My wife and I currently run a preschool in our home. She deals directly with the kids, while I manage the finances and keep the place clean, among other duties.
Whenever I have to sweep the kitchen floor again, or vacuum the carpets, or do umpteen loads of laundry, I tell my wife, “I’d rather be doing this than attending another board meeting.”
And we both nod our heads and laugh.
When you’re a pastor, it’s usually required that you attend regular meetings of the church’s governing board … whatever they’re called.
But since board meetings are more about institutional maintenance than personal ministry, and since they can involve difficult and even painful decisions, and since such meetings can lead to arguments and politicking, the longer a pastor’s tenure in a particular church, the less interesting … or essential … board meetings can seem.
And if several board members begin to attack the pastor in those meetings … especially if those attacks are undeserved … attending those meetings can become unbearable.
As I recounted in my book Church Coup, the last board meeting I attended as a veteran pastor happened more than six years ago.
That final meeting was so traumatic that I relived it on a daily basis for many months … and began my book Church Coup by recounting it in detail.
There are many things that I’d rather do than attend another church board meeting. Here’s a sample:
*I would rather listen to Oprah babble on about her weight loss for a couple of hours.
*I would rather read the latest edition of Tax Instructions from the IRS.
*I would rather endure a root canal … even though the last one I had done required four hours of work over two days.
*I would rather attend a Celine Dion concert. (I was once offered two free tickets to one of her shows, and I instinctively declined.)
*I would rather watch 50 commercials starring Flo from a certain nameless insurance company … one after the other.
*I would rather listen to Joel Osteen preach for more than a minute … and that’s stretching it.
*I would rather reassemble a document that I had run through the shredder.
*I would rather watch 7 reruns of the old Full House TV show … a show my kids used to watch … even though I never laughed even once.
*I would rather root for the Seattle Seahawks for an entire game … and for me, that would be pure torture.
*I would rather wait in a two hour security line at the airport.
*I would rather spend a day trading insults with the Dowager Countess of Grantham from Downton Abbey.
*I would rather spend an hour chasing our two chickens around the back yard.
*I would rather drive to Los Angeles (a distance of 100 miles) during rush hour.
*I would rather wear a suit and tie … something I last did when my son got married four-and-a-half years ago.
*I would rather endure two straight weeks of 100-degree+ temperatures. (But please, God, don’t take that statement too seriously.)
*I would rather go camping … and I haven’t been since I was a youth pastor.
*I would rather stay in a Motel 6 with its paper-thin walls.
*I would rather drive through Oklahoma … easily the most boring of all the states on a cross-country road trip.
*I would rather use a Blackberry again.
Why do I feel this way?
Several weeks before my final board meeting years ago, my wife and I took a mission trip to Moldova, in Eastern Europe. I led seminars two straight days for pastors on church conflict. After that, we spent time in Wales, the Lake District, and Scotland.
We took a lot of great photos on our trip, but they’re hard to look at sometimes, because while we were overseas, the church board was plotting against me.
So not only was my last two-hour meeting with the board excruciating, but that meeting tainted all that came before it and afterward.
I once heard a prominent pastor describe the meetings of his elders. They met in a home … they ate dinner together … they shared their lives … they prayed for each other … the pastor shared a report … and then he was permitted to go home while the rest of the board conducted business.
That pastor’s board was so loyal to him and so competent that he could trust them to make good decisions even when he wasn’t present.
I once heard a megachurch pastor tell about a time when he met with the church board. After a brief time, he got up to leave. One of the board members asked him, “Where are you going?” The pastor replied, “I am going to take my daughter roller skating.” The pastor was asked, “Isn’t this more important?” The pastor replied, “Nothing is more important than taking my daughter roller skating.” And he left.
For some reason, I could never do that. I felt that I had to attend every board meeting … from beginning to end … not just because I felt the board needed my input, but because I wanted them to see me working and making decisions about the ministry.
And when I finally missed some meetings … because I was overseas … what did they do?
I’ve got to go. I have to put down mats for the kids so they can take naps. I also put sheets on their mats and oversee the kids for an hour while my wife takes a break.
I’d still rather do that than attend a board meeting anytime in the future.
Thank you, Lord, for knowing when and how to deliver your servants.
Restoring Kingdom Builders 
Not only is the list marvelous but I can relate and still observe as once a month friends and conections of mine will post to facebook that they are suring up their strength getting ready for the monthly board meeting. As was your experience I can’t imagine not attending those meeting and am sure the few times over the years when an executive session later revealed some factious agenda had been the reason are a part of why those meetings where so dreaded and so impossible to miss. By contrast I think of the religious education committee meetings that we started to run after I Had been at one church for about three years. As an associate minister and with my training and experience being primarily as a minister of religious education even though as a called member of the ministry team I reported to the board as did the senior in many functional ways the R.E. Committee where a lot like the board was for the Senior minister certainly it was the body with whom I worked most closely. For the first few years we just like many boards with members having areas of specific responsibility and people giving their check in and discussing new business before rendering any needed decisions. But when it comes to educational ministry you inevitably will have to deal with the supply closet and teacher rotation issues not to mention policies for youth events, and on and on. Now on the Myers Briggs I am an ENFP the important letters being that N and P which means instead of the detail minded Sunday school superintendents some may bring to mind from their own childhood church experiences who kept an inventory of craft supplies, was on top of the parent snack sign up calendar through till next year, and who could report from memory the curricular focus planned for every grade three years out (which would be your SJ types) my NF spirit has little drive or innate skill set that would help to do any of those things. Instead I am the one who is ready at any moment to offer a good workaround if a teacher doesn’t show up, is likely to tell eager volunteers who have a great new idea for how we could teach Sunday school “awesome let’s do it how can I help?” and may not know what the plan is for next week let alone next year but would spend from now till next year discussing how we envision improving our ministry to children and the optimal organizational structure to insure things would go smoothly that is theoretically. This in mind I had the wisdom to know that we were in trouble if there weren’t some heavy involvement from some people who represent my temperamental shadow side but that if I was going to remain engaged and ready to bring the best of what I had to offer including outside the box open to possibilities innovation nurturing work that they called me hoping I would bring them that there better be people who are ready to let the meeting go late to debate the pedagogical implications of the two VBS options and would be there toothpicks to prop up my eyelids if anyone came ready to give a report on the colors of markers and crayons we were trending low on verses those that we had overstacked yet kids were not tending to use. I joke but seriously was well aware of how much happier we all where when the logistics where being well managed and though I was able to do it if need be we where all better off because of the people ready to gift the church with some of their natural management ability. And in kind the truth was that those talented organizational savants felt greater pride in the work they were doing for the church when they had been a part of a deliberate conversation of the theoretical foundations that we were hoping to use to guide us toward a broader vision about the changing shape of the church in the world today. People seemed able to agree that we wanted to be a committee that insured that we accounted for the income from the sale of classroom chairs and the remaining profit after using those funds to purchase new beanbags and plush cushions for the kids to sit on but could also articulate for anyone who asked the value and meaning of our effort to deschool Sunday school and how bean bag chairs where just one small part of that project and why we where not going to talk about classrooms anymore but meeting spaces. But when there are always details to attend to you never get to just think big together and have a rich qualitative evaluation of how things are going. So we started by chunking out responcibilities for communicating with volunteers, coordinating snack, greeting visiting and new families with children and so on. What ever you where responsible for you had a broad authority as far as deciding exactly how to get that work done which allowed us to more efficiently get things done with less need for discussion but you still had to check in and be able to bring it to the comittee if you were having difficulties with something. So we started devoting every other meeting to updates from members on life in general and the specific area they were responsible for. On alternate months we tried to get any critical task check in stuff done via email and table anything else till the following meeting and for that month then the entire meeting was devoted to some in depth discussion. Some months I might have a short video about a new curricular model that we would then brainstorm and talk through how it would work and how it would change what we where doing now not that we would adopt the model but we would have played with it and might later have some one suggest we think about actually doing it. Other months I would invite someone to present some series of interactions they observed with the kids on Sunday and then we would engage that and work out how it informed us about the impact we where having with some new change. By the time I was finishing out my last year there we had even moved to having meetings every other month since we had become so efficient in getting work done but also where really using our time to evaluate and analyze and cast a vision for where we where going to the fullest able to go deep without needing to be eased or pushed there ahead of time so we really could accomplish what was needed with six meetings a year and maybe an extra brief quick update session after church near Christmas and Easter. Not sure how something like that would be structured for use in hwo Church board meetings are run but for me it made all the difference so that R.E. meetings were ones that I would get Jazzed to attend eager to see what we discovered before reaching the end of that meeting.
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Thanks so much for your input. Yes, I think there are many ways to improve meetings, and as you suggest, to avoid attending too many meetings altogether. My problem with such meetings is that (a) they tend to be in the evening and take up valuable time; (b) they go on much too long because everybody wants their say; (c) board meetings are often more focused on money than ministry; (d) the atmosphere of such meetings can become needlessly intense; and (e) they give laymen (the amateurs) the same say as pastors (the professionals). I enjoyed board meetings for many years, but that’s because I was usually in sync with the board. When that doesn’t happen, such meetings can become nightmarish.
Jim
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Good points– I would even expand and say that there is a dynamic where church becomes a place where people sometimes feed the power needs not being met at church which doesn’t help. Many in my own tradition –Unitarian Universalism– have looked to a policy driven governance model as a way to address some of these things. In short the board would represent the congregation in setting a broad strokes vision and goals for the year and update as needed other statements of the work and focus of the church and the staff are given autonomy to administrate and budget etc. in order to accomplish those goals. It is more than that and is not always a perfectly lived out model.
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