Major-league pitcher Steve Trout, to show off, recently attempted to throw a strike while blindfolded. He succeeded. The novelty of that exhibition, however, simply points out how unusual is such an accomplishment without being able to see.
Whether throwing baseballs, driving a car, or reading a map, we need well-focused vision. And in leading a church, vision of a different kind is equally vital.
Virtually all thriving churches have at least one visionary, a person who sees the possibilities, knows where the church can go, and excites others about getting there.
Wooddale Church, in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie, has its share of visionaries, including Leith Anderson and Austin Chapman.
Leith Anderson has, since 1977, been senior pastor at Wooddale. During his pastorate the church has relocated, changed its name, and nearly doubled in size.
Austin Chapman is president of The Northland Company, a financial services company, and is a key lay leader at Wooddale. He has served as church chairman, deacon, Sunday school teacher, member of the building committee, and chairman of the pastoral search committee. Together, they have been instrumental in helping the church more clearly define its focus of ministry. LAY LEADERSHIP asked them about the process necessary for well-focused vision.
An interview with Leith Anderson and Austin Chapman
Lay Leadership: For those who’ve been in church awhile, the word vision means one of two things: a building project or relocation. Is that a legitimate image?
Chapman: Vision is a picture of what can be in the future. In a dynamic church, that can be of growth, and growth suggests you need facilities. Certainly building programs or relocation can be part of a church’s vision, but they’re not really central.
Anderson: The essence of vision is what you imagine and intend should be. I like Robert Kennedy’s quote: “Some people see things the way they are and ask why; I see things the way they could be and ask why not.”
Persons of vision are those who imagine what could be, and should be, and say, “Why not? Let’s go for it.”
Lay Leadership: How would you state the vision of Wooddale Church?
Chapman: We have a purpose statement: “The purpose of Wooddale Church is to honor God by bringing lives into harmony with him and one another through fellowship, discipleship, and evangelism, based upon the Bible as a standard.”
Lay Leadership: How many people in the church could quote that?
Chapman: If you allow for paraphrasing, I would hope the majority. All of them are familiar with it.
Anderson: We put it in our literature several times a year, and I welcome people to the church with it. Everything we do is described in terms of our three operative words: fellowship, discipleship, and evangelism. We have three special weeks of the year: Fellowship Week, Discipleship Week, and Evangelism Week. Our youth program has fellowship activities, discipleship activities, and evangelism activities. This threefold approach permeates everything in the church.
Chapman: Each year at the annual meeting, the church votes on our statement of purpose, our strategies, and our current objectives. These aren’t changed every year, but they are ratified every year.
I should say, though, that vision is much broader than just our formal statement of purpose. Vision is deeper, wider, longer range; it has to do with conceptual things, intangibles. We want to be God-centered; we want to be a church that’s open to new people; we want to reach people who are not churched. That’s not part of our statement of purpose, but it’s part of our vision.
Lay Leadership: How important is it to have a vision statement? What would be the effect if you did not have one?
Chapman: It helps to define where things fit and who has responsibility. Of course, the purpose statement is further defined by our specific strategies and objectives. But it helps us decide whether we do something or not.
Anderson: When some proposal comes up, we often will say, “How does this fit into our statement of purpose?”
For instance, and this is a touchy area for some people, we used it recently to decide whether to allow certain kinds of fund raising and whether to have offerings at certain events.
We have, for example, a major concert coming up. Our purpose is “to honor God and to bring lives into harmony with him and one another.” The question becomes: Are we more likely to bring non-Christian lives into harmony with God by taking an offering at that concert or by not taking an offering? We decided by not having an offering. We felt it was more important to fulfill the purpose of the church than to get four hundred dollars in the offering plate.
Lay Leadership: If we attended Wooddale this Sunday, how would we detect the vision? What would we feel? What would we see?
Chapman: I think you’d feel the fellowship. You would be greeted. I’d expect many people would speak to you, not just the greeters who have that responsibility.
Anderson: We’re far more concerned that people experience fellowship, discipleship, and evangelism than that they can articulate it.
Most people think in terms of the whole only in relationship to the part that affects them. We, for instance, have very little concern about the corporate structure of the Standard Oil Company, but we have a great deal of interest in whether they offer self service or full service at the local station. That’s true of the church as well: Most people understand the vision in terms of the part that affects them.
Chapman: The struggles we’ve had in the church have not come because of the broad vision; the struggles have come over specific little ways of implementing it.
When Leith says from the pulpit, “We want to reach out, to be open as a congregation,” everyone agrees. But when you start to make the changes necessary to open the church more to the unchurched, that’s where the struggle comes.
Anderson: In Nehemiah 8, Ezra stands and reads the Book of Moses – and then a group of people have to go out and explain it. That happens in our church: Austin and the board have to tell people, “This is what Leith meant.” I was glad to see that’s a biblical approach. (Laughter)
Lay Leadership: What’s an example of your struggle to implement the vision?
Anderson: In a business meeting that Austin was chairing, someone raised the question whether openness and welcoming of non-Christians meant that we would allow smoking in the building. We had an energetic discussion. It turned out to be a moot point because smoking in public buildings is against Minnesota’s Indoor Clean Air Act.
But the discussion helped people grasp the vision. It’s at those specific points where people get a handle on what it means to be open and to reach out. They see the vision through the lens of the specific.
Lay Leadership: We’ve talked about vision as this all-encompassing statement of direction. But there’s another meaning: seeing something that isn’t yet but could be. What kinds of visions have you had, and where have they come from?
Anderson: Music is one area we haven’t developed as much as we’ve envisioned – both in terms of honoring God and reaching unchurched people. Austin has been a real leader in helping us reach this.
Chapman: Our vision for the music ministry is to provide excellence and to minister to people who are not Christians but who will be attracted to good music.
A few years ago as we were developing our vision for Wooddale, we discussed, “What are we competing against as a church?” One key competitor is television, which has imposed upon our society, including church members, a certain standard of excellence. Programs start on time, end on time; people speak well, sing well, perform music well. When people intuitively sense this as the standard, the church often comes off second best. We wanted to raise our sights, to attract people who have come to expect quality in music.
And within the congregation, music is fundamental to the worship experience. So the acoustics and musical elements of the service become very important.
Lay Leadership: So your vision is to raise the level of the music ministry. How have you gone about it?
Chapman: It’s not a formal process. I’m involved in the building committee, so I have been discussing acoustics and choice of organs and such things. And the music task force, of which I was a member, recommended that we add a staff person in the music area. We also set the sanctuary choir as the first priority, and discussed styles of music appropriate to our church.
Lay Leadership: How specific did you get there?
Chapman: Very. People obviously have preferences, and so our role was to point out that music had to be (1) suited to our audience and (2) consistent with our vision for ministry. But a wide variety of forms and styles of music are appropriate, in the right setting, if done well. We have not come down and said, “We’re not going to do jazz,” for instance.
Lay Leadership: Somebody has to make the decision as to what’s suitable for a given occasion.
Chapman: The staff has to make that decision. And if they get beyond the line of what people can accept, they hear about it, usually very quickly. (Laughter)
Lay Leadership: Tell us about the process of developing an overall vision for Wooddale.
Chapman: In 1978, after Leith had come to us as pastor, we determined it was time to look ahead and make some strategic decisions. The church board went through an involved planning process in which we evaluated our strengths and weaknesses, where we wanted to go, and what we wanted to be.
We spent a lot of time looking at trends in the evangelical church and trends in the secular world. We tried to understand how those would impact us. We looked at our resources and our limitations, and studied Scripture in relation to all of this.
Anderson: I think we had twenty-five lengthy meetings that year – not for routine business, but to help decide our direction. By the end of that year, a number of things had happened. As a board we were amazingly united. We also had a pretty clear picture of where we wanted to go and how to go about getting there. The next step was to convince the church that was where to go.
Chapman: Out of that study, we made a variety of recommendations to the church. The only ones I can remember now are the controversial ones. For instance, we proposed removing baptism by immersion and total abstinence from alcohol as requirements for membership, and dropping the word Baptist from our official church name.
Lay Leadership: How would you describe what the church was, at that point, and what you wanted to become?
Anderson: At that point, the church had plateaued, in fact, declined. The great days of Wooddale had passed. So people tended to talk about how much better the church was “back then.”
We needed to take people’s eyes off the past and put them on the future, off how great the church had been and onto how great the church could be.
That was probably the most significant change of all – more important than membership requirements, name change, eventual relocation, and everything else.
Lay Leadership: This change from past orientation to a future orientation was accomplished largely through those twenty-five meetings with the board?
Chapman: It was accomplished in the leadership. It was not yet accomplished in the body.
Anderson: The process isn’t totally sequential. Many things were happening at the same time. It’s like the construction of a new building. You have to work on several parallel lines at once – design, financing, legal procedures – and then they all come together.
One thing Austin and I did was to design a leadership course – six ninety-minute sessions that dealt with leadership in general, then biblical leadership, and eventually the direction of Wooddale Church in particular.
After the first course, we all critiqued it and made adjustments. Then Austin and I did it again with another group. We did this every six weeks for two years until in groups of ten to twenty we dealt with everybody that we considered a leader or a potential leader in the church. It ended up being hundreds of people.
As a result, all the opinion makers in the church had read the same books, had participated in the same types of discussions – not on what Wooddale ought to be, but on how decisions are made, and how churches establish priorities. It gave us a common vocabulary and some common experiences to draw on as we wrestled with implementing the vision.
When we actually went ahead with the proposed changes, we operated on the philosophy of growing concentric circles. In the center circle would be the elders and the staff. After working these things through, we moved to the next circle, which would be, in our case, our operating boards and committees. We met with them in a number of weekly meetings and went through the whole process again. Then we met with the leaders of our adult Sunday school classes, then in open forums with the congregation.
We didn’t want to make the mistake some churches do: they go through a complicated decision-making process and then have a business meeting and expect the people to go through a process in forty minutes that the leaders have taken four years to go through. Because people can’t do it that quickly, they’re hostile toward the process, and the idea is rejected for the wrong reasons.
So we had meeting after meeting. And in the end, people were on board.
Lay Leadership: So the actual congregational business meeting was not held to make a decision.
Anderson: Exactly. The purpose of the official meetings of our church is to ratify the decisions the body has already made. The decision itself should never be made in the pressured context of a public meeting.
It’s like a wedding. The decision is made long before the ceremony. In fact, the couple even has a rehearsal so that everyone knows exactly what to say, where to stand, and where to sit. Then we have the official public ceremony. And we tell the couple, “If you’re not going to get married, let’s call it off before we get to the official event.” Likewise, when we get to a business meeting, the issue should already be decided. All that’s left is the ratification.
Lay Leadership: Let’s go back to the early stages when you were deciding what you wanted Wooddale to become. What prompted you to launch this whole ambitious process?
Chapman: The impetus came from the church’s recent history. Prior to Leith, we had a pastor for nineteen years, and the church had grown and been “successful” by most standards. Then the pastor left under some rather negative circumstances. It was a hard time for the church, and after a year, Leith came as pastor. When you follow a long-term pastor, it’s a tough transition in any church. As Leith wisely put it when he came, he was the interim pastor; he had to earn the right to be senior pastor. And over a couple of years, he gained that credibility and respect.
At that point, Leith and I recognized that we were ready to go ahead, not just to survive. We recognized the church had the potential to be something much more significant for God than we were at that point, and that we ought to do it.
Lay Leadership: You longed for the church to have a greater impact on the unchurched, and you realized some changes were necessary?
Chapman: From my business experience, I know that all the or organizations that are successful are the ones that are open to the outside. Churches particularly tend to become ingrown, to focus inward, to serve their own needs. I saw that happening to some of our people. They openly stated, “We want to keep things the way they are,” which is another way of saying, “My needs are being met; don’t make us too concerned about other people’s needs.”
The strength of a church has to be in looking out, not looking in. It’s a very subtle thing. One of the strategies we set up, but which we haven’t yet accomplished the way we’d like, is to let various civic groups use our facilities – clubs, AA, Red Cross, whatever. We want our church to be a community center. This, of course, raises the question of what these “outsiders” are going to do in this sacred place.
Anderson: We’re emphasizing that the church is the people and not the building.
Chapman: A second strategy, the flip side of inviting community groups in, is for us to go into the community – not just as individuals, but also in an organized way. Perhaps through music or drama. Perhaps with ministries to alcoholics, international students, unwed mothers, or whatever.
So we tried to articulate the vision that we were here to minister to those who were unchurched and didn’t know Christ. And to do that, we had to take away the impediments and start looking not at ourselves but at how we could meet those needs.
Anderson: When I came, I wanted Wooddale’s ministry to be evangelistic and to reach people. At the same time, the church had a written policy that no one who was divorced could be remarried at Wooddale.
After studying Scripture, that was not my position. When I came to Wooddale, Austin, the chairman of the search committee that brought me, knew I differed at that point. I agreed, somewhat painfully, to abide by the church’s policy. But I knew that would be a major barrier to reaching many people in this metropolitan area.
After a year, I proposed that it be changed, and it was.
It’s simple things like that. Pew Bibles are another example – and providing page numbers so those unfamiliar with Scripture will feel included.
We started looking at our building, at our literature, at our services through the eyes of the unchurched, and we saw hundreds of things we hadn’t noticed before. Farther into the process, we brought in groups of the unchurched for “focus groups.” We sat behind one-way mirrors and listened to them talk about their feelings about churches and things like the Saturday paper with all the church ads. That cured us of advertising on the church page! They laughed at the ads. We’d never looked at it that way before.
When we asked what most turned them off about the church, without fail the first response was fund raising. So we decided if we’re going to reach non-Christians, we can’t ask them for money. So now in services where we know we have many visitors, we will either not have an offering or I will announce, “If you are visiting, you are our guest; please don’t contribute.”
Fulfilling the vision meant we became increasingly sensitive to what started out as something simple.
Lay Leadership: Did you ever fear that the vision would be rejected?
Chapman: At times we were discouraged, but I don’t think we ever envisioned defeat.
Anderson: There were times before some meetings when Austin and I would say to one another, “I’m not sure this one’s going to fly,” but we never doubted that we were on the right track.
We really believed we were doing what God wanted to be done, but at the same time, we realized it was, in a sense, a group decision. We weren’t going to be undone if people turned us down on the name change, the relocation, or some other specific issue. We would have gone on.
We got so much resistance to changing the baptism requirement, for instance, that we decided not to insist on that. But everything doesn’t depend on just one specific element of the vision.
Lay Leadership: How do you see God’s will and your vision fitting together? Are they necessarily one and the same?
Chapman: The term vision connotes something a little mystical. In my understanding it’s not something particularly mystical. We didn’t have direct visions in the literal sense. Our vision was in terms of our understanding of what the Bible calls us to do as believers. We were simply trying to respond faithfully.
Lay Leadership: How would you describe Wooddale? What gives it its unique personality?
Anderson: People who have come and studied our church have said we are a very intentional church. We do very little simply by letting it happen. We analyze and study and decide. There’s a reason we have chosen the colors we have, for instance, or even the size of the brick on the building. Larger brick would have cost a few thousand dollars less, but we wanted a building that fit well with the other buildings in the community.
Our brochures intentionally don’t use words like Scripture, for instance, because that’s a term non-Christians might not understand. We use the word Bible instead. We’re heavy on pictures and light on words.
We may not always make the right decision, but we’re trying to do everything in a way that will reach our community most effectively.
