A Vision is Life

Vince Lombardi inherited a losing team with losing players and made that team one of the best football teams that ever existed. He transformed “losers” into winners. However, when he left, the Packers confused his plans and his methods with his vision.

They imitated Lombardi long after the methods and means were contrary to Lombardi’s vision: winning football games. The Packer sweep or wearing blazers and ties on the plane ride were means to getting there . . . not the vision. Times changed, Lombardi would have changed, but the Packers did not.

They lost for two decades until they hired a man like Lombardi in having a vision for the team who was  not bound by Lombardi’s methods or legacy.

If we confuse our check list, our business plan, or goals with a vision, then the ministry, business, or program will perish. A vision needs an implementation plan, but those are not so hard to find. An implementation plan will never get a vision by itself.

A vision is the worthy goal for our life and for the lives of the people in our community. As such, it will tend to be general enough to adapt to changing times, but specific enough to be doable and not a mere fantasy. To give an example, our new school, The Saint Constantine School, might aspire to have a billion dollar campus in the next five years, but that is neither a vision nor a realistic business plan. A number is an outcome to a vision, so can never be part of a vision and while a number will often be part of a business plan, the plan must be constrained by reality.

A billion dollars is not a worthy vision for a human life. A goal that ignores reality sounds bold, but is merely reckless.

So why start a school, a business, or a program? The answer must not be for the sake of building the school, business, or program. Any such social structure is the means to the end and not the end. We want to build The Saint Constantine School not because we aspire to be an outstanding elementary, junior high, high school, and college program. That aspiration is unworthy of a human life if that is all there is to it. The school is a good thing and the excellence is a fine thing when it serves God and His people.

When I was a kid, Christians often talked as if what the Church needed was a “Christian ABC, CBS, or NBC.” Leave aside all other problems with this idea and just grasp that at that time what we could have done is bypass the old network structure and get in on the start of the new media revolution that is still happening. Too often we invested millions of dollars of God’s money in knock off networks that few people watched when the goal should never have been the network!

We imitated because we lacked a vision . . . having substituted a desire to imitate what the actual visionaries who built the networks had already done. This rarely (if ever!) works.

When people said they wanted a “Christian network,” what I hope they meant was that they wished to communicate Christian ideas (as they understood them) to many people. They wanted story telling, news, and event coverage that took the Christian perspective into account. In other words, they wanted to live as Christians in media. Instead of working “in the system” or recreating “the system,” a visionary would have made a new system.

Hollywood, before it was Hollywood, bypassed the old centers of media and created a new structure. The next Hollywood will not be Holy Wood.. . the old system sanctified, but communication, story telling, and information done differently and better. It is hard to catch up with an established player in any field, but much easier to bypass them. Don’t build a record company. Go digital.

But don’t be confused . . . none of that is a vision. Digital is not a vision! Instead, the vision is the reason you might go digital. The vision might even be incompatible with certain methodologies. You cannot take communion online.

The vision of The Saint Constantine School is not the methodology (classical and Socratic) or the business plan. If we ever confuse the vision with the methodology or the plan, then we might keep building old wine skins in an age when new wine is needed or is all that is available! God help us to never build Christian hula-hoops, just when everyone else has stopped using hula-hoops. God help us never to be trapped in endless imitation. Houston has many fine schools. If we merely imitate them, then we probably should join them.

So what is the vision?  We aspire to  produce flourishing human beings, fit citizens for the Republic, and souls prepared for Paradise now. Without God, this is impossible, but it does mean that any means can be reconsidered, old and new. Some old ways will be best, reading great texts, but some old ways will no longer work.  As an Orthodox school, we might look back to the great chariot races that so moved Byzantine culture (where we find our educational roots), but chariot races no longer resonate. We live in a republic, not an empire. We have digital technology, not just pen and parchment. What is the best way to educate Houstonians now? How can we best serve the Church and the city now?

We are educating children and young adults in 2015, not 1453. We embrace the unchanging truths about humankind, while knowing that some things do change! Some of those changes are for the good and some are not so good, but we are teaching the souls God sends us, not the souls that God sent a school in 1715, 1815, or 1915!

A good education will learn from Byzantium, Antioch, Athens, Moscow, Oxford, Paris, and Rome, but exists for Americans in 2015. We are not here to recreate what has been or is, but what is needed and does not yet exist! This is living as opposed to creating a mannequin. The dummy never changes, but the living are always growing. Vision is seeing the unchanging and the changing in a living community and embracing both. Without vision, any program will kill the community and leave only an imitation of living.

Some techniques that are still best are ancient: the Socratic method. Some ideas are ancient, but have new and better ways of going about achieving those goals. A sound mind in a sound body is a good goal, but we have better means of achieving that goal than they had in 1945 due to technology and an increase in knowledge. How should “school” change?

The vision will never change, many of the means are fairly timeless, but all we would do must be to serve God, his Church, and humankind. Programs exist to serve a vision and a godly vision will always love God and people. Often we perish, because we confuse the way things have been done (and are still being done) with what should be done or will be done. We sometimes perish because we confuse our plan to achieve the vision with the vision. We imitate Socrates’ actions, but forget his reasons for his actions and so we perish.

God help us to look toward Him and develop a keen sight of how to love Him and our fellow human beings in every area of service.  In my own field, it means that the school is formed for man, not man for the school! May God give us a progressive vision so we can live, really live, both now and in the age to come.