For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
— Matthew 25:40

Who are you? Who, who, who, who? I really wanna know.
— The Who (British rock band)

I'll never forget when my phone rang at the Alban Institute one winter morning. "Hi, I'm the rector of an Episcopal church in New England. I need a mission statement for my church by 6:00 tonight. What can you do for me?"

Claudia Greer is a Resource Associate at the Alban Institute. Reach her at cgreer@alban.org.

"Well, I can look up some twenty-odd mission statements from church websites, e-mail them to you, and see which ones you like," I replied. "But there will be a problem. However good a mission statement sounds, it won't mean much. If your church hasn't engaged in a thoughtful discernment process, even the most beautiful mission statement will be nothing more than a collection of empty words. The statement won't speak to your congregation's history, or your identity, or the future to which God may be calling you."

"Yeah, I know. But we've been trying to hash this out for eight years and we can't stand it any longer. There's a meeting at 6:00 and we need to wrap this thing up. Just give us something, okay?"

While his request seemed foolish at the time, I can understand his frustration and his wish to put this behind him. Some approaches to congregational visioning can seem woefully abstract and out of touch with the day-to-day realities of congregational life. More than that, some approaches fail to recognize the importance of knowing your congregation's identity—before attempting to formulate its mission. Gil Rendle and Alice Mann note that for congregations, "honest self-knowledge reflects a maturity that allows for clear and purposeful decisions to navigate the future."¹

If your congregation has felt daunted by the task of discerning identity, you might consider an approach from Janet Cawley: the personal identity exercise. Outlined in her book, Who Is Our Church?, this exercise invites people to think of their church as a "who" rather than a "what," a person rather than an institution. As Cawley puts it, a church "uses its knowledge of itself to construct a metaphor, a dynamic model of the congregation as a person."

When you imagine your church as a person, some questions you might ask include these: What is this person's gender? How old are they? What do they look like? What do they do? What is their level of health? What events, challenges, and opportunities are shaping their lives now? Even questions such as what they eat for breakfast can be illuminating.

Cawley narrates stories of churches that applied the exercise fruitfully, and explores options for using exercise results "to locate problem areas, gain a realistic sense of mission possibilities, and plan future action." In addition, she alerts readers to those situations when the exercise is not advisable—such as new pastorates, recent mergers, or times of intense conflict.

While any approach to discerning mission and vision has its limitations, it's helpful to know that there are tools available when you and your congregation are feeling "stuck." And they can keep you from needing to desperately call around for a last-minute mission statement.

— Claudia Greer
January 29, 2010