Items that Hinder Church Growth: Lack of Vision

I am appalled at the lack of vision within urban churches.  Recently, I sat in the sanctuary of an urban church with a well-known pastor in our city.  He shared about the mess the church was in when he came, spoke of the growth of the congregation under his leadership, and pointed gingerly at various parts of the sanctuary as he talked.  After about fifteen-minutes I asked, “Where do you see this church in five years?”  He grew quiet, but eventually said, “I don’t know.”  I explored the topic with him in detail, but this pastor could not tell me any part of a vision for his church or for his people.

In traveling throughout the country and talking with many pastors over the past few years, I have noticed three distinct types of pastors.

The first type is building his ministry.  Sadly, many of today’s pastors are busily building a self-made career, climbing the church and denominational ladder to an empty throne of false hero worship.  These pastors have their groupies of younger pastors wanting to catch the hero’s coattail on their way up the ladder too.  As a young man, I followed this path.  However, in my late thirties, I grew to understand its vanity and God’s desire for a greater relationship with me that transcended into so much more than I could ever have gained on my own.  This type of pastor has but one vision, and he is the center of it.  Yet the gospel is preached and God uses the message to reach others.  Even though the motivation is wrong and the vision is self-centered, God can still use this man to help save people.

The second type is reaching the community for Christ and meeting human needs.  I stood in front of a church in Monroe, North Carolina with a pastor who pointed north, south, east, and then west as he explained how the church had worked to remove drugs and prostitution from their community.  To hear this pastor talk, this was his community and God wanted it cleaned up and rehabilitated.  He had presented his people a method for reaching these goals, which included buying some of the neighborhood houses so they could better control what went on in their community.  His church was packed to overflowing as the community responded to his love and care for their daily challenges.  He had a God-centered vision.  Like Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, this pastor had a vision for his community and it was a God-centered vision with people at its heart.  This man not only preaches the gospel, he lives it and people's lives are made better and eternally changed.

The third type of pastors has no vision for the church or the community.  This type pastor scares me and angers me at the same time.  God’s Word is clear, where there is no vision the people perish.  Yet there are large numbers of pastors that have no vision.  I believe this is because being a visionary is hard work.  Receiving a vision requires spending much time in prayer before God.  It takes face-to-face (F2F) time with God.  It takes God size glasses to look at a run down neighborhood and see the “heaven” in it.  It takes a visionary to look at a drug-ridden section of the city and see how God can transform the area, to look in the face of poverty and see the potential for creating wealth, and to look in the penthouses of loneliness and see joy and happiness.  Visionaries are needed in our cities across this nation and throughout the world, but visionaries have to spend time F2F with the Heavenly Father.  Visionaries learn to see through the Father’s eyes what can be.

A pastor who is a visionary can move into the most hellish part of the city and change it into a suburb of heaven.  Visionaries are not fearful of the flames of hell, for they understand the power of God to transform the bad into good, to reclaim the broken, and when necessary to create out of nothing.  If God has given you a vision for the cities, God will give you a strategic plan to bring that vision into reality.  God is a strategic planner, and He makes stuff happen through his visionaries.  There is no safer place in all the universe than being in the center of God’s will, and no worse place in this life than being outside God’s will.

What do you do if your pastor is building his own ministry, unconcerned about the real hurt and pain in your neighborhood?  What must you do when your pastor has no vision?  Pray and pray hard!  We are living in the last days, and we do not have time to be playing denominational games.  We need to be about the Lord’s work of going throughout our cities and making disciples and baptizing them in the name of the Lord Jesus.  Pray for your pastor, pray for your church, and pray for God to give you a vision for your city and the courage to help make it become reality.