Write the vision, make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.

I was 20 years old at Urbana 2009. A vision cast from a person I didn’t know, have never talked to, and have never met again, changed the course of my life.

I had just gone to Thailand on a short-term trip that opened my eyes to the reality of the unreached. God had started to put on my heart the possibility of serving overseas. As a part of that process, I went to Urbana, Intervarsity’s triennial missions conference for students. A bunch of other friends from our Intervarsity chapter at UT Austin went, including several that ended up on our original team in Thailand.

Between the plenary sessions, there were opportunities to go to different workshops about different topics, whether business as mission, social justice, or different evangelism methods. One workshop that caught my eye was named “Costly Discipleship: Incarnation, Jesus, and The Way of the Cross.”

Most of the workshops had been helpful and informative, but mostly informal and casual. As we sat down, a man in his 30s walked up to the front. He said, “My name is John David Pitts. My wife and I were kicked out of Pakistan 6 weeks ago. We are going back in 4 weeks. In all likelihood we will be thrown into prison or killed.”

“Today, we are going to call you to come and die.”

I could feel the tension in the room rise as our attention was fixed on the speaker. For the next 45 minutes, John simply presented the hard sayings of Jesus and taught on them.

John 15:20 – “Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.”

Luke 14:26-27 – “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

Matthew 16:24-25 – “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

At the end, he concluded by saying, “Following Jesus requires radically high levels of commitment. His final command was to go and make disciples of all the nations.”

Instead of taking questions, he released us to go spend time with God. I went straight to the prayer room and for the next 2 hours surrendered my life to Jesus. I felt the Holy Spirit say, “If you believe the Gospel, you’ll go to the nations.”

I made my commitment to serve overseas long-term on December 30, 2009.

Vision casting is a powerful form of communication that is critical in our pursuit of the Great Commission. Ministry, missions, and movements are really, really difficult. If we don’t have vision to guide us, we won’t have a clear direction and can get distracted by the urgent and needy. If we aren’t reminded of that vision regularly, we can get discouraged or apathetic.

For missions team leaders, casting vision is needed to recruit people to your team, to motivate your team and partners towards the end goal, to encourage people to persevere, to excite people and give them courage for the work, to and many more opportunities. Vision is needed to help yourself to focus on abiding and endure through suffering. John David Pitts casted the vision towards me for radical commitment to following Jesus and making disciples among the unreached, and I’m still pursuing that vision today.

Our definition of a leader is a man or woman that receives vision from God to influence the people of God towards the purposes of God. The vision piece is critical for leaders, because it is what you use to influence those that you lead towards God’s purposes in their lives. If you don’t have a clear vision, then you’re probably not yet a leader.

What is Vision?

A vision is an end goal, an eventual reality that you want to achieve. It should be biblical, faith-driven, and derived from prayer and listening to the Lord.

There’s a lot of articles on vision and mission statements for businesses, organizations, and even churches. The challenge is that there’s often a lot of overlap between vision, mission, calling, and purpose.

For me, vision is why you (or your team or ministry) exist, and mission is what you do to accomplish that vision. Although I think it’s worth writing down a vision statement, I’m not going to focus too much on the specific details of vision statements but talk more about vision in general.

These are some questions you can consider to try and figure out what God’s vision is for your life:

• What has He called you to give your life to?
• Why / For what purpose does you or your team or ministry exist?
• What is the future picture of the world that you desire to make a reality?
• What makes you “pound the table” / keep you up at night? (something that you’re passionately moved by and want to impact)

After considering these questions, if it’s not already derived from Scripture, see what in the Bible aligns with this vision. Bring it to the Lord in prayer, and listen to the Holy Spirit to see what he says about it. 

We’d also encourage you to think big when it comes to vision! Don’t just think about what you can accomplish by yourself. Big vision forces us to hear from God and depend on God. Big vision should require faith, since “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). Big vision should be beyond our capabilities, beyond ourselves, perhaps even beyond our lifetime!

For our team in Thailand, our vision is “To see multiplying churches among all UPGs in Southeast Asia, through mobilizing the church to catalyze CPMs.”

For our Yield Coaching Ministry, our vision is “To advance the Great Commission by developing abiding leaders to catalyze movements among the unreached.”

These are things that are far bigger than ourselves, and things that I would gladly give my life, time, and effort for.

There’s a few examples in Scripture of vision. Obviously there are specific visions through dreams and images that God gives, and those would fall under the general umbrella of what we call ‘vision.’

For Jesus, there are a few strong candidates for what His vision would be. It could be bringing the Kingdom of God (Luke 4:18-19), coming to give eternal life through his sacrifice (John 3:16), or simply embodied in the Great Commission, that there would be disciples from all the nations (Matthew 28:18-20).

For Paul, as a minister to the Gentiles, his vision and ambition given by God was to “preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named” (Romans 15:20). He would largely fulfill this vision by pioneering the early church and state that “from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ” (Romans 15:19).

Lastly, the ultimate vision for all believers is the gathering of all the nations around the throne of Jesus in Revelation 7:9. This is an actual vision given to John of what will happen in the end times, and remains a clear and motivating vision for many of those called to serve in the nations.

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!

Revelation 7:9

Why is Vision Important?

Habakkuk 2:2 gives a compelling argument that writing down clear vision allows the people of God to run. Proverbs 29:18 gives the opposite side: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (KJV).

Vision helps you and your team to determine your direction, your ultimate goal, and the purpose for which you exist. From there, every other strategy, objective, plan, and decision should be aligned with that vision. In order for your vision to be helpful, it should be clear, memorable, and inspirational.

If a vision is your ultimate goal, a strategy plan is the steps for how to get there. By creating a strategy plan that flows from your vision, you can make decisions on what to do, and more importantly, what not to do. One way that we’ve heard movement practitioners summarize it is, “Big Vision, Clear Path, Simple Steps.” The clear path is the strategy plan or ministry framework you use to guide you towards that vision. The team or movement leader’s job is to set the vision, give the clear path, and make sure your teammates know the next, simple steps for that day/month/year towards that path and vision.

As a leader, you should be considering the vision, embodying the vision, and communicating the vision constantly. But sometimes if all we give is vision without a clear path and simple steps, it can be initially motivating but people that we lead may not know what to do next. Eventually that motivation will fade if there’s no way to progress towards that goal. That’s why strategy and simple steps of obedience are important.

But without vision to guide your strategy and simple steps, you can simply go from one urgent thing or one opportunity to the next, and not know if you are making any progress towards the end goal God has called you towards. As Paul says about his focus on his apostolic work, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it” (1 Corinthians 9:24). If you are willing to sacrifice so much to make disciples and obey God, work and run in such a way to win the prize, to complete the vision!

Sometimes people are confused between determining and casting a vision that helps you focus on your end goal, and casting vision that just seems to be generally motivating for people. These are certainly related! Talking about your specific vision statement and giving focus to it (why we exist, how we can get there, etc.) is vision casting, and motivating people through encouragement and inspiration is also vision casting! You need to do both types of vision casting as a leader.

Once your team is clear about the end vision of why your team exists, you need to consistently help them focus on it and motivate them towards it. We’ve heard it said that vision is a leaky bucket, it needs to be constantly refilled or else it runs out!

Ways to Cast Vision

There are many, many ways to cast vision – these are a few methods that we come back to often. We use these after our end vision is established, and we need to cast vision to motivate and focus those that we lead towards that end vision. 

Our main recommendation is to pay attention when you are praying, reading Scripture, or watching someone casting vision and it moves your heart – use that as a vision cast! Think about what has been effective in motivating you, helping you focus on the vision, inspires you to keep going. Steal those vision casts and make them your own! This also requires that you as a leader should be proactive in receiving vision through prayer, Scripture, reading books, listening to stories, etc.

Here are a few different ways to cast vision:

Through Scripture

If vision is given by God, then God’s Word is the most surefire way to receive vision and deliver vision to others. Look for key passages that align with your team and ministry vision and are motivating towards it!

Vision Casting in Scripture: When God is casting vision or when biblical leaders cast vision in Scripture, many times those vision casts can be a great example to point to. Some examples might be God casting vision to Joshua to take the land of Canaan (Joshua 1), Nehemiah mobilizing the people to rebuild the walls (Nehemiah 2), and Paul’s exhortation to the Romans about his ambition to preach where Christ has not been named (Romans 15).

Promises of God: When you need to cast vision in terms of giving encouragement, the promises of God are a great way to help your team lift their eyes from their current situation and look to the future reality that God has promised He will bring to fruition! In the future we’ll have a post about the promises of God for movement practitioners. Think about what your team is feeling like they’re lacking or having difficulty believing will happen – find the promises of God in Scripture that directly answer those doubts! Read them, surrender your fears and doubts, and receive the faith and courage to believe the promises and persevere until they are fulfilled!

Through Listening Prayer

Prayer is another surefire way that you can receive vision from God to communicate to others. It requires asking and listening to the Lord about what He wants to tell the people you lead.

A Word You’ve Received: As you’re in prayer for your team and ministry, what is God telling you? What Scripture is He highlighting, what promises is He elevating? Listening in prayer and relaying it to your team is a powerful way to cast vision.

Listening Together: Sometimes, the Word I would receive from God was just to seek Him together. I wouldn’t come into a team meeting with a prepared message to share, but would set aside our normal meeting agenda to let the team simply sit and listen to the Lord. We’d then all share what we were hearing and look for the common theme the Holy Spirit was trying to convey to us! This is a great way to include your team in receiving vision directly from the Lord instead of always hearing it through you as the leader. A great example is in Acts 13 when the leaders at Antioch were worshipping, praying, fasting and heard the Holy Spirit set apart Barnabas and Saul, sparking new movements in the region.

Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.

Acts 13:1-3

Through Personal Convictions or Stories

Your Own Stories: The personal experiences that are cornerstones in your own journey towards the vision God has given you can also be motivating for others! Share stories of experiences you’ve had that opened your heart to pursuing this vision, that encouraged you that God was moving, that were examples of this vision starting to be a reality. Make sure you tell the story in a way that is encouraging for those that are listening, not just nostalgic for yourself!

Stories of God Working: Stories of miracles, answered prayers, changed lives, and salvations are great vision casts to get people excited about joining in what God is doing in your region or ministry. When you hear stories of God working in other places or in history that make you excited and you start to desire those things in your ministry, take note and share that with others! For example, I tried to hear as many stories of movements happening all around the world to build my own faith that it was possible here in Thailand, especially things that were sparking in the Buddhist world. If they worked for my heart, surely some of them would work for those I was leading! I would tell these stories and ask the question, “Why not us, and why not now?” And that would be the basis of our pleas to God in prayer!

Inspirational People Missions and Their Words:

Reading the biographical stories of great missions leaders throughout history has inspired countless people to follow in their footsteps. These faithful pioneers in our past have many lessons for us to learn. Recounting some of their stories and sharing their quotes are a great way to cast vision. Some of our favorites:

• Jim Elliot – “Canst thou bear this, my soul – short life? In me there dwells the Spirit of the Great Short-Lived, whose zeal for God’s house consumed Him. ‘Make me Thy Fuel, Flame of God.’”
• Hudson Taylor – “If I had a thousand lives, China should have them. No! Not China, but Christ. Can we do too much for Him? Can we do enough for such a precious Saviour?”
• Amy Carmichael – “We will have all eternity to celebrate our victories, but only a few short hours to win them.”

Through Needs and Opportunities

A vision, a future reality, isn’t needed if everything is perfect in your current reality. Your vision is trying to meet a need or answer an opportunity that exists in the world today. Illustrating that need or opportunity and how you want to respond to it can be a compelling way to draw people towards your vision.

Stories About the Need: During our first trip to Thailand, we were struck by the lack of access to the gospel across the country coupled with the spiritual darkness in Buddhism and Animism. Jenn and I met a shop owner who had never even heard the name of Jesus before. We heard testimonies of Thai believers who were miraculously delivered from demonic oppression. These stirred our hearts to want to make a difference, to proclaim Christ where there was no foundation. We relayed these stories to others to see if God would also stir their hearts to join us!

Unique Current Opportunities: As we said earlier, people want to join with what God is doing. Sharing about current opportunities can convey a sense of urgency that is compelling. During our early years in Thailand, a Thai pastor told us , “Thailand is based on 3 pillars – Religion, Country, and Monarchy. Right now all three are shaky and Thai people don’t know where to place their hope. There is a great opportunity for the gospel!”

Statistics and Maps: Sometimes, illustrating the vision through statistics or maps can be powerful forms of vision casting. I’ll always remember at Perspectives when one speaker told us that Americans spend more money on costumes for pets at Halloween than on bringing the gospel to the unreached. Juxtaposing such a trivial category against the core of the Great Commission was a sobering challenge to give sacrificially and in a focused way towards the unreached. Using maps can also be a memorable way to cast vision. The 10/40 Window is a striking combination of a map with a statistic: over 95% of the world’s unreached population lives within the 10/40 window. Simply by drawing a rectangle around that area, we can be reminded and convicted of the great need among the unreached.

Tips for Vision Casting

Directed Towards Your Audience: Always consider your audience when you’re vision casting, especially at that moment in time. Sometimes your best vision casting vignettes will fall flat if it’s not what your audience needs to hear. One illustration is to be a sniper, not a shotgun; you want to cast vision with your target audience in mind, not just throw out whatever cool stories you have. After you share, it’s good to take note of what worked and what didn’t.

Share Out of Your Passion: Good vision casting will affect and pull at your emotions. It may bring you to tears, invoke anger at injustice, feel inspired to do something. You’ve been affected by vision before, and when you cast vision, allow that passion and emotion to come out! Speak with conviction, with anger, with excitement, with joy! Jenn cries often and just says, “Don’t be afraid – I’m a crier.” But those tears highlight the significance of what she’s saying and display the passion she carries.

Cast Vision Often: Take every opportunity to cast vision! Like we said earlier, the vision bucket needs to constantly be refilled. We might take opportunities to cast vision during team meetings, 1-on-1 meetings, ministry trainings, in front of large groups, with supporters, or in recruiting conversations. 

Short and Simple: Vision casts don’t have to be and probably shouldn’t be very long. You aren’t trying to do complicated problem-solving that uses a lot of mind-power, but instead wake up the heart to be motivated to push forward. Sometimes vision casts might be the length of a seminar or longer talk, but most times 5-10 minutes will be plenty!

Practice and Get Feedback: If you’re not a natural communicator, that’s OK! Listen to the Holy Spirit, prepare what you want to say, and practice! Even the best vision casters practice! Try out your vision casts in front of a friend and get feedback.

Make It Your Own: Even if you are “stealing” a vision cast from someone else, don’t feel like you need to copy their style. Again, you don’t have to be a “charismatic” speaker in order to vision cast. Do it your way! If you’ve been impacted by vision, let that conviction and passion come out in a way that feels comfortable to you.

Listen to the Holy Spirit!: We mentioned this above, but it cannot be overstated that listening to the Spirit is the best way to make sure your vision cast impacts those that you are communicating to. He knows what your team needs!

It can feel intimidating to put yourself out there and try to inspire, influence, and encourage others towards great and challenging things the Lord has called you towards. But if He has given us this vision to communicate, we can be confident that He will be the one to give us words and to change the hearts of those we lead. This frees you to boldly cast vision, trusting the Holy Spirit to be the one who convicts hearts through your words.

In Part 1, we discussed what strategy is and is not, and some areas for learning before trying to establish a strategy plan. This post is a step-by-step guide for how to write a strategy plan for your ministry. Creating the strategy plan assumes you have received from God the end vision he has given you and your team. The examples in this guide are specifically for church planting ministry, but the broader steps can be applied to almost any ministry context.

1. Pray and Fast: This must be the first step – to look up and go to the One who Sovereignly knows and guides every plan. Start by surrendering and releasing all of your expectations and assumptions. Ask God for wisdom, faith, big vision; ask Him for a promise, theme, phrase, verse, image, and spend time waiting and listening. You may not get something specific immediately, but receiving a verse or phrase from God to guide your planning can be a strong foundation.

2. SWOT Analysis: This assumes you’ve done some homework on investigating your context. From there, do a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats, Opportunities) for your area. For how to do a SWOT, check out this short guide. Also, here are some helpful questions you might ask in a SWOT analysis. The SWOT Analysis gives you some insight into what opportunities and challenges may be happening in your area at this moment in time.

3. Shortened ‘Gap Analysis’ and Pathway: Gap Analysis is just a way of asking – where are we now, and where would we like to go? By clarifying the present situation and the end vision, it lays the foundation for how to create your strategy plan, which is how you will get from here to there. Take your ministry principles and / or model and list out the broad steps or pathway for how to get to your end goal. Our team uses this CPM Continuum as a guide for where we want to head, and for new teams, you would want to start at the beginning with things like Investigation and Partnerships. If you are further along and re-visiting the strategy plan, start where your current status is. 

4. Brainstorm the Questions: Now you have the general pathway and broad steps for how to get to your end vision. The next step is to discover effective applications for your context in each step. Start with brainstorming questions that need to be answered to discover effective applications. Below is a list of the sections and questions adapted from the CPM Continuum, CPM principles, and the Multiplication Cycle that are relevant to our ministry context. The questions below are just examples of what you might ask in each step; you would want to list 3-7 key questions under each to try and find appropriate applications in each step.

5. Answer the Questions, Establish the Applications: After you lay out the steps and the questions, try to write down various answers. Some answers will be obvious, and others will just be a guess. This exercise will help you understand your level of confidence in the application for each step. If you’re particularly unsure about a section, then spend more time in prayer and investigation about it. Then, list no more than 2 to 3 potential applications that could be used in that section. 

• For example, Gospel sharing or evangelism is an important step in our ministry process. After discussion, prayer, and investigation, our team listed out 3 different potential tools that we wanted to try in our context. We automatically eliminated the ‘Bridge’ diagram because Thailand was a fear/power context and not a guilt / innocence one. Eventually, after experimenting with a few different evangelism tools like 3 Circles, we decided to primarily use a testimony + prayer for needs approach that led to a simple, biblical gospel presentation that one of our Thai partners wrote. It took several years of iteration and experimentation to establish that application, and it was mainly picked after this church planter started seeing dozens of people come to faith!

6. Create 5-3-1 year goals: Now that you have the pathway and some applications, create your goals – what progress in your pathways are you realistically pursuing in these time frames? 3 and 5 year goals are going to be more vision level, but 1 year goals should have clear lead / lag measures to get to where you think God is calling your team to go. These can be easily changed as you progress forward depending on circumstances and timing, so don’t worry if you don’t feel rock solid in your 3 and 5 year goals. They are there as a benchmark to see where you are shooting at, and you want to work backwards from future vision to current actions. For example, a new team post-language school might have these potential goals:

• 5 years: Train and coach 15 church planting teams in our area; see 20 simple churches planted.
• 3 years: Establish at least one main national partner; Train and coach 5 church planting teams; see 30 Discovery Bible Groups started.
• 1 year: Investigate 5 potential national partners; pilot the first 5 trainings for church planters.

7. Establish your Wildly Important Goal (WIG): Our team uses the 4 Disciplines of Execution as our short-term goal setting tool. Basically, the premise of 4DX is that if you can focus on your 1 or 2 most important goals for success, you can achieve it, but if you have too many goals, you’ll be too stretched to obtain success in any category. So for our 1 year goals, we want to give extra thought and discussion with our teams to make sure it is the most important goal that will move us forward the most towards our end vision. Our teams will do a 2-3 day planning retreat to go through this entire strategy process, ending in a single 6-18 month goal. The 4DX process also gives some helpful tools for how to be accountable and how to track your progress in this goal with a scoreboard.

• Using the above example, the goal is to begin piloting trainings for church planters by the end of one year. In order to do that, we have to establish introductory partnerships with 5 potential national churches and leaders (lag measure – the outcome we want to see). Our lead measure (the critical activities that we engage in to affect our lag measure) would be to engage in a partnership development meeting with a potential partner at least 3 times a month (e.g. attend the church, visit a small group, cast vision with a leader, serve in some capacity to build trust, etc.). We believe that by faithfully acting on these lead measures, God will help us find the right churches and leaders He wants us to partner with.

8. Get Feedback: After you’ve given some time, thought, and prayer into your strategy plan – get feedback from others! This could be other peer leaders in your agency or country, mentors or coaches, your teammates, and your national partners. 

9. Additional Questions to Consider: These are some broader questions to consider along with the ones you establish in your pathway.

• How will we recruit, develop, and establish leaders at every stage?
• What are your top potential barriers / constraints / obstacles? How do we turn them into opportunities? 
• What knowledge, skills, resources, teammates, roles, partnerships, competencies will you need to achieve your strategic objectives?
• Would additional financial resources help you achieve your objectives? What are budgeting aspects to consider in your strategy plan?
• What rhythms of evaluation / feedback will you have? And how? 
• What might be some completely out of the box / way out of left field ideas that could spur innovation in your strategic approach?
• What support structures do you think may be needed in your strategic approach?

10. Jump In!: Once you’ve written your strategy plan, gotten feedback, and established your 6 to 18 month goals, jump in and do the work! Now that you’ve prayed, investigated, and discussed the different steps, applications, and goals, you can focus on the most important goals, while keeping an approach of experimentation, learning, and adjustment if your applications aren’t effective. Don’t be afraid to fail forward – even if your plan doesn’t bear the fruit you’re hoping for, it’s an opportunity to learn and innovate to move forward. There’s also a fine line between discerning when you should innovate and change something, or when you should keep persevering in a goal – ask the Holy Spirit to give you wisdom to decide. As a general guide, we have heard from CPM practitioners that you don’t want to say something ‘doesn’t work’ until you’ve tried it 200+ times!

On first glance, this may look like a lot of moving parts and complexity. My encouragement to you is to set aside 2-3 days and just start trying to follow the guide and fill in your plan. I’m confident that by the end, you’ll have at least the beginnings of a solid strategy plan for you and your team. Going through this process gives you and your team clear goals to focus on, an understanding of your ministry process, questions that you can investigate, and motivating vision for where God is leading you. To me, getting even a semblance of those benefits is worth giving a couple of days of focus, as opposed to you or your teammates waking up each day and not knowing what you’re supposed to do!

And as we said in Part 1, allow the Holy Spirit to guide and surprise you. If you sense him nudging you in a different direction, follow him with obedience and boldness! Most importantly, we submit all of our plans to him:

The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.

Proverbs 16:9

Lastly, if you need help either getting started or at any step in the creation of your strategy plan, we’d love to help! Please reach out to us at contact@missionsleaders.com.

“Strategy” is a frequently used word in missions leadership, maybe because of the parallels between missions and military situations. It’s often expected that team leaders would be ‘strategic’ in their ministry plans and leadership of their teams. For some leaders, they hear the word ‘strategy plan’ and they get really excited. Others might hear it and think, ‘that’s overwhelming, I’ll never be able to create a strategy and I don’t even know where to start.’ 

This is a two-part guide for how to write a Strategy Plan for your ministry. In this first part, I want to just define a few things about strategy and some of the information that needs to be gathered before you write a strategy plan. In the second part, we’ll have a step-by-step guide for how to write a Strategy Plan.

This guide is intended primarily for field team leaders pursuing movements among the unreached, but I think it can be adapted for many different ministry contexts. This was developed when we expanded from one team that Jenn and I led into 3 teams in early 2020, and we needed to help our new team leaders create their own strategy plans. I had to switch from thinking about strategy more intuitively and instead think of how any team leader, regardless of their natural aptitudes, could create a basic strategy plan for their ministry and their team.

Vision vs. Strategy vs. Tactics

The dictionary definition of strategy is – a plan of action designed to accomplish an overall goal within certain conditions. It’s important to distinguish vision (the end goal) from strategy (the plan) and tactics (the actions you do to fulfill the plan). Your vision (e.g. multiplying movements among this unreached people group) should be heavily prayed over and considered even before you launch to the field – it should very rarely change unless something very drastic happens or God speaks in a very clear way. You should be confident, clear, and committed enough to the vision God has given to you to be willing to give your life for it.

Strategy is the plan that you use to get from where you are to the vision that God has given you; it should be revisited and reworked probably 1-3 times a year to get a big picture view of how it’s going and how to plan to move forward. Tactics are the day-to-day and week-to-week actions that you do to accomplish your strategic objectives, and can change just as frequently.

What Strategy Is and Isn’t

Before we jump into the step-by-step guide, I wanted to bring some clarity to what I think strategy is and is not. Strategic thinking can quickly go from helpful tool to unhelpful pitfall if we’re not careful.

• Strategy is not primary. Even though I personally love strategy and my mind is drawn to it, I think we can assign far too much value to strategic thinking and strategy plans, particularly for Westerners. Give me a leader with godly character who is able to listen to the Holy Spirit and is humble to learn, over a strategic thinker without those things, every time. The best man-made strategies cannot compare to a godly leader obedient to the Spirit.
• Strategy is not meant to be perfect. The goal should never be to have a perfect plan. Ministry is messy because ministry involves people, including you and me! Therefore, we should hold our plans relatively loosely, and not get upset when our strategies don’t end up working out. But going through the process of thinking and planning can help you to understand what’s going well and what isn’t working, as well as other important aspects (more below). From experience, our plans have never really worked out how I originally thought it would, but we’ve seen God more often than not fulfill the goals and objectives that He was giving us. It feels like He is simultaneously reminding us that He is in charge, and showing His faithfulness to do what He leads us towards!
• Strategy is not as simple as copying someone else’s. You cannot carbon copy someone else’s strategy. This is a pitfall for a lot of people working towards CPM: they think, ‘well this strategy or training worked there, so it’s going to work here!’ The place you’re going to is unreached because of the difficult barriers to the gospel and to multiplication. Each context is unique because people groups and cultures are complex, so having a cookie-cutter approach between different contexts rarely works. It’s fine to mimic some of the things you learn from other places – most of the tools and lessons we use in Thailand are totally ripped off from other places in the world.

Strategy is not primary, won’t be perfect, and shouldn’t be copied, but it’s still a powerful tool when we have the right perspective:

• Strategy is important. Even though strategy plans won’t be perfect, it’s still an important endeavor and a helpful tool in your ministry. It’s the pathway for how you want to get to the vision God has given you, and it helps to create good expectations for your team. One of the questions we got the most from our teammates was, “Are we doing the right thing?” Crafting a strategy plan helps you and your team to move forward with focus, to thoughtfully learn from and adjust to your mistakes, and gives you clarity in what you’re asking God for in faith-filled prayer. 
• Strategy is doable. You don’t need to be an amazing ‘strategist’ in order to create a basic strategy plan. It shouldn’t be overly complicated or it will cease to be helpful. If you’re willing to learn, to listen to the Holy Spirit, and to put in some of the time and effort to write things down, a strategy plan will be a helpful tool for you and your team.
• Strategy requires continued learning and adapting. Whether a new team leader or an experienced one, you will never have all the information you need to create a perfect plan. There will always be mistakes, missteps, and places where you’re downright wrong, and a good leader will learn from failing forward. God’s ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:8-9), and that’s good! If you’ve learned from the actions you’ve taken, then you’re well on your way to figuring out what will work. And, there are others that have gone before that can help you – learn from them!

Information Gathering

Before we jump into the steps for writing a strategy plan, there’s two areas that require some learning and information gathering: principles and context.

Learn the Principles

Ministry principles are the building blocks for your ministry plan. A principle is something that is true regardless of context. Our ministry philosophy and strategic plan uses CPM principles.

As much as possible, we try to adhere to these principles and keep these in mind when we’re forming our strategy plan and tactics. When making ministry decisions, we’ll ask – is this simple and reproducible? Is this in line with Scripture? Are we sowing broadly?

For movement practitioners, it’s essential to know these principles and study the different ways these principles can be applied in different contexts. The more you can learn from others that are doing or have seen success in a similar ministry as you, the more you’ll build your database of knowledge and be able to form strategy appropriately.

Principles are different from applications – this is an important distinction in strategy. For example, broad sowing is an important principle for multiplication, but the application of broad sowing can look different in different contexts.

For us, 3 Circles is a gospel sharing tool that we learned and used in the US. In our first training group with Thai disciple-makers, we trained them in how to use 3 Circles. After 3+ months of going onto the college campus as a team and sharing 3 Circles over 200 times with almost no success, we asked our Thai partners, ‘is this a good tool for sharing in Thailand?’ They told us, ‘No, it isn’t!’ There were too many differences in worldview for 3 Circles to make sense to someone from a Buddhist background, so we needed to pick an application that was more contextually appropriate.

It can also be helpful to learn from and use different ministry models to guide your strategic planning. We use this Multiplication Cycle adapted from other models with our partners in Thailand, but there are many other models out there like 4 Fields or the T4T Three Thirds Process. There’s a ton of resources out there, and you can find some of them on our Resources page.

Investigate your Context

Now that you’ve studied and understood the ministry principles and models that you want to use – here comes the hard part! How do I apply this in my context? What are the best methods, practices, and rhythms of training, coaching, evangelism, discipleship, and church planting among your people group?

Before you launch, and as you’re there, learn as much as you can about your context and people. In the 2 years before we launched to Thailand, I had Joshua Project opened on my computer and Operation World on my desk, and I prayed through a different UPG a day in Thailand before we ever moved there. Learn about the culture, the gospel barriers, the history of Christianity in that country if there’s anything. Try to identify where the major barriers and opportunities are. Meet people from that country and ask a ton of questions about their upbringing and culture and context (ethnographic interviews can be a helpful tool to ask good questions). Try to meet other like-minded goers that have been there for a while, even better if they’re movement focused as well.

It’s difficult to create a strategy plan with the right applications when you haven’t learned the principles and the context. Again, you won’t have perfect knowledge, so ministry strategy requires experimentation and innovation. Ultimately, none of us as outsiders will have the cultural understanding that an insider will be, so partnering with national believers can be one of the most effective approaches in cross-cultural ministry – we call this ‘Being Barnabas’ and will write a future post about it!

Write your Strategy Plan!

From there, you can start to write up a strategy plan (part 2!). It’s a good practice to write a strategy plan before you even launch, but just hold that loosely because there’s so much you learn just by being on the ground there. When you get there, you want to learn as much as possible and write down what you learn. We had our team brainstorm 50 questions in 10 different categories that they’d try to ask different types of people over the first 2 years – some of the categories were about religion, culture, Church history, barriers to the gospel, spiritual environment, urban vs. rural, etc. 

It’s a good idea to revisit the strategy plan after you finish language school and before you start to jump into full-time ministry engagement, maybe 1-2 years after you’ve been there, depending on how long language learning is for you. Then probably evaluate your strategy plan once again after your first season of ministry as you’ve tried some stuff out.

Strategy is a tool that can help bring clarity, but it doesn’t determine your success. No one ever got to movement because of perfect man-made strategy; God alone determines when and if movements start. And the Holy Spirit is the driver and the guide – if you look at Paul’s journeys in Acts, you can clearly see some strategic aspects of how Paul operates – like going to synagogues before engaging Gentiles (Acts 17:2), or the way he sets up local leaders versus leaders in his apostolic team (Acts 19:22). But you should also go and count how many times his ‘plans’ get changed by the guiding and direction of the Holy Spirit (Acts 16:6), like getting the dream of the Macedonian call (Acts 16:9).

In Part 2, we’ll give you a step-by-step guide for how to write a strategy plan, but ultimately, our plans need to be given to us by the Spirit – and he will do it!