I ll identify the principles, but first you need to know a little of Saddleback s history. Very little of Saddleback s ministry was preplanned. I didn t have any long-range strategy before I started the church. I simply knew God had called me to plant a new church built on the five New Testament purposes, and I had a bag of ideas I wanted to try out. I didn t plan them in advance.
Most people think of vision as the ability to see the future.
But in today s rapidly changing world, vision is also the ability to accurately assess current changes and take advantage of them. Vision is being alert to opportunities. Because Saddleback is a young church and I am the founding pastor, we ve been able to experiment with far more ideas than the average church mostly due to the fact that we didn t have decades of tradition to deal with. In the early years we had nothing to lose, so we tried out all kinds of ideas. Some of our ideas were spectacular failures.