The Vision Frame: The Core Tool for Visionary Church Leaders

Vision Frame is the result of years of thinking, leading and consulting with church leaders. It's the primary subject in the book Church Unique and it's the primary deliverable in my consulting work with Auxano.

Therefore, you will see it all over this blog! This page not only provides an overview and introduction, it's a unique list of links for diving into the Vision Frame further for yourself.

The frame represents five irreducible questions of clarity. Therefore, the ability to answer five questions in a clear, concise, and compelling way is the litmus test of clarity for the ministries we serve. The chart below provides an overview of the questions including the use of missional language to build a bridge between clarity and missional theology.

To go further in your journey of understanding the frame:

Read about the Vision Frame on the Auxano site.

Read about the Vision Frame on the Church Unique site.

Read two articles on Vision that I wrote for Outreach Magazine:

If you want to see examples of the Vision Frame, type "Church Unique Snapshot" in the search window of my blog.

Perhaps the best resource to to dive into the Vision Frame is the Church Unique Visual Summary released in April of 2011. Thousands have applauded our efforts for showing the usefulness of the Vision Frame in a graphical way. You can download the summary here, and see below how the components of the frame have their own graphic.

About Will

Would you like to fall in love with ministry again?

I want you and your ministry to experience the benefits of stunning, God-given clarity. As a pastor turned vision coach, I’ve worked with an unprecedented variety of churches from growing mega-churches and missional communities, to mainline revitalization and church plants. I started several interconnected organizations that help the church embody the movement that Jesus founded. My visionary planning tools, the Vision Frame and the Horizon Storyline are used by thousands of churches every year through my calling to raise up other consultants and trainers. In 2004, I founded Auxano, which I sold to LifeWay and continued to lead until 2020. In 2014, I created Younique to deliver gospel-centered life design through the church. It is now the world's only comprehensive, open-source life plan system.

In 2023, I founded Run Free as my official team-based consulting shop. We deliver the most innovative Vision Framing experiences available to church teams through the "Pivvot Process" and to network/denominational leaders through the "Denominee Process." We also offer team coaching to church leaders using the "Performance Practices" of meta-performance executive coaching.

I've written seven books: Future Church, Church Unique, Younique, Clarity Spiral, God Dreams, Innovating Discipleship, and Building Leaders. I enjoy speaking about clarity, calling, disciple-making, and vision. It's all about helping one another do more than we can imagine. I co-locate in Houston and Chile with my wife, Romy, and the last of my four children, Poema.

If you are interested in Run Free's consulting offerings or want to discuss getting a LifePlan, just reach out to set up a conversation.

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