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Leadership

Why Seemingly Smart People Don't Get Your Vision for the Church

Church leaders get frustrated with people don't follow. And when you think you've clearly communicated your vision and people just don't seem to get it, it can be frustrating. But here is the key...

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Sometimes people don't get your vision. Whose fault is that?

Great leaders know that you need to constantly communicate your vision.

Here might be another way to look at it. It’s from author James Clear:

Clear's Law of Recurrence
The number of people who believe an idea is directly proportional to the number of times it has been repeated during the last year—even if the idea is false.

This is just a different wording of what some call the ‘mere-exposure effect’.

According to Wikipedia, the mere-exposure effect is essentially a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle.

In other words, for people to really buy into your vision, they need to become familiar with it.

I think vision in almost every church is under-communicated. Vision needs to be reinforced, probably weekly, from the stage. But that’s only the beginning. It needs to make it’s way to every area of your church communication. It needs to start to be recreated in different ways at different levels so that it can eventually become part of your church’s DNA.

It could be that your vision isn’t gaining traction for one simple reason: people just aren’t familiar with it yet.

The challenge: you’ll feel like you’re over communicating. But you’re not. You’re just making ‘familiar’.

QUESTION: When was the last time you communicated your vision?

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From James Clear’s Atomic Habits Email Newsletter. Subscribe here.

Todd Rhoades

Todd Rhoades

Todd has invested over 30 years in serving churches, having served as a worship pastor for over 15 years, a church elder for more than a decade, and in various ministry leadership roles in both the business and non-profit sectors. As the original founder and developer of ChurchStaffing.com, Todd fundamentally changed the way thousands of churches search for pastors and staff on the internet. Todd is a graduate of Cedarville University, and lives in Bryan, OH with his wife, Dawn.

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