Jagged Vision - A Guided Collective Approach
By Chad Haverkamp | October 15th
Vision, vision, vision!!! It is one of the paramount things that any effective leader has. It guides your decision-making, fuels the passion for your work, and is the mark with which you measure your current success. A leader with strong vision can attain incredible things, while a leader with weak or no vision will often lead their organization into rabbit-holes that don’t matter, or, worse, the end of the organization itself.
In the Christian school context, an effective school leader, whether the Head of School or the Board of Directors, needs to have a strong vision. It could be relating to our practice of Christian faith in education, to a specific learning pedagogy, or something entirely different; however, without vision, how does a school measure or define if it is actually being successful? If you have not defined what you are trying to achieve, how will you know if you are achieving it?
When you hear the word, “vision”, what comes to mind? Is it a mark? A specific thought or idea? Is it rigid or is it malleable?
In my experience, I have often thought of vision as being a specific point that lies ahead in the future. It is as if you are standing on a straight arrow pointing towards vision and everything that you do is leading you straight towards it. In the context of a business or other form of sole-proprietor organization where one person holds the final decision-making authority, this is often the case. Some very successful organizations have been led this way, by strong leaders who set a clear direction and pursued it with unwavering focus.
These leaders have done incredible things and accomplished much. They generated wealth and developed products and services that we cannot imagine our lives without, and in some cases brought forward a cultural change that has shifted life for the better (hopefully).
But every leader is not just what they have accomplished but rather who they are as people. Romans 3:23 says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. As we live and interact with this world, we can see where this is true. We are all sinful and have flaws and misunderstandings about the world. Some of these things are inherent to our sinful nature, while others are lies we have had to tell ourselves to make sense of what is happening or has happened to us. No person is entirely objective and free from the sin of this world.
When it comes to leadership, these inherent sins and personal flaws are also right there alongside us as we lead, and also right there alongside us as we develop and pursue our vision. Since we are flawed and sinful human beings, is it possible that our vision is also tainted and flawed?
This is where the Body of Christ comes in. Within the Christian community, the Holy Spirit lives and works in the collective. As you walk through your life, how often has a brother or sister walked alongside you, poured into you, and you were changed?! Your faithful brother or sister faithfully followed the Spirit’s leading and was used by the Lord for your good, to the glory of God. In other words, you were heading in a specific direction, only for another person to come along and be used by God to “bend” you in a slightly different direction.
The same is true when it comes to vision, especially in Christian leadership. In your Christian school, you are the holder and keeper of your school’s vision, but your school will hopefully exist long after you are gone from your leadership role. The vision of your school is not just yours, it belongs to your school community. Our job as school leaders is to help coach and guide our community towards the vision but you also need to be open to the bias that you bring to that vision.
Over and over, I am amazed at how God has used others in my own school community to help shape and mold my vision once I realized my own skew. Leadership is a practice in humility and we need to be open to adjusting and “bending” our vision to align with how the Spirit would have you go.
As an example of this in action, consider the story of Peter in the New Testament. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter had a strong vision who he thought Jesus was. He believed a hard-fought physical victory would bring Christ as the Messiah. His rigidity in his vision brought him to the point of drawing his sword and slicing off a soldier’s ear. But then, Jesus knocked Peter’s vision arrow from being incredibly straight to one with a “bend”. He showed him in a moment, while healing the man’s ear, that Peter’s vision was skewed. Christ himself adjusted Peter’s vision towards the what God was actually doing and Peter became one of the founding fathers of the church itself, doing incredible things in the growth and expansion of the church.
So you see, pursuing vision is not so much a straight arrow as it is a jagged one. As a leader, you have likely experienced this yourself. It may not be that your vision was far off to begin with, but that it just may have needed a bit of refining along the way.
If you are truly open to the Spirit “bending” our vision when needed, it could be incredible what God can do in you and through you in your respective Christian school, but also in Christian education across Ontario and beyond!
Chad Haverkamp is the Niagara Peninsula Cohort Leader for Edvance, and COO and Principal of Jarvis Community Christian School.