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constantly struggled to find enough help, and few people in Axis were actively building friendships with people who didn’t know God.
    The intersection of vision and reality may
    be one of the greatest tests of leadership.
    Did I mention that reality hurts? Who wants to hear all that stuff? This intersectionof vision and reality may be one of the greatest tests of leadership. It is having sober eyes and an optimistic spirit, and refusing to choose between the two. It is the good news–bad news moment when you cannot allow one to dismiss the other. They are both true—where we are heading and where we are—but we have to walk through reality in order to move toward the vision. Without that, vision becomes a simple addiction to the emotional high of an imagined future.
    Vision is hard work. Stinking hard work. And living in reality prepares us for that. It takes us out of the clouds and puts us in work boots. We dream and we struggle. We seek to bring the Kingdom of God into a world that is not yet ready for all of it. The tension between these two things is the realm of good leadership. Discouragement and belief: strange but necessary bedfellows.
    One of the most painful things about a disappointing reality is that at one time, those things that are now not working originated under the banner of a glorious vision. There must be a continual monitoring of the vision against the current reality.
    The disparity between the vision and the reality establishes a gap. And what fills that gap is strategy. Strategy answers the “how” question: How will we move from our current reality to our preferred future? Without a plan, the gap will remain.
    Of course there will always be a gap, but strategy is about pointing the way and narrowing the gap. Strategy focuses on the two, three, maybe four main things that we have determined will significantly move us toward our vision. It builds a bridge between here and there, betweenthe real and the anticipated. And bridges are full of hope.
    Strategy puts feet to the vision and, as such, breathes encouragement into an organization as it takes its first steps toward the future. Strategy gives us the potential to move our organizations from having a soft, benign presencein the community to being unstoppable forces in our world. It brings a focus and clarity to our flurry of activities and our wonderful random acts of kindness—and that unleashes power.
    Strategy puts feet to the vision and, as such, breathes encouragement into an organization as it takes its first steps toward the future.
    Because there are thousandsof wonderful causes, we must do the work of determining what we will spend our great but limited resources of time, energy, and money on. We must ask, is the cause effective and sustainable? In doing this, we create the possibility of releasing those resources in remarkable and not-to-be-ignored ways. I think part of what Jesus meant when He told Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church is the kind of strength that can be created when God’s people come together focused on both the dream and the reality.
    It is tempting to say yes to everything—particularlyfor those working in churches and nonprofit organizations. I once did some work with the leadership team of a small church with about a hundred and fifty in its congregation. We did a strategy exercise in which I asked the team to list the various ministries within the church. I finally stopped writing when we had filled up an entire whiteboard. This small church had seventy-five different activities going! That’s a ministry for every two people in the church. Easy to see strategic mistakes in someone else, isn’t it?
    In Axis, our strategy very simply became large group gatherings, small-group gatherings, and serving opportunities. Just those three things. Other great ideas came our way all the time, but our strategy gave us the confidence to say no, thank you.
    We decided that we would become a