The church that I serve has a fairly lean committee structure.
There is the Church Council, which divides into three boards, each with a specific area of oversight. The Board of Mission makes sure that we’re the church who we claim to be. The Board of Stewardship watches over everything involving money. The Board of Property watches over our building and all of our stuff.
Then there are four Leadership Teams. Worship and Fellowship leads us in managing worship. Faith Formation leads us in finding ways to grow as disciples of Christ. Generosity leads us in ensuring that our time, talent, and treasure leave the church building and go out into the community. Membership and Engagement leads us in making sure that our members are engaged and that new people are invited into the life of the church.
That’s eight committees. And while that’s more committees than some congregations have, it’s far fewer than others have, and it’s far fewer than we used to have.
But, when those committees don’t communicate or collaborate very well, and when the only way for the pastor to know what’s going is to attend all of those meetings, it can be a bit overwhelming.
So we decided to try something different. We decided to try something that I stole from Molly Phinney Baskette: one big meeting with everyone meeting at once.
We had our first Big Meeting about a week and a half ago. It was a huge success.
Because of how we’re structured—because the Council and the Boards overlap—this meeting included the Boards and the Leadership Teams. The next meeting will include the Council. As we go forward, the Council and Boards will alternate months while the Leadership Teams meet every month.
We started together with a moment for prayer and a quick update on the things that everyone needed to know. Then we broke into our individual groups for a little more than an hour. Then we gathered back up, shared a few things that had come up that everyone needed to know, and ended our meeting with the Lord’s Prayer.
It was during those individual meetings that the spirit moved and the magic happened.
First, as each team worked, it thought of ways that its projects connected to the work that other teams were doing. And, instead of filing that information away as an email to be forgotten about later and ending up with three teams all working separately on suspiciously similar projects, people just got up and walked over to the other teams, and started having conversations about working together. Now we have a couple of big projects that multiple teams are working on together!
Second, as I and a few other people bounced from meeting to meeting, we could find common threads that were appearing. Sometimes, we pointed teams to other teams that those threads were running through. Other times, we decided that we need to have a bigger conversation about that thread. And we did that without attending eight different meetings at eight different times!
Third, one of those projects—a project that comes out of some projects and conversations that were already happening—involves lay people doing more ‘pastoral’ visits, delivering care packages, and sharing communion at home. That’s important for so many reasons that I might write about another time. And it’s wonderful to see this idea growing.
That is a lot of good news coming out of the simple idea of bringing all of these groups together to meet at once. We’ll see how it goes in the future, but I am very happy about how the first Big Meeting went!