Meetings, Meetings, Everywhere…
Mondays are meeting days.
Each and every Monday morning, Pastor Bob and I sit down for most of the day. We spend nearly the entire workday meeting. While I’m sure there are those out there who shudder at the thought of an entire day of meetings, I actually enjoy our Mondays meetings. They usually go something like this:
First, we start off by reading some scripture together. We’ll take a book of the Bible and go through it over the course of a couple weeks. After we read the section, we’ll talk about what was interesting or what we hadn’t noticed before. Then we ask “what was in there that applies to us (us being Journey) today. It’s not uncommon for us to spend over an hour just looking at a chapter or two. So far we’ve covered Acts and Nehemiah and we just started 1 Timothy today.
After Bible study, we start with a review of yesterday. We’ll look at what went right in the service, where we missed the mark, and where we could be doing better. This time is so very critical and something that I think a lot of churches tend to skip over. In every service we do, there is something that we can learn from in regards to our presentation and production. Maybe a transition was weak, maybe there was too much dead time between the video and the speaker coming up, maybe the lighting was wrong. While none of these may have derailed the worship service, they’re areas that we can focus on to do better next time. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: God deserves our best – but yesterdays best is tomorrow’s mediocre. We can always be doing something better.
Once we’ve reviewed yesterday, we turn to the next few weeks. We recap what will be covered this week and make sure that everything is on track and we look at the upcoming weeks to make sure that things like media pieces and songs are in place or at least in production. This can be one area where the tension between Pastor and Artist can build. I (the artist) want to do things weeks in advance. If I had every message outline between now and Easter I’d be the happiest man alive. Pastor’s, on the other hand, are generally more focused on the hear and now. Both views are important because they keep it balanced. If we did have all the messages between now and Easter done, there would be a million changes over the course of time because, well.. things happen! You develop a topic and it ends up going in a different direction than you thought. That’s ok! But on the other hand, if you do everything a week out, you lose time to pull off some really creative things simply because there’s not enough time to pull everything together.
Beyond the weekend-related portion of the meeting, the rest of the time is spent looking at various projects and events that are coming up (some as far away as New Years Eve and beyond) or talking about new strategies or ideas for things like marketing and outreach. This can be one of the best portions of the meeting because here we get to be creative and develop ideas as a team. Some of our most creative ideas have been born here.
One of the biggest advantages of meeting all day on Monday is that it frees up the rest of the week. Now that we’ve met in great detail on Monday, we rarely have to meet again throughout the week. Sure, we touch base on things or bounce other ideas off one another, but the bulk of all the discussions have already happened, keeping our already crazy lives just that much closer to sanity.