{"id":31538,"date":"2022-09-10T15:34:17","date_gmt":"2022-09-10T20:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/6-annoying-ministry-meeting-time-wasters\/"},"modified":"2022-09-10T15:34:17","modified_gmt":"2022-09-10T20:34:17","slug":"6-annoying-ministry-meeting-time-wasters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/6-annoying-ministry-meeting-time-wasters\/","title":{"rendered":"6 Annoying Ministry Meeting Time Wasters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jon Tyson photo – Unsplash<\/div>\n

By Joy Allmond<\/p>\n

Most of us have meetings to attend\u2014at work, at school, and in our communities. Sometimes these meetings are times well spent.<\/p>\n

On other occasions, however, meetings\u2014especially ministry-focused meetings\u2014can be a colossal waste of our time and a drain on creativity and productivity.<\/p>\n

We took to social media and said, \u201cBased on your personal experience, please identify some ministry or staff meeting time wasters.\u201d Here are some of the responses:<\/p>\n

1. Reviewing the same information\u2014over and over<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u201cConstantly rehashing vision (for the \u2018new folks’ in the room). Instead, spend time training them and then add them to the rest of the ministry team.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were weeks the agenda didn’t seem to change, but we still met and the meeting still seemed to take forever to talk about the same things.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cSame meeting every week. There’s next to no reason to have an all-staff meeting each week. This is why each week of the month we have a different kind of meeting in the same time slot.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. Discussing irrelevant details of the recent past<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u201cTalking about yesterday is a colossal waste of time. This is the probably the most classic; every church does it. It looks like this: All ministry heads sit around the conference table, they take turns giving an \u2018update\u2019 or report about all who attended, visitors, etc. It can take about 20 minutes per person, and it’s a snooze fest. All it tells us is what happened yesterday, and it could be on a piece of paper or an email.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe used to have hour-long meetings on the membership roll. I won’t name the denomination. It was such a waste of time and unfair to those who needed pastoral care. I’m all for the business of the church but why hem and haw over people who obviously left the church months ago whether they should be removed from the roll? It was frustrating, especially since there were greater needs in our body.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Ill-focused prayer<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u201cPraying is good. But if we only have about an hour to meet and work on the next event, or debrief the last event, we don\u2019t have time for 30 minutes of prayer.  This is why we have separate prayer meetings for this sort of thing. We open in prayer, we close in prayer, but we don\u2019t have a prayer meeting and call it a staff meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prayer requests for a person’s grandma\u2019s neighbor’s niece who has a terrible home life and needs her husband to be _____. We have had to ask people to please keep their prayer requests in a reasonable time frame or write them in a notebook that we pass around. It\u2019s not that we don\u2019t care, but we have to have some sort of structure so that the time serves its purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

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See also  8 Ways to Persevere in Ministry<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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4. Wandering aimless into minutiae without an agenda<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u201cMost pastors and church leaders know how to sit in a group and talk, but have no idea how to gather people and conduct a productive USEFUL meeting. A meeting should have a point, a purpose, an agenda, etc. And it should END at some point. If you don\u2019t know how to lead a meeting, don\u2019t schedule one and force people to sit through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember being on a board where every month we discussed what toys to purchase for the nursery. I got so tired of it that I finally said, \u2018Let the people who work there pick them out and I’ll even buy them myself if we can just stop talking about it.\u2019 I had to apologize for my frustration, but it finally stopped the discussion. Hallelujah!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFielding \u2018anonymous\u2019 complaints: \u2018So and so said they heard someone was maybe mad about XYZ.\u2019 Huge time waster. And a distraction.”<\/p>\n

5. Over-socializing<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u201cPlaying catch up. This is when the meeting is supposed to start at 9. Everyone gets their coffee, sits around the table, then at 9 they all start catching up with each other rather than taking care of the meeting that needs to happen. They should just gather five or 10 minutes before or after and use that time to catch up. Or go to lunch. But don\u2019t spend the first 20 minutes of a meeting time doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was on staff at the two churches, there was constant joking around in meetings from all the pastors. The rest of the staff waited patiently as we got around to the main issues at hand. Drove me insane. Just get to the point.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting sidetracked by jokes or skits or songs or others’ cultural references that lead someone to pull up a YouTube video.\u201d<\/p>\n

6. Showing up unprepared<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u201cPeople not being prepared with all of the details about what they need to discuss or people who check out of the conversation if it doesn\u2019t apply to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

What are some ministry meeting time wasters you\u2019ve experienced?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Joy Allmond<\/h2>\n

@joyallmond<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Joy is the managing editor of LifewayResearch.com.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n