March 18th

What's the value of a vision statement?

This is the first in a series of reflections from Executive Minister Michael Pahl on our new MCM Vision & Mission Statement, approved at our 2026 Gathering.

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I have a confession to make: I’ve always been skeptical of vision and mission statements.

I know. It would have been good if I’d told you all that before I just helped the MCM Board lead us through a two-year visioning process, culminating in the creation of a new Vision and Mission Statement for our community of congregations.

But I’m confessing it now—and I’m ready to explain my skepticism.

In my experience, vision and mission statements are too often words on a page that have no meaningful connection to the lived experience of the organization. They gather dust in some forgotten corner of the organization’s website, ignored and irrelevant to the decisions that are made day to day and year after year. Most people couldn’t tell you what the vision or mission of the organization is, not even the supposed “vision keepers”—the executive staff, the board, the pastors, the lay leaders.

This, I would say, was generally true of Mennonite Church Manitoba in recent years. However good our vision and mission statement was, with its long list of shared values, however well-intentioned we were with it in its early years (it was nearly 30 years old), in the last decade or more it has rarely made a public appearance. It certainly hasn’t been prominent in guiding us as a community of congregations.

And I suppose this is where my skepticism of vision and mission statements comes in. It’s not the statements themselves that I’m skeptical of, it’s the way in which they are—and even more, are not—used.

A good vision statement is like a good confession of faith: it has value only to the extent that it is actually lived out. To extend the comparison, and to borrow words from the introduction to our Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective: “a written statement should support but not replace the lived witness of faith.”

In other words, that “lived witness” is more important—more real—than any written statement, whether it is a confession of faith or a vision and mission statement. And the written statements, whether confessions or visions, are only valuable to the extent that they are actually reflected in the lived experience of the community.

Our new Vision and Mission Statement for our community of congregations has grown out of two years of conversations and feedback. The MCM Board has listened to us in our diversity and discerned several themes that are important to us in describing who we are and who we believe God is calling us to become.

Our Anabaptist identity is important to us, even as we want to hold that with open hands in our active engagement with others of diverse faith traditions. Within that Anabaptist identity, a focus on Jesus as the centre of our faith and life together is important to us, as is an emphasis on community, belonging, and the love of God. We long to be healthy, even flourishing, both as congregations and as a community

of congregations. We want to maintain a focus on social justice concerns, but we want to make sure this is grounded in a vibrant spirituality centred on Jesus and nurtured by the Spirit.

These themes and more, discerned together over the past two years, have gone into creating a new Vision and Mission Statement for us as a community of congregations. It’s now up to us—to our denominational leaders, to our congregational leaders, our “vision keepers”—to hold this vision before us. And it’s up to us—all of us, by God’s grace—to reflect this vision in our lived experience as congregations.

May we indeed be—and become:

A church to belong and be loved,
    embraced in the Spirit.
A church to meet Jesus,
    following in his Way.
A church to do justice, love mercy,
    and walk humbly with God.