Christoph Schalk

How To Draw Up Your Own Mission Statement (Part II)
[This series started in eNCDine October 2004]

You are sitting in your car driving on the highway. A truck in front of you slows you down. You look at your watch and recognise that you are running late. So you step on the gas, pull out from behind the truck and change to the left lane ... If you were taking a test for a driving licence, you would now have failed. It's imperative to look in the rear-view mirror before you change lanes. Only looking back gives you clarity in what is going on behind you. The same truth applies when you want to draw up your own "mission statement".

Looking back is needed before you can look ahead and focus on your goal. What you need to do first is step back and evaluate your life so far. In this process, four questions are helpful:

•	How has God worked in my life so far?
•	How did God form me?
•	What did God teach me through his word?
•	What is the "vision" God has given me?

If we want to discover God's mission for our lives, we do not start with nothing. God said to Jeremiah: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations." God has a purpose for our lives, long before we begin to understand this truth. This is the reason why he has used every day of our lives so far to lead us and to prepare us for his mission.

God directly intervened in our lives and used persons, events and circumstances to form us. He used positive situations as well as – from our limited point of view – negative situations to grow us towards maturity. As we look back on our lives, we will be amazed as to how many traces God's work has left already. Often a clear pattern will become visible – and this pattern is the starting-point for the view ahead. After all, God does not constantly change his behaviour towards us in an arbitrary and erratic way.
 

How has God worked in my life so far?

The first step towards developing a life purpose statement, therefore, is to look back at your life so far and to draw a "lifeline", including each significant event and thus revealing a pattern of God's work in your life. This preliminary exercise will create an awareness of the most important and significant "highlights" in your life. Such a lifeline is particularly helpful when you use symbols for different parts of your life. You could draw for instance a telephone for an important phone call that changed your life or a smiley for a person who crossed your way at the right time.

This is my personal lifeline:

I do not want to confuse you with all the details, but the bird, for example, is a symbol for a budgerigar I had as a child. One day, when he became rather sick, I prayed to God (at that time I was not a Christian yet, though I had a Christian background): "Dear God, if my budgerigar gets healed, I will pay more attention in my Christian education class." The bird got healed – and thus I had my first experience with God, which finally led me, along with other experiences, to Christ. This was a milestone in my life!

If you want to deepen this exercise, then spend an hour or two alone and write down your own life story. Note how God used situations, events and people to form you. Why are you like you are? An example showing that God formed my life through people is the following statement from my own life story: "Not long after I had become a Christian, the leadership changed in the youth group of which I was a part. The new leader spent a lot of time with me and discipled me right from the beginning. I owe him the basics of my faith ...." Another sentence summarises an event: "This year I prayed, whether I should participate again in a short-term mission trip to Albania as I had done last year. Suddenly I had the impression 'No – do an internship at the Church Growth Institute'. This internship later on opened the door for my ministry in the area of church growth."

Exercise: Please write down your personal life story. Are there certain periods in your life story? Phases that clearly differ from each other? Please notice the transition from one phase to the next. What was the cause for the transition? Are there any key-persons or key-events involved?

In fact, the most important thing in understanding our lives – the past and the future – are not the phases themselves but the transitions between. God triggers something to set us in motion, changes situations, moves us forward. The church in the days of the apostles experienced God's initiative in a pretty drastic way: persecution (Acts 8). God used the persecution, to move the church from phase 1 ("revival in Jerusalem") to phase 2 ("Judah, Samaria, to the ends of the earth"). God's initiative – persecution – plays a major role in bringing the Christians of that day closer to their proper God-given mission.

Triggering circumstances like this are not often seen as something positive, though God is behind them. On the contrary: confusion, lack of orientation, anxiety, and uncertainty characterise these transitions from one phase to the next. However: It is - in the truest sense of the word – a "holy anxiety", as God moves us forward towards his goal, towards our true commission in life.
 

Four Key Factors

Dr. J. Robert Clinton, Professor at Fuller Seminary in California, studied the life of more than 700 leaders – in the past and the present – and discovered that God seems to use certain patterns again and again in the life of leaders. We recognised during our discipleship training that those patterns not only apply to the lives of leaders but also to Christians in general. That does not mean, however, that everything happening in our lives is used by God to grow us spiritually. The four most important factors according to Clinton are:

1.	Encounters granted by God: From time to time God causes us to meet other people just at the right moment, to have a significant impact on our personal development. These people give us the right information; they open doors, introduce us to other key people, and so on.
2.	Faith Challenges: God examines our readiness to take steps of faith and to grow in confidence. Often, when we have to make decisions or need to start something new our faith is challenged as well.
3.	Negative Preparation: As in the case of the first Christians in Jerusalem, who only became aware of their worldwide mission when they were persecuted, God sometimes uses situations in our lives that seem to be negative and unpleasant in order to bring about significant change. This may involve conflict and crisis.
4.	Isolation: Times in which we are released from our day-to-day duties can be significant as they help us to listen to God in a better way and receive instruction from him. Sometimes such times are planned ("Sabbath times"), sometimes we have to face them rather unexpectedly (e.g., illness or unemployment).

Exercise: Study again the story of your life by means of your lifeline. Can you tie events, persons, and/or circumstances to one or more factors as described by Clinton? And above all: Can you recognise what God had in mind when he made you face those factors? Please summarise your insights in a new, more detailed lifeline, in which you include all these details.

How did God form me?

Values and convictions are deeply rooted in our personality. They form a kind of "operating system" for our lives, making sure everything runs smoothly. Our personal "operating systems" are also responsible when we run into problems with other people using different "operating systems" to ours. While the computer world faces communication problems only, when a Windows-based computer is not able to process the data of a Mac (or vice versa ...), different values are an integral part of our unique personality and form the basis for our unique calling.

How do values emerge? Again, there are certain events, circumstances and persons that have a great impact on us by touching our hearts. Those personal experiences are key in that we develop through them (consciously or unconsciously) certain attitudes, standards, and patterns of behaviour. These values are not always helpful! Emotional damage and bitterness emerge in a similar way, and not all values are in accordance with God's values. Godly values in fact are the result of both godly reactions to whatever we have to face in life and the cultivation of the corresponding attitudes within us.

An example will explain what I mean: If a child is always disadvantaged by his parents by constant comparison to his sisters and brothers, it can react with an inner bitterness and a determination to reverse that later on. The value was internalised: "I must put myself in the first place." But the child could also react in another way: "I always want to treat other people fairly."

As another preparatory work for a "mission statement", it is helpful to make oneself aware of one's values. On the one hand, to have those values clarified by God, and on the other hand, to discover what – in accordance with the values of God – is important to me. What excites me? What makes me stand up with passion? These questions in fact are a valuable pointers to God's call on my life – for God also took part in building my values!

 

Exercise: The following questions are to help you identify your values. Please write down your answers to the respective questions. 1. If you knew that you could not fail: What would you stand up for? What would you change in your life? 2. What thrills your heart? What makes you become passionate? 3. What makes you sad? 4. What character traits has God shown you to be important? 5. What principles are important to you in your church, family, job, relationships to other people? Please write down the most important values that you have recognised so far: 1. ..................................................................................................... 2. ..................................................................................................... 3. ..................................................................................................... 4. ..................................................................................................... 5. ..................................................................................................... Please verify now, whether your values correspond with biblical values: Do they correspond or contradict biblical principles? Give Bible references! If this check seems to you to be too general, you may find the following questions helpful: • Why has God created me? What am I here for? • What is the purpose of my life? • From God's point of view, what ought to be the source of my deepest joy? • How is the lordship of Christ to be displayed in my life?

What did God teach me through his word?

Biblical values are transmitted to us through God's word and its application to our lives. Therefore, it is reasonable for everybody who wants to develop his "mission statement" to have a look at what God has taught him or her so far through his word.
 

When I did this exercise years ago, I wrote down the following statement: "My whole life shall be worship for God: full of vibrant faith – though I do not see yet – holy and pleasing to God. I want to do God's will in humility and love, by keeping his word, by being a disciple of Jesus myself, by discipling others, and by investing my gifts into the kingdom of God in a way that produces fruit. The basis for all of that is to be a deep relationship to Jesus in which I get to know him more and more."

What is the "vision" God has given me?

Now you have looked in the "rear-view mirror" long enough. It's time to look at what's ahead in correspondence to God's will, which is to bless people and offer them his friendship. So, we are not talking about self-realisation but a vision of what God wants to accomplish through my life. This vision focuses all energies and aligns them with one goal. It creates momentum and is the basis of my personal calling. God is the one who gives vision. A personal vision emerges out of prayer and thoughtful reflection before God on key questions.

Exercise: Take half a day (or several sessions of at least one hour each without interruption) to pray and reflect on the following questions. Please write down your answers: 1. Where do you want to be in 10 years – in your job, in your church, in your family? Develop a very concrete picture of your future in your mind’s eye. 2. Gifts are pointers to tasks and therefore an indication of your calling. What gifts do you have? How do you want to use those gifts in the long term? What potential do you see in your most daring dreams? 3. What would make you stake everything on one card? What would be worthwhile to die for from your perspective? 4. Is there anything you think you should do (even though you have tried to drive away the thought again and again)? 5. What could you contribute to the kingdom of God through your life that would change the world (regardless of whether those changes would be small or great)? 6. Do you see a train of thought in your answers to questions 1-5? Now try to describe your vision in 5-10 sentences.

When I was working out my vision, I wrote down the following sentences: "I want to make a significant contribution to the development of churches worldwide. My contribution to 'church development' is to include:
 

•	Facilitating church planting, because only self-multiplying churches are healthy and extend the kingdom of God.
•	Facilitating the development of existing churches.
•	Church consulting, because I cannot see myself working for just one local church. Yet, in light of my values and gifts, I need to be involved and at home in a local church."

Your personal "mission statement"

By now you have developed step by step the "puzzle pieces" for your personal "mission statement": You examined God's working in your life up to this point. You wrote down values and biblical insights. And you brought your vision to the point. All these elements together make up your personal "mission statement": a statement of not more than 10 sentences, which summarises these aspects and answers the question of your calling and the mission of your life.
 

Exercise: Write down your "mission statement" by summarising the results of the preceding steps (it is up to you, whether you line up the "short versions" of your values, biblical insights, vision, and so on or whether you phrase your statement in a new way in order to integrate all your insights). Now try to summarise your "mission statement" in one single sentence – as I did with my motto "More and better churches – naturally".

Congratulation! You have reached the goal and established the foundation for a simpler and more fulfilling life: You understand God's calling for your life in a better way. Your life-motto will serve you well as a compass, as you look for direction in your day-to-day decision-making.

This chapter was taken and translated from Leichter leben lernen (The Keys to a simpler and more fulfilling life) by Christoph Schalk. Leichter leben lernen is available in German only from CoachNet D.A.CH. Copyright 2003: Christoph Schalk, C&P Publishing, used by permission. [Another chapter will follow in February: How you draw up a mission statement for your church ]

Christoph Schalk lives in Germany and directs the international consultant network of the Institute for Natural Church Development.