The Church Revitalization Podcast – Episode 312- Pastor Vision and Strategy
If you’re a pastor who thrives in one-on-one conversations, loves walking through life with your congregation, and feels most alive when caring for people in their moments of need but breaks into a cold sweat when someone mentions “strategic planning” or “vision casting,” this article is for you.
Many pastors are naturally strong in shepherding: care, presence, and relational ministry. Yet they feel less confident when it comes to pastor vision and strategy, those future-oriented, organizational direction skills that seem to require a completely different wiring. The pressure to lead the church forward while staying true to your shepherding heart can feel overwhelming.
Here’s the good news: pastor vision and strategy can be cultivated. While some leaders seem naturally gifted in these areas, these are also skills that can be developed, learned, and practiced. You don’t have to become someone you’re not. You don’t have to fake being the visionary leader you see at conferences. Instead, you can learn to lead with vision and strategy in a way that honors your God-given shepherding strengths.
Recognize Your Strengths and Weaknesses
The first step in growing as a leader is honest self-awareness. This doesn’t mean beating yourself up for what you’re not good at. It means having a clear-eyed view of both your gifts and your growth areas.
Affirm Your Shepherding Gift
Shepherds are essential in church leadership. You nurture people, protect the vulnerable, and guide your congregation through life’s challenges. These aren’t secondary leadership qualities. They’re foundational. The trust and relational equity you’ve built through faithful shepherding actually makes vision more believable when you cast it. People don’t follow vision from leaders they don’t trust, and your shepherding gift has already earned that trust.
Acknowledge Growth Areas
At the same time, it’s important to admit that long-term planning and future-oriented thinking may not come naturally to you. Strategy requires intentional effort, training, and practice. There’s no shame in this admission. It’s simply recognizing that God has wired different leaders with different strengths.
Don’t try to force something that isn’t you, and don’t try to be something that you aren’t. If you’re naturally a 3 out of 10 in strategic thinking, you might be able to develop to a 5 with intentional work. And that incremental improvement has real value, but recognize that your ceiling in that area might be a 5, and that’s perfectly okay.
Self-Assessment Practices
To gain clarity on your leadership profile, consider these practical steps:
Use leadership assessments. Tools like DISC, StrengthsFinder, or the Enneagram can provide valuable information about your natural bent. You don’t need to become an assessment junkie, but one or two well-chosen tools can offer helpful insights and affirmation of what you probably already sense about yourself.
Seek feedback from peers and mentors. Ask trusted leaders in your life: “Where do you see me strongest? Where do I seem to struggle?” Sometimes others can see our blind spots more clearly than we can.
Journal your stretched moments. Keep track of situations where you felt out of your depth or particularly challenged. Over time, patterns will emerge that help you identify specific areas for growth.
The key is gaining information so you can make informed choices about how to lead well, not to shame yourself for what you’re not.
Build a Team
Once you’ve identified your strengths and weaknesses, the next step is building a team around you. This is where many pastors know what they should do but aren’t actually doing it. Or they’ve assembled an advisory team without truly empowering them.
Surround Yourself with Complementary Leaders
Seek out visionaries, planners, and systems thinkers. Look for people who get energized by spreadsheets, strategic planning sessions, and organizational charts (the things that might drain you). And here’s the critical mindset shift: don’t feel threatened by them. Their strengths don’t diminish yours; they complement yours.
Jesus didn’t need a team. He was fully capable of accomplishing his mission alone. But Jesus chose to have a team of twelve disciples. You’re not Jesus, so you need a team even more than he did. This is where the actual goals become reality, is with the team.
Collaborate, Don’t Just Delegate
Building a team doesn’t mean abdicating your leadership responsibility. You’re still accountable for the church’s direction. But your team helps sharpen and clarify that direction. Treat the team as a learning lab where you can grow your own strategic muscles by watching how these leaders think and work.
This means creating a real team, not a cosmetic one. A team that actually functions together, makes decisions collaboratively, and then implements those decisions. A visual team that doesn’t function as a team won’t help you or your church.
Practical Actions
Form a strategy circle or advisory team. Identify 3-5 people with complementary gifts and invite them into regular strategic conversations. Make sure these aren’t just “yes people” but individuals who will genuinely challenge and strengthen your thinking.
Invite them into big-picture conversations. Don’t just present finished plans for rubber-stamp approval. Bring them in early when ideas are still forming. Ask questions like: “What am I missing here?” or “How would you approach this differently?”
Ask them to challenge your blind spots. Create a safe environment where honest feedback is not just tolerated but expected. When someone pushes back on your thinking, thank them rather than becoming defensive.
Live Your Role
Once you’ve built your team, the next step is to fully own the role you play best. This is where your shepherding strength becomes a powerful asset in leading with pastor vision and strategy.
Lean Into Your Shepherding Strength
Here’s what many shepherd leaders don’t realize: you actually make vision stick better than the natural visionaries do. Why? Because you walk with people through change. You understand their fears, their questions, and their resistance. You can translate vision into care by showing how it serves real people with real needs.
When vision gets rolled out, there’s often resistance, especially if it represents significant change. People have feelings about that. While a visionary leader might charge ahead impatiently, you’re uniquely positioned to come alongside people pastorally and help them see the value of where the church is going. “I totally understand how you’re feeling and why this is challenging. Let me explain why we’re moving in this direction…”
See Shepherding as Fuel for Strategy
Your shepherding strength isn’t separate from strategy. It should inform your strategy. You know your people well. You understand their capacity for change, their spiritual maturity levels, and their life circumstances. Use that insight to shape realistic, people-centered strategies.
Vision divorced from people is abstract and ultimately ineffective. Your strength ensures that pastor vision and strategy remain grounded in the actual lives of the people you serve. As the podcast emphasized, “You can translate vision into care by showing how it serves people.”
Practical Practices
Frame every vision conversation in terms of how it blesses and grows people. Don’t just talk about organizational goals or numeric targets. Connect the vision to spiritual formation, community health, and individual flourishing.
Share stories of life change. When communicating vision, illustrate it with concrete examples of transformation. Your pastoral experience gives you a treasure trove of these stories.
Speak first, but in your own voice. Even if you’re not the most visionary communicator, step into your role as lead pastor and speak first. Own the aspect of communication you’re good at. Maybe you’re a great Bible teacher, so you connect the vision to Scripture. Then let team members who excel at rallying the troops or explaining implementation details take their turn. Don’t feel like you have to do all of it yourself.
Don’t Let Pride Get in the Way
This final principle might be the most important and the most challenging. Pride can sabotage everything we’ve discussed so far.
Admit You Don’t Have All the Answers
Pride keeps leaders from asking for help or learning new skills. It whispers, “You should already know this,” or “People will think less of you if you admit weakness.” But humility actually accelerates growth in areas where you’re less naturally gifted.
Think about Moses. From the beginning, he recognized he wasn’t a great communicator, and God said, “Okay, your brother Aaron can help.” Throughout Moses’s leadership, his failures often came when he stepped out of his lane and led in ways God wasn’t asking him to. His pride got in the way, causing him to forget who he was in relationship to God and the people.
Don’t try to be the master leader who’s great at everything. You won’t be, and the attempt will exhaust you and limit your effectiveness.
Commit to Being a Lifelong Learner
Growing in pastor vision and strategy requires intentional learning. Read books on church leadership, organizational development, and even business strategy. Attend workshops or coaching sessions outside your comfort zone. Consider joining a cohort of pastors who are also working on these skills.
Recognize that developing in these areas isn’t a quick fix but a long-term commitment. And that’s okay. The goal isn’t to become a different person but to expand your capacity in areas that matter for the mission God has given you.
Celebrate Others’ Wins
When your strategic team contributes significantly (when that associate pastor knocks it out of the park with a vision presentation, or when your administrator creates a beautifully clear implementation plan), celebrate them genuinely. Don’t let insecurity make you feel diminished by their success.
It’s good to have other people on the team who are successful and good at what they do. If people walk away from a meeting saying, “Wow, that executive pastor is a rock star,” your response should be: “Yes! Aren’t we blessed to have them on the team?”
This humility needs to go both ways. Just as you shouldn’t let pride prevent you from empowering others, those team members shouldn’t let their pride make them think they’re “basically the lead pastor.” Everyone owns their role with humility and servant-heartedness.
Remember Jesus’s teaching in the upper room. We often think of foot-washing as something we’re supposed to do for the world, and we should serve the world. But Jesus’s point in that moment was specifically about how disciples were to treat each other. Christian leadership is fundamentally about servant-heartedness within the team.
Moving Forward
If you’re a shepherding-type pastor wondering how you can lead better in vision and strategy, here’s the summary:
First, recognize your strengths and weaknesses. Know who God made you to be, and be okay with what you’re not naturally gifted to do.
Second, build a real team around you. Surround yourself with people who have complementary gifts, and genuinely empower them to lead alongside you.
Third, live your role fully. Own your shepherding strength and let it fuel your approach to pastor vision and strategy. You don’t have to become a different kind of leader. You just need to be the best version of the leader God designed you to be.
Finally, don’t let pride get in the way. Stay humble, keep learning, and celebrate when others on your team excel in areas where you don’t.
You are an important component in building Christ’s church. Your role isn’t diminished when you feel inadequate in certain areas of leadership. It takes a team, and God has called you to lead that team in your unique way. Lean into your strengths, build your team, and build his church.
Additional Resources:
Empowering Co-Shepherds: A Fresh Vision for Shared Pastoral Care
Watch this episode on YouTube!
Scott Ball is the Vice President and a Lead Guide with The Malphurs Group. He lives in East Tennessee with his wife and two children. (Email Scott).
