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Jeff Gill, Guest Columnist Published 4:00 p.m. ET Jan. 3, 2020

How many ways have we seen 2020 as a year conflated with 20/20 as a measure of vision?

I was in seminary when I first heard reference to goals and planning towards the year now begun, mixing up the usual metric for clear vision with the Anno Domini, Year of Our Lord Two thousand and twenty.

And I hate to tell you, but it was 35 years ago.

Thats almost four decades of beating that metaphor into the ground, and its with a measure of relief I mark not just having lived to this date, but seeing it start to move past us. No more 20/20 riffs or reminders or relationships.

Im not a person with 20/20 vision. Ive worn glasses since third grade and probably needed them earlier than that. Im about 20/60 in one eye and 20/200 in the other.

What that means in everyday terms is that what the normal person can see at 200 feet of, say, a set of letters on a poster, I can only see at 20 feet. 20/20 vision just means that you see at 20 feet of distance what most people see from 20 feet away. Thats why a person with truly acute vision might have 20/15 vision, because they can see at 20 foot range what the basically enabled watcher would need to step five feet closer to make out.

Which is where I think the idea of labeling a visioning process for a church or any other faith community as 20/20 vision is not a sign of acuity or excellence, but youre actually asking for the average, the generally accepted. And is that the kind of vision we want in our spiritual insight?

Id hope, as a congregation, that my church members would ask and pray and work for a measure of vision that is better than the run-of-the-mill eyesight. Certainly, we dont want worse, and Im glad to have my own corrective lenses to get me roughly back up to 20/20, but our hopes for vision and anticipation should be more for . . . well, how do they measure telescopes or microscopes?

So, to see well into the future, we might want to aspire to 28x vision like a good home telescope, or for insight 100x magnification akin to a desktop microscope. Thats the kind of vision worth pursuing, dont you think?

Anyhow, 20/20 is dead-on average, and while thats useful and common, I think the year 2020 is a good time to retire that image, and maybe even rethink the whole concept of vision statements. Mission statements have been boiled down to a phrase or short set of words for quite a while now; you dont see long mission statements as a standard quote line on either business or non-profit documents very often anymore. Its not to be the leader in every market we serve, to the benefit of our customers and our shareholders or a company that builds value for its shareholders through its employees by creating an atmosphere of optimism, teamwork, creativity, resourcefulness and by dealing with everyone in an open and ethical manner. Now, youre more likely to see Peace of mind or To inspire humanity.

A vision statement should state the goal youre working together to achieve, and a mission statement your particular part of making progress towards that vision. My own congregation filed a very forward looking vision statement with the Ohio secretary of state back in 1891: To glorify God and better humanity. While we have a more recent and much longer mission statement, we work with a simplified condensation of it as Worship, Serve, Grow. Those three words offer a visitor or guest our sense of how our church is participating in that larger vision to glorify God and better humanity through the values of corporate worship, shared service, and a commitment to personal growth in spiritual maturity.

How does your church community envision the goal youre together to support? And what are you particularly called and gifted to accomplish in that pursuit as a local church? Im betting you can do better than an average, common, 20/20 vision of those ends.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him how youre thinking about vision atknapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

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Original post:
Faith Works: You might be surprised by what you see - The Newark Advocate

This entry was posted on January 3, 2020 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Eye Sight & Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |