Making Meetings Meaningful
One of my favourite sayings is, “meetings make things happen”. It’s a trustworthy saying that you won’t find among the Biblical trustworthy sayings, but it is wise. Therefore I think we are wise to always be working on how we undertake our meetings.
If we are going to prayerfully grow as a church in the fruit of the gospel (seeing God save people, seeing people grow more like Jesus as they have the fruit of the Spirit growing in their life), then we need to think about how we make all our gatherings, groups and teams meaningful as people meet. Yet for the purposes of this short article I’m to focus on leadership development and how we make our various team meetings meaningful in our own church context.
It used to be we would host major team meetings all over the time and place, but this caused a few problems for people. For example, Sunday meetings we ought would be fruitful ended up being the opposite.
The problems of Sunday meetings are:
1. They can be overly long, because we feel we have all afternoon.
2. They take people from their families (reality is kids are in bed on weeknights and not Sunday afternoons)
3. Most of all they take away from ministering to a wider group of people that we don’t have the same opportunity to minister to on a weeknight.
So here is our way forward…
Elders Meetings on the 1st Monday of the month, 7.30pm at Reforming House or in an Elder’s house
This means that Elders are leading under Christ and from the front, at the start of the month, for shepherding the flock of God.
BoM Meetings on the 2nd Monday of the month, 7.30pm at Reforming House
This means that the Board of Management has time to collate data from the previous month to present at meetings for the purposes of managing facilities and finances.
Make Leaders on the 3rd Monday of the month, 7.30pm at Reforming House or in the Grinter’s house
As we make disciples we must keep being intentional about making leaders who experience the key area of keeping to a meeting schedule that models being a leader in an environment of working with others in the rigours of ministry.
With this plan we can also see people in our church have margin in life, at other times during the week and on Sundays. It also means we have a culture of Christ in doctrine, and ministry, by being ordered in this way for the good of people. And ultimately, it gives God glory as we prayerfully make discipling making-disciples through our meetings which make this happen.
Make Leaders Article, by Russ Grinter | Pastor & Teaching Elder
Russ is weak, but Jesus is strong (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). Russ gladly boasts of his weaknesses by preaching, writing, and speaking the gospel - because Jesus changes everything.
