Will Mancini > Quotes

“Leaders constantly bring the most important things to light: current reality and future possibility, what God says about it and what we need to do about it.”
― Will Mancini, Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement

“Questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. —Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“Our heart is made to live in a larger story; having lost that, we do the best we can by developing our own smaller dramas. Look at the things people get caught up in: sports, politics, soap operas, rock bands. Desperate for something larger to give our lives transcendence, we try to lose ourselves in the smallest kind of stories.”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“The functional Great Commission in North American churches has become: Go into all the world and make more worship attenders, baptizing them in the name of small groups and teaching them to volunteer a few hours a month.”
― Will Mancini, Future Church: Seven Laws of Real Church Growth

“Think about it: God’s doesn’t stand in heaven with a photocopy machine every time a local church is started. Your church was born an original; don’t let it become a carbon copy on your watch.”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“Just like the person of Jesus, the local church as the body of Christ must understand what it is created and called to do.”
― Will Mancini, Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement

“Scripture reveals a God who expects a return on investment. But experience shows that too many leaders are satisfied with input results only.”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“Does God desire a radical transformation in my heart or can I enjoy great worship and teaching once a week and call it good?”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“Despite the importance of input results, they do not provide a necessarily positive indicator of mission achievement. More attendance and more giving don’t necessarily mean more and stronger disciples.”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“Why is all of our innovation in ministry about technology and not about discipleship?”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“As you “live out” your vision, the next step is continuous innovation for the sake of your unchanging mission and timeless values.”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“This simple instance illustrates a silent epidemic at work all around us. The reality is that most people don ’t think; they only rearrange their prejudices. Real thinking can be disruptive to the status quo and requires a great deal of courage.”
― Will Mancini, Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement

“Instead of counting Christians, we need to weigh them. - Dallas Willard”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“But what if this limitation—being constrained within time—actually creates exciting possibilities?”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“A template is something you can choose to use and then adapt or combine; it accelerates your start but doesn’t limit your art.”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“vision serves everyone, every day. It’s fun and makes us better. And it is always continuing and unfolding.”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“So how do we open our mind’s eye to consider new alternatives? That’s what the rest of INNOVATING DISCIPLESHIP is about.”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“One question I always enjoy asking church leaders is “How do you want your church to be different two years from now?”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“Pastors make “automatic” decisions without “active consideration” of “viable alternatives.”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“to equip you as God’s co-creator. After all, he designed you to help design a better future.”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“Most pastors, as I have observed them, will spend more time on preaching preparation for the next month than on vision preparation for the next five years.”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. —Author and lecturer Mark Twain”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“The poet Archilochus wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In Good to Great, Collins demonstrates that great organizations live and breathe from a hedgehog concept. They are ruthlessly clear about the one thing at which they can be the best in the world. Organizations that act like foxes, chasing after too much too often, never achieve a singular focus. They stay stuck being “good.”4”
― Will Mancini, Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement

“Is our vision to have more of the same results or some new result?”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“We don’t naturally look for fundamentally new, different, or better results, but more of the same of what we commonly measure.”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“Innovation must be anchored in clarity first.”
― Will Mancini, Innovating Discipleship: Four Paths to Real Discipleship Results

“Scripture establishes the wisdom of planning as a God-dependent, assessment-based collaborative process for seasonal rhythms and special reasons.”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“God doesn’t do generic. There is no such thing as a generic sunset, a generic snowflake, or a generic human being. Likewise there should be no such thing as a generic church or a generic future.”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future

“Presumption prevents the breakthrough to self-knowledge that would otherwise open the door to new levels of leadership.”
― Will Mancini, Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement

“It’s been said that vision without execution is a daydream, and execution without vision is a nightmare.”
― Will Mancini, God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church's Future