BHAG

Big Hairy Audacious Goal. That’s what BHAG stands for. I came across the term while attending a CREDO conference in southern Indiana in early 2011. CREDO is a denomination-sponsored week-long program for mid-career clergy that helped us look at our lives and ministry in a holistic way. I loved it. I didn’t want to leave. On the bus back to the airport I felt I was having to say goodbye to my new best 33 friends.

BHAG had a lot to do with it. I have always been one to see the bigger picture rather than the minute details and this played into it. The term comes from an article in the Harvard Business Review in 1996 called “Building Your Company’s Vision” and talks of company’s need to have a bold mission that is easy to imagine that may take 10-30 years to achieve, if at all, that is visionary and gets the juices flowing. An example is NASA in the 1960s with its plan to go to the moon.

The church has had a BHAG since the First Century. As witnessed in our story of Tabitha being raised from the dead in Acts 9 this rag-tag, poverty-knowing, on-the-margins-living, seemingly powerless group of men and women, many of them widows, were part of a church community that turned the world upside down, didn’t wait for the status quo to get entrenched, and expected a hopeful future. Tabitha, though she had died, got up.  God’s Spirit is loose in the world.  And God’s church can still do some big, hairy, audacious living.