Poor Meeting Agendas

Why people don't like meetings (and maybe small groups!)

by Dan Lentz

I have sat through countless meetings: church board meetings, committee meetings, work-place meetings, and civic organization meetings. Most of these meetings had one thing in common—agendas or lack there of. Agendas are those lists of topics, activities, ideas, or information that needed to be known, talked about, approved, disapproved, or tabled for later discussion.

I mostly don’t look forward to meetings because many meetings seem to easily get off track, involve the wrong people, or misuse people’s time. Apparently, I’m not alone. In an MSNBC article about work-place meetings this dilemma shows itself to be common in most meetings. Here’s a quote from this article about a typical staff meeting: “First, around 25 people attend, of which about half are (the bosses); the rest are the support staff, who don't all need to be there. Second, there's no agenda or specific purpose. Instead, the facilitator asks everyone what they've done throughout the week. The ‘bosses’ dominate the meeting, competing about who worked harder. Finally, the meeting tends to go over its allotted time.”

That’s pretty typical of church meetings also in my experience.

In a past blog entry, I talked about how decisions made during meetings are also prone to problems. I don’t know about you, but I can get to the point where I could be convinced that meetings don’t serve a very productive purpose much of the time.

However, being a small group guy, I always had the tendency to think small groups aren’t nearly as susceptible to all these types of problems. Since groups aren’t committees, and we don’t have to obey “Robert’s Rules of Order,” small groups can cut through to the heart issues the group faces.

Well, maybe it’s not quite that simple. Small groups are, in fact, susceptible to the same problems that plague any smaller group of people who are gathered for an intentional purpose. Regardless if you call it a small group, a committee, a board meeting or whatever, the gathering can waste people’s time and not help anyone grow or move forward with mission and purpose. So, what do we do? Not have any smaller gatherings of people?

No, we are called to practice Biblical community and that involves smaller relational groups of people. So, to move forward together we definitely need to give the purpose of our gathering some serious thought when planning the group agenda. Discussion needs to be facilitated with skill to avoid some dominating while others are silent. Obedience, good decision making, action and passion will not be produced unless a sense of community and mission is developed in the group both during the gathering and in-between the gatherings. Finally, this all reinforces the importance of a trained leader or facilitator, particularly one who is relying on the Master Leader (Jesus) to guide the group process.

So, my question to you is how is the agenda process going in your small group? And, could your agendas be improved in some of the other smaller “meetings” that are happening around your church. What have you done that’s been helpful?