In the last five years God has led the Community Christian Church where I'm the Lead Pastor to places I never envisioned!  In 1998 we became a multi-site; one church with two locations. It wasn't a part of my vision.  And since the second location was so successful we recently launched a third location. And since becoming a multi-site church our outreach has more than quadrupled with an average attendance of more than 3200 with the majority of these new attendees being people who are far from God. But my point - I didn't vision cast for that!

The real story is this:  when we made the move to start our second campus it was so apparent that God was at work that the decision was easy.  Imagine this:  you have a real estate developer that wants to build a 35,000 square foot community center to be used by your church with the direction for design coming from focus groups comprised of your church leadership; he wants to partner to establish a new not-for-profit to build community and he wants to support the start-up of the new campus with significant financial dollars.  The answer is simply apparent, "Yes!"

We didn't really decide to start our third campus either…again, it was just so apparent.   We had an existing small church come to us and offer to give us their five acres and facility to use however we wanted.  It was a $1 million asset they wanted to hand over to us.  They knew one thing for sure - they wanted to join us in this mission to "help people find their way back to God" and the rest we could figure out in time.  You might think, "Well, that's a no-brainer!"  The answer seemed pretty apparent to me too! 

Did the vision come first?  No what came first was the "God-thing". 

Our experience has been that the "God-thing" is what makes the vision so very compelling.  When I was first contacted by the Bieritz family about the our (third) West Campus we were excited about the possibility of using this old church building on Montgomery Road in Montgomery, Illinois as a new site.  This elderly patriarch and his daughter were ready to give us the building that was their home church for all their lives.  But I kept it very quiet so that our lead team could pray and process over this decision. 

I will not forget the day I told all our staff about this possibility.   No one outside of our lead team knew about this possible new campus in Montgomery.  When we finished our all-staff meeting I went back to my desk and I already had this e-mail from Sherry, one of our key staff members:

Dave,

Weird thing - I had a dream last night, it was weird but what stood out to me was this little old lady standing there telling me that I needed to go and find this church in Montgomery. I kept asking her how to get there and she told me to go down Montgomery Road and i would see the signs and they would tell me where to go. She said I couldn't miss it, but is was important I check it out.

Then I hear about this church thing today with this property that someone wants to give us in Montgomery? On Montgomery Road?  Weird isn't it?

Sherry

I believe that dream was a God-thing confirming that we were to start this new West Campus.  God spoke in that dream to Sherry and to all of us at CCC to make sure we didn't miss His vision. Whenever I got the opportunity to vision-cast for our new West Campus, I always started with the God-things:  a gift of a $1 million asset and the confirmation through a dream to a trusted leader.

Does the vision come first?  Maybe not.  And certainly not always!  Maybe Drucker was right, "decisions are not so much made as they become apparent?"  And it's the communicating of the God-thing that makes the decision/vision so compelling!