Each Vital Questions column invites you to consider a question you won’t typically be asked at charge conferences and year-end reports. Instead of focusing on reporting numbers, they are intended to provoke conversations and provide clues about next steps for your church.
This month’s question: “What topics do we spend the most time on at our meetings?”
True story. The church I served needed to repaint the wood addition. It was the first time this needed to be done since it had been built, and there were opinions about the right color to paint it. The conversation started just before I arrived as pastor and occupied part of each Trustees meeting since, but now I had been there for close to a year, and we were still talking about the right paint color. Finally, the decision was made to at least strip the old paint off so that we would be forced to make a decision sooner rather than later. When the natural reds of the wood below were revealed, person after person said, “I forgot how beautiful that wood is. I always wondered why the architect suggested we paint over it.” The final decision – no paint. A clear stain to let the natural wood shine through instead. The topic that took so much time never should have been a topic to begin with.
Trustees will always need to talk about buildings and property, and the way we care for the physical assets entrusted to us will always matter. But often we find church meetings focusing on things that are ultimately of little consequence. Nobody’s salvation has been at stake because a committee picked the wrong shade of gray. The pattern on the carpet has never prevented a hungry person from eating. It’s not that the questions of patterns and colors shouldn’t be asked; it’s just a matter of priority.
The easiest way to identify our personal priorities is to check our credit card statements and our calendars. Where do we spend our money and our time? We can repeat that exercise for our churches, too. The focus of our meetings – the time we invest – should be on what we believe God wants us to prioritize. The first step is to identify how we are spending our meeting time. Some groups do this with a time budget. Write on the agenda (and make sure you have an agenda!) how long each item should take. Even if you don’t hold firm to the allotted time, you will at least know that you have taken more time than planned.
Another approach adds just a few minutes to your preparation time. Prioritize the topics of the meeting and set the agenda in that order. Nobody says you have to start with “Old Business” and then move to “New Business.” Start with the item that is most important – not most urgent – and give it the time it deserves. An urgent item is one that must be acted on soon. Fixing the broken air conditioner is urgent. If you discuss it at the beginning of a meeting, when you have lots of time, it could be a 30-minute conversation (which company, what brand, how efficient…). Handled at the end, when time is short, it can take five minutes (“I move we authorize Pat and Hollis to spend up to $4,000 on the air conditioner after getting two bids”). The outcome will likely be the same anyway and now you can spend the extra time on a topic of greater significance. I’m not suggesting decisions should be rushed. I’m suggesting that many lower-priority decisions behave the way physics describes gases – they expand to fill all the volume available.
What is the topic of greater significance that God wants your church to focus on? I don’t know. I’m not at your church. Maybe that’s the question your next meeting needs to address.
David Livingston is an active writer and commentator on United Methodist church life and theology, maintaining a widely read blog and contributing perspectives to outlets like United Methodist Insight. He is the author of the book Getting to Good.