What is the Commons Vision?

The Commons “Vision”: What do we mean? What are we intending to communicate?

When we talk about “vision,” we’re communicating the “who” and “why” of the Commons. Why do we want (feel the need for) a vision statement or vision communication? Part of what we’re doing is branding the Commons in what is a competitive, consumer market. The desire is to share with our C

ommons friends a picture of who we are  (expressed in the form of “vision,” as in a “vision statement”). Such statements express what we want the Commons to be. It is important to recognize that the language of vision takes us into a specific, very recent language world that did not inform the churches before the last third of the twentieth century but is now not just ubiquitous but seems to be a requirement (ought); i.e., we must have a vision statement. 

It's a fact to ponder that almost every modern organization believes it’s essential to have a vision document expressing its “who are we” and “what do we” do (what is our unique proposition). It is now the norm for any organization to develop a vision statement stating who they are, why they exist and where they're going. Vision statements have become so ubiquitous in late modern societies they’re now deemed essential. But, like many other things we assume normative, vision statements are largely the unique products of modern societies. They didn’t really exist before the emergence of the modern organizational society. This should raise for us questions: What is that about? What does it say to us about the assumptions directing our reading of the world? Why didn’t such statements exist earlier - in pre-modern societies? How have these taken-for-granted assumptions about who we are and what we do shaped our being the church - i.e., the community of God’s people (what the Mennonites call a contrast society)?

Some push back with biblical citations supporting vision statements like, for example, “without a vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). This text, however, is an illustration of the problem. It has absolutely nothing to do with modern notions of vision and vision statements. The Proverbs quote isn’t about a leader, board or movement that comes up with their vision and strategic directions but a people who have received the prophetic revelation of the Lord and shaped their life around it through practices. It's really about the Law of God, not a group's imagination.  This should give us clues as to what we want to write or say in this section. I think it simplifies what we need to say and directs us to practices rather than long discussions of our why, what and how.

Is, therefore, having a vision statement a necessary or even essential element of Christian communities? Does attention to vision statements misdirect our work making us sound and act like any business organization believing that this approach is critical for the success of the church. Rather, does a vision statement represent yet one more form of our colonization by modernity? What if a “mission statement" isn't just a neutral tool that has to be taken for granted but an instrument of modernity’s ideological control  rooted in an imagination of the commodification and commercialization of everything, a tool for the maximization of human agency? What if, in using vision statements, we’re turning the common, ordinary life of Christian communities into commodities to be marketed and sold in a secularized, hyper-rationalized, competitive society? 

Is there a relationship between these vision statements and the discernment of God’s agency? Is the framing of a unique (how can this notion of a unique identity proposal be the case in the ecclesia?) vision statement modernity’s way of giving us the delusion of control? What is the place of God’s transcendent presence in such visioning? I think of a paradigmatic text of Israel’s identity, Genesis 3 where Moses is confronted by the mystery and otherness of God in the ordinary bush (a whole other conversation about where we encounter God’s agency). The Lord, it seems to me, goes out of the way to NOT let Moses turn it into a vision statement or strategy for the right, measurable outcomes. At the end of the day Moses isn’t allowed to control the experience or predict the outcomes. There is mystery and uncontrollability at the core of this story. In this story, Moses’ reality (and, thus, Israel’s and, therefore, the church’s) is not manageable or predictable but one of risk and experimentation in the midst of a fragmentary seeing/understanding (we see through a glass darkly) in which, with Moses, we only discover what God is doing and become cocreators with the Spirit as we join together in the risk of believing in this God who will not give us control and acting out our hunches, our hearing that other word that comes to us on the backside of the desert. This means we (plural) approach our world not with the fear that presses us to find control or anxiety (that asks God to give us his name) but with hope (hence, communities of hope) because the creator Spirit is present among us and ahead of us in our communities.

Stanley Hauerwas argues that vision is given through what Aristotle calls virtue, which is, in turn, the outcome of a long life of practice (Eugene Petterson’s a long journey in the same direction. If this is the case, then what we must focus on is the cultivation of the virtues (practices) that direct us toward a) God’s agency amongst us and b) God’s present in our communities. This is nothing like the notion of vision that currently colonizes the churches.The introduction of business language, like vision statements, outcomes and strategies imports into ecclesial life a secularized market-driven commodifying mindset.

Rather than vision statements, can we say that in the Commons we have faith that, through Jesus, God is putting back together all creation. As God’s people we are called to tell of that renewing and be it in the communities where we live. This way of life happens as Christians live in their local communities through deliberate common practices together. The Commons exists as a space where we discover, learn and develop these practices with one another. 

An important element in this framing is the conviction that we must be companions and friends with one another to take such a journey (Moses quickly discovered this in Aaron).  Human experience across the millennia has been about the collective and creative power of belonging, friendship and being companions. This is far more than a group of people in an organization being led through a weekend strategizing and visioning process with whiteboards, newspring and coloured pens. If we want to understand what’s involved here, think of the Trinity,  the dance of belonging from which comes the creativity that makes creation. The lie at the heart of modernity is that we are individuals who really don’t need (or want) each other except for explicit transactional relationships that extend our power. Tolkien and the Inklings got this. Read Guite’s Galahad and the Grail to get the sense of a non-modern imagination driving these stories. In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of the main themes of this story about a world coming apart is not vision (they had none) or strategy (they were Hobbits) but the indissoluble force of friends bound to one another in a common calling (both are essential; the one cannot exist without the other; this is why almost all small groups fail) that cannot be fit inside a vision statement or strategic plan.

After all this, what then do we do? What about those practices?