Strategic Planning

Have you ever taken some time to sit down and write out a vision statement for you life?  Yesterday, Zsofi and I wrote six.  That's because we have six competing visions for our lives.  No, not really.  We actually just enjoyed the process so much that we couldn't stop with just one...

Why all the vision statements?  Well, one of the exciting developments this past year has been the addition of Chad & Serina Hollowell to the UWM team here in Europe (see a picture of their family on the right).  Chad will be serving as UWM's Area Director for Central and Eastern Europe, and one of the first projects he initiated was to come up with a team vision statement for Hungary.  Hence, Zsofi and my devolution into vision statement writing craziness...

The truth is, however, that Zsofi was right.  We began by each of us composing a kind of vision statement for our lives--i.e. what we would like for our lives to have consisted of if we were to look back over it when we are 80 years old--along with 5-8 of our core values.  From those two individual documents we forged a "joint" vision statement for our lives.  This process, though not revealing anything that we didn't already know (at least in the abstract), was nonetheless really interesting to see on paper--especially in drafting the joint vision statement which is essentially our long-term goals for our marriage.

Now to the ordinary person, three vision statements in one day would be sufficient.  Not for us!  From our two individual personal vision statements, we each drafted individual ministry vision statements.  And then from those two individual ministry vision statements, we forged a draft joint ministry vision statement.  Once again, nothing terribly surprising or new to us if we would have spent some time thinking about it, but codifying it on paper turned out to be a really interesting/valuable process.

In the end, when we sat down with Chad on Wednesday to go over our (draft) ministry vision statement, I think he was a bit shocked to discover that we actually had six.  :-)  But I suppose it means that at least we are not people who lack vision...

For any of you who are interested, the final version(s!) should be ready in a couple weeks and we would be happy to send you a copy.