March 24, 2015
By Eddie Pipkin
“Silent Disco” – The Importance of Clarity of Vision
Eddie Pipkin
I was on a three-day cruise to the Bahamas recently, helping a good friend celebrate his graduation from seminary, and I got the biggest kick out of this onboard activity called The Silent Disco.
The first night of the cruise, the ship hosted a party in the top deck dance space in which everyone who entered received a pair of headphones before heading out onto the dance floor. You put on your headphones and started busting a move to the tune in your ears, but here’s the awesome part: there were two separate audio channels, and you were listening to one or the other. So, half the people in the room were dancing and singing along to one tune, and half the people in the room were dancing and singing to the other. Take my word for it, it’s hysterical, particularly if you are standing on the sidelines and just watching.
Groups of line dancers were crashing into one another or looking on confusedly at seemingly random hand motions and gyrations, and because you could switch your headset channel back and forth, lots of people kept trying to switch to the coolest song on the coolest channel at any given moment.
To a spectator, isn’t that exactly what ministry must look like at times? People dancing to their own tune, out of synch with others at the party?
When we are not careful to define and communicate a clear direction—either for an individual ministry or team or for a whole organization—that is the fate that awaits us. Ministry teams (and whole organizations) have to be working together for a commonly understood unified purpose in order to successfully arrive at a destination in a healthy and happy condition.
And I’m not going to pontificate here on the value of Mission Statements or Vision Statements. I have been involved in that process numerous times (and in the doghouse more than once for my cynical, smirky quasi-participation). Too often, those exercises result in ambiguous