Will Mancini. Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement. Jossey Bass: 2008. ISBN: 9780787996833.
Meet the Author
Will Mancini is the founder of Auxano – a church consulting group with a unique approach to developing a church’s vision frame before providing traditional consulting services. Mancini’s pastoral experience includes helping lead two congregations to grow to over 3,000 in weekend attendance:Clear Creek Community Church and FaithBridge UMC. He is the author of Church Unique: How Mission Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement. To connect with him, read his blog, follow him on Twitter, or friend him on Facebook.
Book Basics
Strategic planning was the preferred way forward for many churches over the last several decades, but Mancini argues it produced marginal results at best. In contrast to that well known model, Church Unique offers an alternative framework that is a better fit for the rapidly changing environment of early twenty-first century congregations. More specifically, the book’s stated purpose is “to challenge you to find your Church Unique: that is, to live a vision that creates a stunningly unique, movement-oriented church” (p.xxii).
The book is divided into four main parts each containing multiple chapters designed to walk would be visionaries through a very detailed process:
- Recasting Vision
- Clarifying Vision
- Articulating Vision
- Advancing Vision
Mancini tells stories of Auxano’s work with well multiple well know clients including Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, TX (Max Lucado, pastor) and Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, TX (Chuck Swindoll, pastor) and with churches that lack a national profile. Church Unique provides a pathway that can be effectively utilized by churches of all sizes and with any denominational affiliation (including those who have no affiliation at all) because it seeks to help churches understand their past, acknowledge their present, and leverage both in service of becoming that which only they can be in the future.
So What?
Fact: The average church in America has fewer than one hundred people present for worship on Sunday morning.
Fact: The average American church has no clear sense of vision and expends considerable energy doing things that have always been done or appear important.
Fact: The average American church that has a mission or vision statement doesn’t align staff and ministry offerings to it nor do the members feel it expresses how they are united (if they are even aware of what the statement says).
- How does your congregation live toward its future? What processes are in place? Do the key leaders, including the Senior Pastor, support this ongoing work?
- If you have prior experience using strategic planning in a congregational context what did you find to be its greatest strengths and weaknesses? Do you agree or disagree with Mancini’s arguments that it was never as effective as it claimed to be and should now be viewed as an outdated option?