In todays’ media driven world it’s crucial to have an ongoing media vision for your church. Graeme Spencer shares three essential steps to help church leaders and their tech teams to achieve this.
Set aside a day and host a ‘Media Review and Vision Day’ and follow this simple three-pronged approach.
- Firstly, spend time celebrating what you have achieved. It has been remarkable what local churches have been able to accomplish during the pandemic, I am sure you already have many stories and testimonies of how God showed up in your world and lots of responses from people who have connected to you through your media.
Share these, enjoy the fruit of the work you have done, celebrate the stories of lives changed. Start here before you do anything else. Spending time being thankful and grateful will set the tone for your discussions on increasing your media vision for your church. - Secondly, move onto having an honest and open discussion on the challenges you have faced. Listen to each other, avoid jumping in and defending positions, instead make understanding NOT agreement the aim for this part of your time together.
The idea here is that at the end of the process you are all in the loop on each other’s frustrations and understand how each person sees the past season. This is hard to do but is essential to build unity in your teams. For help with this (and trust me we all need help with this) check out this article by Danny Silk. - Thirdly, spend time casting vision for the future. Don’t make this discussion about the tech or any other “detail” of what you need to deliver the vision, rather concentrate on what that vision is. This is the fun part, you get the chance to dream.
Where do you want your media output to be in two years’ time? (Two years is a good projection as so much can change if you go further than that). Who do you want to be reaching? What content do you want to be producing? What impact do you want your media to have? – lots of questions to work through.
The key in this third part is there are no wrong thoughts. You want to treat every idea as a possibility and work it through, considering everything. The outcome of this process will be that you come up with a collective vision for where you want to be in two years’ time that all the stakeholders agree with.
Implement the shared media vision for your church
This vision or blueprint for your media ministry can then be the plan everyone works from to develop a strategy on how you will achieve it. The strategy will include tech upgrades, content changes, team training and development and much more – but it will all be coming from a place of excitement for WHAT is possible as you now have a shared vision, and an understanding of why these things are needed to deliver the vision.
Also read: Does your church have a vision for media ministry? Now’s the time to start!