How not to be a missional church No.2 Meetings

A sure fire way to avoid being missional is to have lots and lots and lots of meetings. Have lots of ‘proper’ meetings, with a chairman and minutes and lots of people. Spend the first 40 minutes of the meeting reliving the previous meeting by going through the minutes, slowly. To spice things up make sure that there is one person there who talks, a lot, and knows the answer to everything on the agenda. He’s important, because to have a missionally avoiding meeting you need to waste lots of time discussing ‘things’, but never actually agreeing anything. Talk lots about internal procedural things too, talk about structures, processes and organograms, this is great because it has nothing do with other people, and everything to do with you.

Also, hold meetings that do nothing else but inflate the egos of the people who attend, talk about targets and KPI’s, a powerpoint presentation may help you.  Spend a lot of time theorizing, quote books that you have never read, and blogs by people who do the things you wish you could be doing (or should be doing).  Talk about your mission statement, which is preferably meaningless, un-quantifiable and copied from another church in a completely different city or nation.  Always start on time and where possible go over the allocated finish time, make sure you drain every ounce of creativity from the meeting as possible. 

Spend as much time as you can in these meetings planning.  Plan everything, every eventuality, scenario and outcome.  Because you can bet you life that everything you spend hours planning will unfold in exactly the way you though it would, honest Guvnor. Hold meetings like this regularly, draw as many people into them as possible.  when the meeting becomes too big, form a sub-committee, involve more people, take up more time.  Preferably construct agendas that have no possible constructive outcome, deal with micro issues.  Word items on the agenda that require a simple yes or no answer to make sure they involve endless, circular discussion before arriving at the answer that everybody was expecting.

Above everything else spend as much time talking about the people you already have rather than the people you want to reach. And remember; a meeting is generally just a short conversation made very very long by someone with little else to do.

Comments

I can see the points you are trying to drive home, but there would be more value in these articles if you took a positive perspective rather than a negative one. Speak about what you are doing that is different and distinctive, rather than unsubtly criticising what you see other people doing or failing to do. That slight shift in perspective makes all the difference.

By Anonymous. Posted on Wednesday 15th Dec 2010 at 22:03

I am being self critical.

By David Capener. Posted on Thursday 16th Dec 2010 at 12:55

this is all true.
speaking as a minister’s daughter, there were many evenings in my childhood devoted to hanging out in the church gym waiting on Dad, cos he was in a meeting. lame.

it’s not about ‘what can we do for God’

but ‘what is God doing’.

also a little sarcasm never killed anyone.

By Leah Gallant. Posted on Sunday 19th Dec 2010 at 00:02

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