they applied to a very big organization -- America. It was his sense of calling by God that kept him pointing toward the future God wants for us. We’re not there. But we’re closer than we would have been without Dr. King’s vision.

I knew from the beginning that spending 85% of my time in the future was unrealistic. There are projects and people to manage, day-to-day tasks to complete and the occasional, if not frequent, crisis. Even so, I also knew it was my responsibility to ask God to show me where to go.

I also learned that God won’t give you everything you need to know. God will give you a sense of what a preferred outcome looks like, as well as what the next step will be. But if God gave you the whole plan, it wouldn’t be faith.
Genesis 12 tells us, “Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” – Genesis 12:1-2 (NRSV)

God didn’t say where the land was, just that God would show Abram and that he would be a great nation and a blessing. Do you think Abram would have gone if God had told him that the journey would be hundreds of miles? It took courage and faith to move toward the future God had promised.

May you also have that same courage and faith to seek God’s future for the people you lead.

The Center for Vital Leadership is a ministry of the Baltimore-Washington and Peninsula-Delaware Conferences