Mission & Vision

When I worked on teams in Malawi and Mozambique, we each had our own guiding principles that would help us keep the end in mind. We wanted to see disciples who made disciples remaining within their own cultural context.

These guiding principles are important because, knowing me, I’m easily distractible. If something comes up that seems like a good idea, I might be eager to jump at it. But having some documents in place that outline what we’re going for, I can then line up any “good ideas” with our overall end game to see if it is getting us there, or just distracting us.

Mission and vision are statements that help sum up what an organization, or in our case a project, are all about.

I took a first stab at this and here’s what I came up with. Because I think we all want to see Scripture access and exposure to it a main thing, something discovered and shared in a group, those are two important things to highlight. How’s this for a vision statement?

The vision of the “Yawo Fishing Expedition” (working title) is to see every Muslim-background Yawo person have the opportunity to feed on the scriptures digitally in the content form most tasty to them (audio, video, text).

The Mission Statement is a bit closer to the ground, and here’s what I came up with:

Recognizing that Bible poverty is real and that most Muslim Yawo of southeastern Africa don’t know a follower of Jesus, the Yawo Fishing Expedition seeks to use technology to provide scripture access, see scripture engagement groups formed and on-the-ground links made between seekers and followers of Jesus.

I hope you have some thoughts on this so we can continue to refine this together. What would you add or change?

Questions for discussion:

• What changes would you suggest, if any, for the vision statement?