John Piper on leaders and vision

Watch this very brief message from John Piper...


The Work of a Christian Leader from Desiring God on Vimeo.

Do you agree with that, the idea that reinforcing a "vision" is a primary function of a Christian leader? I kind of worry about this because it is so common. When a pastor comes to a new church, it is assumed that he will have a "vision" for that church. Lots of churches spend lots of time creating vision statements or mission statements, reevaluating and revising their statement of belief. Just being the people of God engaged in the mission of God is not sexy enough, we need a vision!

If the "vision" becomes the main thing, then the real main thing gets lost, i.e. Jesus. I am very susceptible to this and I see it happen all the time. When a Christian catches the majesty of God's sovereignty in salvation, it is easy for the vision of seeing Reformed theology sweeping the church take over and become the main thing. All for the glory of Christ of course but pretty soon you find yourself becoming an evangelist for Reformed theology instead of Christ, more concerned with telling Christians why their theology is wrong than telling the lost about Jesus. This is replicated in lots of movements where the vision starts to take over: homeschooling, house church, Reformed theology, family integrated church, egalitarianism, complementarianism. Many of these things are good and positive and started with the right heart but when we focus too much on these visions we can lose our way very easily. The last thing we need is to spend a bunch of time focusing on our particular vision. The vision for the church has already been decided by someone far more authoritative than my or even John Piper.