One of the greatest lessons I ever learned about casting vision goes all the way back to 17 years ago, when I used to dub tapes.

For all of our valued high school and middle school audience members, audio recordings used to exist in the form of a device called the cassette tape.
I know that you kiddies now have your fancy new fangled mp3s, but back in the day when you wanted to rip off your friends’ music, you used a dual cassette boombox to record the content of one cassette onto another.
Hi tech stuff, man.

So, let’s say my friend had the new Def Leppard album. By album I mean tape.
(Come on, I’m not that old.)
I would dub a copy, and it would sound pretty good.
Not as good as the original, but close enough.
The problem began when my friend wanted a copy of my copy.
Or worse yet, when his friend wanted a copy of his copy of my copy.

By this time the recording quality sounded horrible. Because with every new generation came a reduction in clarity and quality. You could barely hear Joe Elliot’s vocals (even though they were stacked 416 times) above the background hiss.

We’ve encountered this same scenario in church planting. In the first few months, I was sharing the vision firsthand with every single person. So they were always getting a first generation copy of the original.
These days, the challenge is to develop systems to make sure that every single leader can dub the vision clearly and passionately.
Otherwise, our new folks won’t be able to hear the content because of all the static.
And new generations of people will completely misinterpret what we’re all about.

Now that music comes in digital formats (CDs, mp3s, etc.) there’s no quality reduction from one generation to the next. The sound is as pristine on copy 1 million as it is on the master recording.
(I’m over my head in technical jargon here, but I’m pretty sure this makes sense.)

Here’s what we’re constantly asking:
How do we duplicate the Elevation vision in digital format?
So that every new generation of members gets an accurate representation of the heartbeat of this church?
So that everybody parking a car, changing a diaper, or leading a group knows precisely what we’re all about?
And what we’re not all about?
And why we do what we do?