WHEREAS…
A few of my areas of ministry have seen precipitous declines in numbers of people attending committee meetings, including people who are otherwise interested and engaged in the ministry, and
Said meetings have always felt rather perfunctory, with very little getting done therein, and
I still feel called to my areas of ministry, but would like to maximize evening time with my family as much as anyone, and
I read somewhere that people in the church feel energized by working on projects and tasks, rather than something as nebulous as serving on a committee, and
Consequently, many thriving churches are doing away with committees as we know them, substituting task groups and short-term project teams and utilizing e-mail, message boards, and other avenues of planning and communication, and
You can call it a “ministry group” all you want, but it’s still a committee,
BE IT RESOLVED
that reverendmother is on the search for books, resources, tips, and best practices from people who have moved away from traditional committee structures and still managed to get things done.
Comments welcome.
11 Responses to “down with committees”
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My context isn’t the same as yours, but I’ve found the best way to get a group of people to do something is to start doing it myself, regardless of resources or approval. In my experience, nobody runs to get onto a train that isn’t moving.
My womens organization is having the same issue across the nation. One local branch near Houston is about to disband - members are enthusiastic in carrying out projects/programs but no one wants to serve “on the board” anymore. Main complaint? They do not want to attend committee meetings. Email makes some degree of communication possible but our older members do not “do email” and some do not even own computers. We’re considering conference calling in lieu of face to face board/committee meetings. This forces us to streamline activities and only hold meetings when meetings are really (!) needed and real goals are set and accomplished. Sociological upside: people are increasingly cherishing personal and family time!
Here’s what we do in a very, very small church setting: We have the committees, but the committees don’t meet just to meet. We meet on an as needed basis. For some committees–like Mission and Stewardship, that means 8 meetings a year. For others–like buildings and grounds, that means something closer to 3 times a year. I try to insist that all committees have an agenda and a stop time for their meeting…For session (which has 10 stated meetings a year) we have to agree if the meeting is going to be longer than 2 hours.
Thanks for sharing this RM–I don’t have anything to suggest, but I sure want to read the comments from others in case it can help me.
What ChicagoRev said…
I worked with a woman once that held the best meetings and she sent out an agenda beforehand with time increments for each discussion topic and, like a drill sergeant, she would not bend a bit if the people wanted to drag out any of the topics past the timeframe set. It was a little militaristic, but it got things done and you’d be surprised how prepared people are when they know the format will be this way.
Google quote of the day:
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress [Mamala will change congress to committee].
- John Adams
Almost all our ministries meet right after church, and that helps somewhat. It certainly spares me the evening meetings, which makes life much, much easier at home.
I’m on the board for a nonprofit in town that has gone to task groups instead of committees. The task groups are identified as part of the yearly strategic planning process and work for only the time necessary to accomplish the task. After awhile committees can become more focused on maintaining their existence than on actually accomplishing things that need to be done. Task groups seem to eliminate that problem, but the draw back that we are beginning to see is that there is a tendency to pay less attention to longer term goals and issues and more attention to the immediate needs. As long as there are a few basic committees in place that help continue to shape the broader vision and longer range goals, I think it’s really a lot easier to get people to commit to something that’s time-limited, with very specific assignments and tasks to accomplish.
We have no committees anymore.
We have ministry teams, and it’s not just a semantic change. I’ll send you the “new flow chart.”
My favorite things each month now are Staff meeting and Session.
I was asked at a recent conference what the difference between a committee and a task force is - and my answer was ‘task forces get things done’ - it got a lot of laughs, but I do think the UMC in particular is very committee based and many just don’t work in small churches at least.
I like that idea of a task force in that you have a specific task and a specific deadline- and clear boundaries.
Most of our commmittees now we try to schedule a 3 year max time of serving (trust me it’s enough) but recently I noticed that one family - both husband and wife asked to be re-elected cos they felt it was their calling to be there. That makes me nervous
I know I’m late on the comments, but at Holy Comfort we do sort of what Linda said. We don’t really have committees. We have people that get together to get a task done. It varies from year to year for an event like Race for the Cure, for example. We do have Outreach as a standing committee, but that’s about it. And our vestry meetings are business one month and mission/visioning the next. Keeps the focus in the right place. If you want to contact the author of this setup, he’s at rhfactor.blogs.com.