Anyone know where the history of the church mission and vision statements came from and how they made it in todays churches. We are developing a mission statement for our church, and honestly I think its a bit rediculous --my Question to myself is "what is Gods mission for his church"? Anyone have an answer?
I think it came from the business world. If you want to have a successful business these days, a well-thought-out business plan is supposedly the key to winning the race. To help develop their business plans, businesses develop a mission statement to determine their purpose and goals as a business. It seems like the church has adopted this practice.examples:http://www.bplans.com/dp/missionstatement.cfmhttp://www.businessplans.org/Mission.html
I'm sure it came from the business world but I suspect it came from someone with a religious background, mission, vision. There is an ongoing enemy strategy to distort and defame biblical truth and part of the strategy is to change what the words mean. The consequence is that everyone says the same things but no one understands what is meant any more. This is ongoing in the world of neo-Darwinism too where the chief exponents consiously use religious language with their own implied definitions.
It is interesting to note how seriously churches take this entire idea of "mission" and "vision." Entire books are written on the subject. At my last church that I attended, the pastor & elders spent months trying to develope a church mission statement. This mission statement wasn't but a dozen words or so, but it is amazing how much time was spent on developing it, perhaps to the neglect of more important things. The idea behind it was that the church would have a short mission statement that members of the church could easily memorize and repeat if need be. What did the statement end up doing? Nothing that I know of. But I imagine that somewhere Bill Hybles or Rick Warren quoted some stats that somehow corelated having a mission statement to the growth and success of their church.I believe the Scriptures already give us our mission statement that all local churches are to follow: go, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. Though having some sort of "vision" might be helpful for individual ministries within the context of the local church, just for the sake of focus. Such as if you were having a homeless ministry, ladies ministry, etc. Collectively, the churches mission is to make disciples, but it might have several visions that help the church accomplish this task: e.g. feed the homeless, teach the word, send out missionaries, etc.
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