Children's Ministry Leaders

Holding the Agenda Loosely
Larry Shallenberger

I enjoy a well-built meeting agenda. Really. I feel pleasure when I design a team meeting, and feel minor bursts of ecstasy when a meeting runs as planned. On the other hand, a poorly constructed meeting bothers me like few other things can. Perhaps it's a hangover from the seven-year-long chain of Kafkaesque meetings that I endured when working in the social service field. Ill-designed meetings steal vision, morale, and pace from otherwise industrious people. Meetings that start late and end later are disrespectful of people's time. Inefficient meetings simply anger me. In my book, a string of inefficient meetings is plainly inhumane. Call me compulsive.

Today I had a bad meeting. Each month I gather my department coaches together after church for lunch and a planning meeting. Today we had one-point agenda: Determine what furniture we need to purchase for the new building.

To make the meeting efficient, I invited a member of our building project's furnishings team to bring in her laptop loaded with a CAD drawing of the children's wing. This way we select a piece of furniture from a catalog, enter its dimensions in the drawing, and actually see if the furniture fits the room. We'd have the ability to arrange tables, chair, cribs, and bookshelves in the virtual classroom and find out instantly what layouts would work.

The meeting opened well enough. I served up a muffaletta that I made the evening before. Kim, one of the coaches, extended the New Orlean's theme and brought in homemade praline. We decompressed from the morning's ministry and caught up on each other's lives. Then the meeting derailed. The volunteer in charge of the CAD program said she was facing some technical issues and would have to redraw the floor plans—a process that would take her at least an hour.

I sprinted to my office and grabbed a paper copy of the blueprints. We could get the job done the old-fashioned way. We'd make copies of the furniture to scale and arrange them on the blueprints. It would be a little more time-consuming, but we'd manage.

In the few minutes I was gone, my team took a closer look at the blueprints—a closer look apparently than they had before. I returned to a litany of questions: "Why is the room shaped this way? Why is there an indentation there?" "What if we added a door here?" "Why are we purchasing new bookshelves? Why not use what we already have?"

And they also had ideas. Lots of ideas. Ideas about how we could improve check-in at the new facility. Ideas about how we could use the new children's ministry resource room. Ideas about decorating the new children's wing.

None of that was on my agenda. The operative word in that sentence being my.

I choked back a wave of anxiety over the looming deadline. Did I mention I have a hang-up about meetings going bad? After a deep breath, I let go of my agenda and dove into my team's agenda. Together, we explored each question and idea. And somehow, by 2 p.m., we tackled most of the furniture issues I wanted to resolve. Yes, there are many loose ends that still need to be tied up before I can check buy furniture off my to-do list.

Next month I'll write about designing team meetings with excellence. But today I was reminded about the need for occasional spontaneity and letting go of the agenda. Some wonderful things occurred at that meeting that wouldn't have had I insisted on sticking to my agenda.

The team experienced discovery.
The coach's team hadn't looked at those blueprints in months. Memories had faded and minor changes had been made to the plans. This fresh look gave us the chance to bring some team members up to speed, brainstorm new uses of some of the space, and better prepare ourselves for the grand opening.

The team experienced community.
Being flexible enough to revise the agenda of the meeting to suit the needs of the team blurred the line between pastor and volunteers. We were simply friends solving problems and dreaming together.

The team experiencing increased buy-in.
The experiences of discovery and community led naturally to an experience of increased buy-in, because everyone's concerns mattered equally. This fall, there will be plenty of changes for parents to deal with. For example, some parents will probably wonder why their kindergarteners will be included with the elementary crowd. Because of today's unscripted meeting, I have a team of leaders ready to explain the change.

That's because we're no longer working off of my agenda, but our agenda.

Larry Shallenberger is the pastor of children and student ministries at Grace Church in Erie, Pa. Larry's next book, Divine Intention, will be released this June by Victor Press. You can connect with Larry at his Web site, www.larryshallenberger.com.

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