By John Cole

Mission Audit packs (see chapter one) give a host of different methods for discovering what should be the priorities in the life of a local church at any given moment.

Similarly, ‘Vision-building’ programmes (and excellent practical books such as ‘Change Directions’ by David Cormack - Monarch 1995) can help a congregation to think beyond the here and now to discern more clearly God’s purposes for them over, say, a ten year period. The immediate steps to be taken then arise logically from this long-term vision.

Both give useful results: but both run the risk of providing a purely human analysis. Part of the answer, of course, is to ensure that the analysis is done in the context of prayer. But even here we can pray so noisily - without really listening - that we only hear our own opinions and presume that God has agreed with our way of seeing things!

There can never be a guaranteed way of knowing that we have heeded God’s priorities and not merely picked a few of our own.

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Mission Audit and vision-building processes owe much to the strategic planning techniques used in business management. All management techniques, however, are based on the assumption that we can quantify how successful we have been in achieving our goals. We who are followers of Christ crucified should not expect to be able to devise such simple yardsticks of ‘success’. On the illusions of success - and failure - see chapter three.

But these words of caution need not diminish the value of exercises like the simple one described on the next two pages. It is the sort of exercise that a church council could tackle during the course of a single meeting - and it is as good a medium as any through which God may choose to speak to you if you really want to hear him.