BRN Strategy Meeting with Will Mancini

Will Mancini leads Denominee as the third organization he has founded since transitioning from pastoral work to full-time church consulting in 2001. In 2004 he started Auxano, a nonprofit which serves 400 churches yearly in Southern Baptist and other evangelical denominations through onsite consulting, training and certification of services that include visionary planning, leadership development and capital campaign design. In 2016 he started Younique, a company that helps leaders deliver personal visioning and life planning to members and attenders in their churches. He is the author of “God Dreams: 12 Vision Templates for Finding and Focusing Your Church’s Future” and “Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Create Culture and Create Movement.”

Through Denominee’s work with state conventions and Baptist associations, “we’re trying to help local churches thrive through biblical network leadership that thrives,” Mancini told Baptist Press, by “activating a new imagination for how groupings of churches flourish and how the network brings value to those local churches.”

The local church is “a complete local expression of the body of Christ,” he said. “But we as Southern Baptists have always believed in partnering for the sake of … going beyond what one church can do.”

Mancini said he works as a “strategic outsider,” his preferred term for a church consultant. His aspiration is for every church to have its own strategic outsider — “someone who brings a strategic viewpoint from an outside objective vantage point … not entangled emotionally with the dynamic inside the organization, but who brings fresh insight. Each three-year process is customized based on several realities, including the current state strategy, the current level of church engagement and the unique needs and opportunities in each region.”

Although Auxano has become somewhat of a network as new churches every year use their vision and discipleship tools, Mancini said he began to sense God’s direction toward something larger.

“I don’t want to compete with all of these other preexisting networks of state conventions and local associations,” he said. “I want to add value to them, and I want to help them add value to their churches.”