Faith Works 1-4-20
Jeff Gill
You might be surprised by what you see
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How many ways have we seen 2020 as a year conflated with 20/20 as a measure of vision?
I was in seminary when I first heard reference to goals and planning towards the year now begun, mixing up the usual metric for "clear vision" with the Anno Domini, "Year of Our Lord" Two thousand and twenty.
And I hate to tell you but it was thirty-five years ago.
That's almost four decades of beating that metaphor into the ground, and it's with a measure of relief I mark not just having lived to this date, but seeing start to move past us. No more 20/20 riffs or reminders or relationships.
I'm not a person with 20/20 vision. I've worn glasses since third grade and probably needed them earlier than that. I'm about 20/60 in one eye and 20/200 in the other.
What that means in everyday terms is that what the normal person can see at 200 feet of, say, a set of letters on a poster, I can only see at 20 feet. 20/20 vision just means that you see at 20 feet of distance what most people see from 20 feet away. That's why a person with truly acute vision might have 20/15 vision, because they can see at 20 foot range what the basically enabled watcher would need to step five feet closer to make out.
Which is where I think the idea of labeling a "visioning process" for a church or any other faith community as "20/20 vision" is not a sign of acuity or excellence, but you're actually asking for the average, the generally accepted. And is that the kind of vision we want in our spiritual insight?
I'd hope as a congregation that my church members would ask and pray and work for a measure of vision that is better than the run-of-the-mill eyesight. Certainly, we don't want worse, and I'm glad to have my own corrective lenses to get me roughly back up to 20/20, but our hopes for vision and anticipation should be more for . . . well, how do they measure telescopes or microscopes?
So to see well into the future, we might want to aspire to "28x" vision like a good home telescope, or for insight "100x" magnification akin to a desktop microscope. That's the kind of vision worth pursuing, don't you think?
Anyhow, 20/20 is dead-on average, and while that's useful and common, I think the year 2020 is a good time to retire that image, and maybe even rethink the whole concept of "vision statements." Mission statements have been boiled down to a phrase or short set of words for quite a while now; you don't see long mission statements as a standard "quote" line on either business or non-profit documents very often anymore. It's not "to be the leader in every market we serve, to the benefit of our customers and our shareholders" or a "company that builds value for its shareholders through its employees by creating an atmosphere of optimism, teamwork, creativity, resourcefulness and by dealing with everyone in an open and ethical manner": now you're more likely to see "Peace of mind" or "To inspire humanity."
A vision statement should state the goal you're working together to achieve, and a mission statement your particular part of making progress towards that vision. My own congregation filed a very forward looking vision statement with the Ohio secretary of state back in 1891: "To glorify God and better humanity," and while we have a more recent and much longer mission statement, we work with a simplified condensation of it as "Worship, Serve, Grow." Those three words offer a visitor or guest our sense of how our church is participating in that larger vision "to glorify God and better humanity," through the values of corporate worship, shared service, and a commitment to personal growth in spiritual maturity.
How does your church community envision the goal you're together to support? And what are you particularly called and gifted to accomplish in that pursuit as a local church? I'm betting you can do better than an average, common, 20/20 vision of those ends.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him how you're thinking about vision at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
