Here are eight areas a church must address to transform committees into caring communities. I’d start with the governing board and then apply the steps to each committee.
1. Deciding who serves. It’s a bad idea to put old Joe on your elder board because he needs to get more involved, or let Gertrude chair the deaconesses because her family makes hefty financial contributions.
Choosing leaders already involved in ministry is one clear biblical priority. When deciding who serves is based on commitment to ministry, faith, a clear job description, and an understanding of what really needs to be done, a committee structure can become a support base and a network of mission communities.
2. Recruiting honestly. I know a college board member who was recruited under the premise: “It won’t take any of your time; you don’t even have to come to meetings. We’re just proud to have you on our board.” What kind of quality can you expect from a board with that view of itself?
An executive I know accepted a position after being told his main task was to encourage people. After taking the job, he learned the institution was bankrupt; his real job was to solve its financial problems. Since that wasn’t what he signed up for, he has little motivation for his work.
As pastors, we want to teach people how to discern God’s will and hear his calling. When they respond freely and in faith, they will be excited about their ministry. This means being straightforward about the costs. It means giving people a chance to pray, discuss matters, and have the freedom to say no without jeopardizing our friendship or approval.
If we expect someone to put out extra effort in September, we tell them. If training and special events are involved, as they should be, we say, “If you’re going to take this on, we expect all new elders to participate in a four-week training experience and an annual retreat the first weekend of December. If you cannot do that, maybe this isn’t your year to become an elder.” It’s not fair to coax a yes and then up the ante.
3. Setting the tone. The first training experience is crucial because it establishes your group’s community-building tools and ministry tasks. In my last church, this training session began with everyone sharing his or her faith journey. Every session after that began with a question to open up relationships. This sets a precedent: “As we work together, we want to care for each other. Bring your whole self to the party.” The leader, of all people, must model this openness and care.
At one Christian education meeting, I asked, “What was your experience in Christian education, if you grew up in the church, and how did you respond to it?” I learned more about the viewpoints, prejudices, and concerns that made up that committee than I ever did from heated committee speeches. I learned why people were impassioned about certain matters. Most important, the group grew closer.
4. Holding a yearly retreat. It may take years to move from a voluntary retreat to a required one for leaders. The benefits, however, can be cumulative, with each year’s attendance and content improving as you build a history and sense of commitment.
One year we had ten elders retiring from the board. All ten asked if they could still come to the retreat! The question was no longer “How can I get out of this?” but “How can I be involved?”
Like the training sessions, the annual retreat should begin with sharing in small groups. One of my favorite questions is, What do you do on a Tuesday?
Move on to vision sharing led by a pastor or key leader. This can create energy and excitement as leaders grasp the overall picture of what God is calling them to.
The next step is evaluation. How did we do last year? How do we stack up to the vision? This provides a basis for the next stage, clarifying expectations and setting goals.
Just listing various positions and asking what we expect from each can be revolutionary. It clarifies who owns what and can create a shared sense of ownership, responsibility, and excitement about ministry.
5. Making meetings productive. Homes are the best committee meeting places. People behave differently in homes than on metal chairs in a sterile classroom. In a home, people treat each other with dignity. They relax. Some refreshments and a little sharing can infuse energy.
People often fear that relational exercises will make meetings longer. But if you give people fifteen minutes in groups of three or four with a focused question for each person to answer briefly, it can actually shorten meetings.
People have a need to be heard. A rule in building relationships is: Never let someone come to a meeting and say nothing. When people feel they’ve had their air time, they can focus on issues and are less likely to make inappropriate speeches later. They feel cared for, and with discipline the meeting actually can end earlier.
Discipline for me means no meeting goes past 9 P.M. I figure if you can’t solve it between 7:30 and 9:00, it isn’t worth pushing, because the quality of personal competence goes flat after that. Ending the formal meeting before people absolutely have to leave has a way of giving a group an extra shot of energy. They may sit around informally, share notes, touch base on projects, form strategies, and end up having spontaneous mini-meetings.
Remember the first hour of a meeting is your most productive. Don’t kill that energy by going straight into trivial reports and minutia. Ask yourself, What are the issues we most need to work on? After dealing with these issues, go to routine reports that require little creative energy and insight.
Giving a timed agenda is another secret to making meetings work. It says, “We have four things to discuss. We need about ten minutes for the first and twenty for each of the others.” When people know they have ten minutes on a subject, they behave differently than when they think they can talk for two hours. The key is to enforce the time limits. Anything that can’t fit a time frame gets referred to a subcommittee, assigned to an individual for research, or tabled for a future meeting.
6. “Spinning off” mission groups. Every committee runs into tasks that fall within its scope of responsibility but beyond its ability to tackle as a group. The answer is to form subcommittee task forces that can put in the extra time and energy.
If the church wants a new library, the education committee should appoint a library committee. The education committee should then do little more than set broad policy concerning the subcommittee’s assignment and monitor its progress.
Most committees should spin off at least two mission groups a year. These groups might work with intensity for three months or a year but then go out of existence once their tasks are complete. Each should maintain the priority on relationships modeled in the committee that formed it.
7. Using “expanded” committees. If the ministries of your committees are truly significant, you will want as many people involved as possible. Committees can function well with up to twelve people. If you know when to create subgroups (during sharing times, for example), and if everyone on the committee is recruited to a specific ministry, committees don’t have to stay small.
Expanding committees to include nonelders provides a context for nonelders to discover and use their spiritual gifts. This enables the church to assess people’s callings and creates a reservoir from which to recruit future elders.
8. Caring outside the meeting. If the only contact people have with each other is in meetings, they have yet to experience full community. It always surprises me how often long-standing church members don’t know each other’s names, addresses, phone numbers, and work places. Distributing this information to committee members is a first step, since church directories are usually sorely out of date.
I like to include birthdays and anniversaries on the list; then I send cards as a sign that I care. After all, the kind of caring we’re after begins with the examples of the leaders.
I’ve also asked people to list the ages of their children. This way they discover others with children the same age, which can prompt getting together for recreational activities. Soon people are praying for each other and meeting each other’s needs. All of this feeds into the quality of time when the committee meets next.
When we opened one committee meeting, Ken, an engineer, expressed concern about his daughter. His tone was matter of fact, but I knew this was a difficult thing for him to do. I prayed silently for someone to mention Ken during prayer, since I was the ordained pastor “expected to pray” for him. We prayed, and as I was about to close, someone finally prayed for Ken and his daughter by name. When we lifted our heads, tears streaked Ken’s cheeks, and he said, “I have just discovered what Christian community is all about.”
This is the kind of breakthrough we all look for in ministry-and it happened on a committee!
– Roberta Hestenes
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