The three elements of the C3 Vision Triangle are Contents, Context and Containers. In the last two weeks we noted that:
Contents is the most non-negotiable of the three vision elements, the top “point” of the triangle. Contents are biblical, theological and doctrinal and are at the heart of our Christian beliefs. Therefore, they are non-negotiable.
Visually think of Context as the lower left point of our equilateral triangle. Context refers to the various people out in the communities around a given church that this church has identified as its primary mission field. The church’s vision, grounded in the Great Commission, is to go and make disciples. Of whom? We are to go and make disciples among lost people in our communities – our ministry Context.
The objective of a Great Commission church is to deliver the Contents of our faith to our Context, making the gospel crystal clear so that the individuals of our Context will have the opportunity to respond to the call of Christ.
Today we come to the Containers, the third and final element of the C3 Vision Triangle, the lower right point. Containers are the delivery systems through which the Contents are delivered to the Context. These are matters of style, preference and choice, and determine the environment that church leaders endeavor to create. As such, no doctrine or theology is at stake so the Containers are utterly negotiable.
What drives the selection of these delivery systems, these choices that leaders make? These choices are driven by consideration of the Context. Knowledge of the Context will inform the selection and design of Containers.
For example, my third church planting ministry was the restart of a decades old church in Phoenix, AZ. After relocation, the church set up shop in a suburb of southeast Phoenix, an area primarily populated by young middle to upper-middle class suburbanites. Our Container was casual with a building that featured natural lighting, open spaces and desert colors. The building we built was a multi-purpose building that was indeed used for multiple purposes. The style of music was contemporary, but drew from varied repertoire from traditional hymns to praise songs to recent Christian “hits.”
My fourth church planting ministry was in the eastern U.S., Richmond, VA, and sought to reach a Context of young, urban artists. The gospel, the Contents, remained the same as it was in Phoenix, but with a vastly different Context the Containers were vastly different. Here we met on Sunday nights in an old gothic middle school building. We displayed art objects and the music was much more loud and edgy, pumped through a state-of-the-art sound system.
In either case, the particular Context led church leaders to select Containers that would appeal to that Context. Nothing was lost in terms of the Contents, the non-negotiables, but there was great range and flexibility in the Containers, the utterly negotiable.
With these last three posts I have given you a look at the C3 Vision Triangle, but before I leave the subject I want to share one issue that I have found again and again in my work throughout the church. Assuming a strong evangelical commitment on the part of a church, the Contents are usually well protected. The Context simply is what it is, the people of the community. There’s not much to negotiate here. Rather, there is a selection process of determining which of the varied demographic slices of a community will be the focus of that church’s ministry.
That said, I have observed that most of the conflict in the church is over Container issues. Certain people in the church become so attached to their favorite Containers that they give them the status of Contents, thereby making them non-negotiable. They come to think of their favorite Containers as the right or even biblical way of doing ministry regardless of the Context. When this happens, the church is caught up in endless debates and arguments over negotiable elements that are deemed non-negotiable. Meanwhile, the Contents never make it to the Context and no one comes to Christ through that conflicted church’s ministry. This is both silly and tragic, and is the antithesis of Great Commission ministry.
