Everything You Need for a Productive Church Staff Meeting from A to Z

Let’s just say it from the get-go: church staff meetings are necessary. They are not optional. Does that mean they’re all good, productive and useful? No. But still indispensable to any church that wants to grow, be better at serving its community of believers as well as reaching the residents of its locality.

Most pastors and church leaders will agree with the above statements…and still question the reason and pertinence of church staff meetings. Why is that, though? The answer to this interesting interrogation lies within the question itself: why is it necessary when it seems to bring no results?!

Meetings allow many great things to happen, like getting people together and connecting, even if done online. Information and direction are often given. Collaboration and unity can be built. Yet, you’ve been part of numerous unproductive if not wasteful meetings.

You want something else for your church; you want better from your church, as well. If you can hold meetings in a positive way and form, they will be a great addition to your work.

IMPORTANCE OF CHURCH STAFF MEETINGS

• Essential information is shared. Important upcoming dates, calendar changes, future guest speakers or series and the list goes on.
• Values, goals, mission and visions are communicated.
• Collaboration increases as teammates share time, projects and energy.
• Culture can be instilled, nurtured and corrected if necessary.
• Championing staff, volunteers, spouses in their sacrifices, successes and growth becomes celebrated.
• Community is promoted in the sense of unity, transparency and authenticity.
• Opportunities happen to ask for feedback, receive training and encouragement.
• Inclusion of different perspectives and thoughts about challenges can be shared.
• Tunnel vision, isolation and lack of motivation are kicked away as you meet.
• Accountability and staff engagement are heightened.

Now, you may be asking yourself how to do all this in your weekly staff meeting? The answer, simply put is, you don’t! Unless you’re a professional meeting ninja, it’s about impossible to do all that in ONE meeting. Even if you’re that gifted and master the artistry of perfect church staff meetings, you shouldn’t cram all that in one get-together. Instead, start thinking about strategizing your meetings.

STRATEGY AND PURPOSEFUL MEETINGS

Since you’ve decided that boring, useless, powerless, and never-ending church staff meetings are a thing of the past now, you get to decide the strategy behind the future ones.

These seven F.A.C.T.O.R.S. will forever change your church staff gatherings:

Facilitation of your church staff meetings

Announcements of your meetings

Components of each of your meetings

Types of meetings you’ll plan

Organization of your meetings (time, length, do’s and don’ts)

Resources

Specialists (coach, mentors, consultants)

Factor FACILITATION

As you begin this efficient and creative way to have your meeting with staff, high-level leaders and key volunteers, remember one thing: YOU are leading the meeting. Whatever type of meeting is happening, you are the leader of it, you’re the one facilitating the interaction. You are the Task Master, not a tyrant, but the leader your team needs you to be.

You may decide to delegate parts of the meeting to one of your leaders, yet the whole process is under your leadership, supervision and guidance. You’re not necessarily obligated to lead each meeting and direct all of it. You could even choose, once in a while, that the responsibility will be handled by someone else.

Being the facilitator implies a few things. By definition, a facilitator makes things run smoother, easier. The role cannot be taken lightly as you are portraying a new way of functioning.

The facilitator will hold 5 major roles.

• The first one is that you are the guide since you planned the meeting and knows what it entails too. You’re guiding participants and making it easy to follow.
• Secondly, you’re the activator. By your presence and charisma, you engage people with questions, comments and remarks.
• The third role is the builder. Build people with words of encouragement just like 1 Thessalonians 5:11 states “encourage each other and build each other up” (NLT).
• Next, you’re the observer. You need to pay attention to what’s going on, what’s happening. Are people focused? Are there any signs of disconnect, impatience? Observation is part of facilitating.
• The last role but not the least is the peacemaker. In many situations, teammates that love and appreciate each other will still disagree…and take things personally! Remember Ephesians 4:3, “Be faithful to guard the sweet harmony of the Holy Spirit among you” (TPT).

The next factor to consider is the announcements of your meeting.

FACTOR Announcement

“Just send an email.” There. It’s done. But who do you send it to? Announcing your church meeting goes beyond sending just the typical email with the subject line being “Church Staff Meeting.”

Consider just the subject line. If it is always the same old same old, your team will react the same old same old as well! You will read later the different types of meeting you can have, all 7 of them, but suffice to know for now that your header should mention what type of meeting is going to happen.

Along with that, there should be an agenda. Really. Yes. Every meeting. Why though you may ask? If the meeting is worth having, it is worth planning it. If it is worth planning it, let your invitees be aware so they can prepare adequately.

Agenda items

Your agenda is comprised of this simple information:

• Type of meeting: this determines who gets invited.
• Time of meeting: punctuality is of the essence.
• Duration of meeting: this allows your team to manage their time to its best efficiency.
• Place of meeting: You want your team to be on time, at the right place!
• Subjects at hand: what subjects you will be talking about.
• Needed documents: if you require reports, metrics, spreadsheets to be used, this is where you note them.
• Follow-ups: this pertains to unfinished business from prior meetings.

Now that you made your announcement, based on your agenda, you can prepare your exciting church staff meeting by including the next important components.

FACTOR Components

There are many parts to a meeting that will keep your team active, engaged and responsive. Here’s a list, in alphabetical order. These are the “DO’s” of every church staff meeting. At the end, you’ll be able to read the “DON’Ts”

“DO’s”

• Agenda: which you’ve already read previously. Go over it quickly to make sure everyone is on the same page.

• Cancellation policy: If you discover that the meeting is NOT necessary, you can cancel it. It is your leader’s prerogative to be able to do so. Also, let your teammates know how and why they can cancel their participation. Sick day, PTO, direct family emergency for example, could be part of that policy.

• Clarity: the purpose of your meeting needs to be clear to all participants. It’s practically impossible to cover every topic you want to cover in one meeting. Ensure there is no confusion.

• Confidentiality: It is said that a secret is something you tell one person at a time! That’s a far concept from real confidentiality. Depending on the type of meeting you’re leading, some of the subjects you’ll discuss may require a high demand of secrecy, like staff evaluations, overall budgets or even staff’s lives situation. If you desire your team to keep things confidential, clearly mention your expectations.

• Connection time: this is important, even at a business meeting. It allows your team to connect, chit chat and talk about last night’s game. Limit this to the first couple of minutes. If you prefer, build the habit that people arrive a few minutes in advance so they can do this.

• Designated secretary: assign the task of taking notes of your meeting and making sure they are sent out afterward.

• Follow-up note: As you hold different meetings, you’ll discover that notes should always be sent to the participants. Here’s a caveat though: if your notes are from a leadership meeting or they have sensitive content, put a password on your note. Don’t be like that church where notes were sent to all staff, by accident albeit, mentioning staff leaving, being fired and poor evaluations. A few staff members learned they were fired in an email sent to everybody. Even former staff got the email as they weren’t taken off the list yet!

• Necessity: this is an obvious one, but don’t create a meeting if there is no necessity for it!

• Next steps: tasks should be assigned, and next steps should clearly be indicated before leaving your meeting.

• Opener: your meeting will function best if you open with something relevant with the subject and people involved. A story is always good.

• Praise: Add value to your teammates by giving public praise for character traits like resilience, humility for example. As Paul says it, “Respect those people that you should respect. Praise people that you should praise” (Romans 13:7 EASY). Words of affirmation will go a long way with many.

• Prayer: “For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28 NLT). This answer is given by many apostles and disciples after much discussion and disagreements. Prayer seals your discussions. Prayer may not be part of the normal process of a business corporation, but it should be in the context of a church.

• Problem-solving: Often, problems and solutions need to be brought to attention in meetings. Make sure you are solving those issues!

• Recognition: This is all about recognizing accomplishments. The Proverbs mention this “Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it” (3:27 ESV).

• Regularity: the habit of having your meeting creates some expectancy. Have a planned recurrence for your various types of meetings, not for the sake of frequency. You would call that a rut, a redundancy.

• Reinforcement: Your values, your church culture always can use some repetition, which will strengthen them. When you tie accomplishments, character, actions, attitudes to your values, missions and vision, you are creating an environment that boldly underlines your people and their work.

• Tasks: Give people work to do following your discussion and make sure tasks are assigned so a follow up can be done. Give a timeline as well. “John will contact the worship team for new Sunday worship structure by next week”. In your next get-together, you will receive a report on the task.

• Timer: there should be a predetermined time duration for any meeting. It probably should be shorter than longer as a rule of thumb. Be as long as needed and as short as possible.

“DON’Ts”

• Invitation: Don’t invite everyone for the sake of inclusion. Only invite those that are directly needed for your meeting. Other people could receive an invite for a specific part and time for the meeting.

• Last minute: Please, for the love of Jesus and people, do not schedule your meetings less than a week prior. Your team needs to be able to plan their schedule accordingly, prepare the needed documents and perhaps change some already planned meetings.

• Late start: “Let’s wait for those that are not here yet before we start” sends all the wrong messages to your team. It’s OK to be late, your meeting is not that important, latecomers’ time is more important than on-timers, you’re not ready and the list goes on. You’re convinced that is not the signal you want to send out!

• Loose ends: you’ll recognize these: forgotten discussion, task not assigned, next steps unknown.

• Multitasking: you and your teammates should be totally focused on the meeting at hand. Answering emails or using a phone, tablet or computer should be avoided, unless it’s part of an assigned task like note-taking. There will probably be points that do not concern everyone, yet your expectation is that everyone stays focused!

• Never-ending time: Respect the assigned time duration. Period.

• Talking: a structured meeting will allow participants to voice their observations, thoughts, opposition/agreement and comments. Your role is not to do the talking, you’re facilitating.

• Too: too much “we’re so good” in an evaluation meeting is as bad as too much “we have so many things to correct.” Too much of any extreme is a no-no.

• Topic overload: when there are many topics that need to be addressed, resist the temptation to put them all in there, unless it’s an informational meeting. 3-5 topics for a 60-minute meeting means you have 10-15 minutes per subject.

FACTOR Types of meetings

There are various types of meetings in a church setting. Each have their realities, desired outcomes and purpose. These are, in alphabetical order again.

1. All-staff meeting
2. Brainstorming meeting
3. Feedback meeting
4. Kickoff meeting
5. Leadership meeting
6. Stand Up meeting
7. Team meeting

1. ALL-STAFF meeting

• Purpose: To get everyone together for training, celebration, vision and appreciation.
• Invitation: The title says it all. All the staff is required to be present. If you have a limited number of paid staff, you may want to consider inviting those that would be paid if you could!
• Duration: These are great to cover many topics during an extended period of time. These can easily last a few hours.
• Frequency: once/month, perhaps bimonthly.
• Content: You can worship, pray together to start off and close.
• Agenda type:
  • Opener: Bible share, not a sermon, just a quick 3-minute thought
  • Worship and prayer
  • Vision: great time to reinforce your church’s values
  • Training: specific subject that will give tools to your team
  • Inspiration: stories, stories, stories!
  • Metrics: look at where your team is at on numbers that are important to the church
  • Celebration: perhaps birthdays, praise reports, recognition of accomplishments. Rewards may be distributed also.
  • Deep end information: you can share upcoming events, change of strategies, hiring, structure changes. Anything that affects the whole team.
  • Q&A: once in a while, have one of your topics to be a Q&A or AMA (Ask Me Anything). This may bring to the surface issues or topics which may need to be dealt with in the (near) future.
• Meal: if you plan to start early, work during lunch or if dinner time is involved, offer a meal. That is always appreciated.

• BRAINSTORMING meeting

• Purpose: To generate new ideas, projects or perspectives
• Invitation: this one is RSVP only. Bring in your problem solvers, your idea creators to this meeting. You can invite different people for other meetings. Invite people that are not related to the subject. For example, invite a children’s ministry leader to a creative outreach project.
• Duration: 30 minutes, 60 at the most
• Frequency: as needed
• Content
  • Agenda sent ahead of time, so your invitees have time to think of ideas or solutions.
  • Clear objective: “ideas about new outreach initiatives”, “parking circulation issues”, “possible new ways of running our weekend service”.
  • Prayer
  • Opener that creates space for ideas like a team building exercise.
  • Take all ideas without judging them as good/bad, possible/impossible, realistic/unrealistic for example.
  • Assign a note-taker who will additionally take pictures of drawings, charts or anything else pertinent

• FEEDBACK meeting (sometimes called evaluation or retrospective meeting)

• Purpose: To evaluate of a project, idea or event
• Invitation: RSVP with people who took part in the planning and execution of the event. Include event participants as well.
• Duration: 30-60 minutes.
• Frequency: as needed
• Content
  • Agenda sent ahead of time. Possibly with a link to rate different KPI (key performance indicators) like registration, attendance, participation and so on.
  • Prayer
  • Postmortem evaluation of the project/idea, not the people.
  • Make sure people note down their feedback and ask them to send you their notes after. (Some people wait for someone else to talk and then agree with them.)
  • If you have had a brainstorming meeting previously, have a feedback meeting to evaluate the proposed ideas.

• KICK-OFF meeting

• Purpose: To review and prepare for the launching of a new project or initiative
• Invitation: Everyone directly involved in the launch
• Duration: 60 minutes no more, knowing you are about to launch the initiative in a very near future
• Frequency: prior to every new launch
• Content
  • Detailed agenda of topics (who’s who and what’s what!)
  • Prayer
  • Long term vision of the initiative
  • Short term expectations
  • Determined roles to be filled
  • Assignments and tasks
  • Follow-up
• NB: you may need to have a second kickoff meeting to ensure everything has been covered and ready.

• LEADERSHIP meeting

• Purpose: To enhance upper management and leadership focus
• Invitation: all those in the top of the org chart
• Duration: a few hours to a full day
• Frequency: This one is a little tricky as there are many factors to consider, but as a rule of thumb, 1/month. Bimonthly if you can have subgroups that report back to the whole group
• Content:
  • Prayer
  • Revision of important church metrics
  • Oversight of each ministerial department
  • General evaluation of staff and health of teams
  • PGP (Personal Growth Plan) for the team and/or individuals
  • Leadership Training to improve the quality and quantity of ministry
  • Vision and mission for the present and future
  • Round table: you can also invite your department heads to give a report of their ministry
  • Determine next steps and assign tasks

• STAND-UP meeting

• Purpose: informational meeting on a specific subject, follow up or new update.
• Invitation: all staff, or at least all those who are present.
• Duration: 15 minutes or less
• Frequency: when needed
• Content:
  • Strictly the news that needs to be shared. You would call a stand-up meeting if something significant had happened to a staff (car accident or unexpected but happy pregnancy!) or good news just came in (approved zoning change for the new building for example)
• NB: These rarely happen, a couple of times a year.

• TEAM meeting

• Purpose: get a specific ministerial team together (worship, next gen team for example)
• Invitation: all the members of that specific team only
• Duration: 30-90 minutes, depending on the subject(s)
• Content:
  • Prayer
  • Clear objective for the meeting (evaluate processes, new onboarding of volunteers for example)
  • Main points of discussion (no more than 3-5)
  • Important notes, something worth sharing that would not transfer well in an email!
  • Determine next steps and assign tasks
  • This meeting is to facilitate better functioning of a team 

As you can see, the many types of meeting allow you to aim the right target. Let’s go on to the next factor.

FACTOR Organization

In the previous factors, many things were already covered like agendas, duration and frequency of meetings.

When organizing your meetings, there are key ingredients that will change perspectives, outcomes and even prejudiced thoughts against meetings! Those elements are your vision, your values, the stories, inspiration, growth and development.

Vision: it needs to be shared every single time you meet. The art of learning happens through repetition. The vision of your church needs to be the thin solid thread that holds everything together. Therefore, you structure your meeting with your vision in mind. “Reaching out to those far from God,” “Love God, Love people” or “Know God and Discover your purpose” vision and mission statements will certainly give very diverse flavors to your initiatives. If “reaching” is your main vision, then your brainstorming meetings will be geared to help reach people. “Discover purpose” would have leadership meetings to focus on the broadening of opportunities to serve within the church and the community.

Your vision is the central theme of how you invite your teams to the church staff meetings.

Values: if vision is about your purpose, values are about how you live it out. By putting an accent on specific values, you encourage your team to display them. Values are always action-oriented. “We are optimistic people” would go along great with a “reaching” vision as you optimistically talk and share your faith with everyone you meet.

Reinforcing your values in each meeting benefits the vision and the people as well. Your team will know what you’re looking for, what is appreciated, valued! These values will promote godly character and competencies.

Stories: what you do matters to God. It also is impactful to your congregants and teammates. Whatever your topic is, start off by telling a story of how it influenced a friend, a teammate. Let the story do the hard work for you. Suddenly, the vision, those values are being fleshed out into something beautiful.

Inspiration: The author of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us to “Discover creative ways to encourage others and to motivate them toward acts of compassion, doing beautiful works as expressions of love.” (10:24 TPT). Your eagerness to inspire to action in your meetings changes your team’s perspective on projects, initiatives and people.

Growth and development: you’re a pastor at heart. You love people and you certainly want the best for them, specifically your team. The ladies and gentlemen under your leadership want to grow. John Maxwell calls this “adding value” to people. Give your peeps useful tools for ministry, challenges to get out of a comfort zone and reward them for it. Get a PGP (Personal Growth Plan) ready with your staff, not just a “here are a few goals for you to hit”. G &D is about engaging and caring for your staff.

FACTOR Resources

Some people’s ministry is about organization. They make a living helping people like you, to better themselves in diverse areas of expertise. These resources will certainly be helpful.

• ChurchStaffing: This site offers tons of valuable resources to lead your church better.

• Pushpay’s Church Management Software: They’ve been helping churches for years now to engage teams and efficiently coordinate children’s check-ins, manage online giving and plan schedules.

• Slack: This is a platform that brings the people on your teams or your congregation into a collaboration hub. This app can unify your systems and keep your church on the same page as you communicate.

• Monday: This is a project management platform to keep your teams, goals and projects well organized and keeps collaboration efficient and frequent.

• SmartSheet: This is another software for collaboration and work management, used to assign tasks, track project progress, manage calendars, share documents, and manage other work.

• Basecamp: This is an all-in-one toolkit that’s especially useful for remote work. Here’s how the company says it: “Before Basecamp: Projects feel scattered, things slip, it’s tough to see where things stand, and people are stressed. After Basecamp: Everything’s organized in one place, you’re on top of things, progress is clear, and a sense of calm sets in.”

• If you even search Amazon for “staff meeting books”, you’ll get OVER 3,000 RESULTS!

As we end, the last facet is:

FACTOR Specialists

In your desire to have everything you need from A to Z for great church staff meetings and be the best leader you can be, there are 2 types of specialists you can, and should, require services from.

Mentors: These are people that have “been there, done that”. They have experience, they have knowledge…and mostly, they are willing to share that. Mentors are ahead of you in years and expertise. They will challenge you to be better, give you useful tools.

Coaches: These specialists know how to ask questions that will produce results. They are guides that will hold accountable to the steps you say you will take and encouragers of growth.

A few companies, Christian and secular, can offer one or the other, even both.

• Find a Certified Coach, Speaker or Trainer at the John Maxwell Team: John Maxwell is THE leadership “guru.” He has lead thousands of mentors and coaches. Plus, he is a pastor!

• Christian Coaches Network International: This is the leading credentialing agency in the field of professional Christian coaching. They seek to empower, equip, and connect Christian coaches.

• Table Group: A secular company where Patrick Lencioni leads his tribe, this is business that helps organizations become healthier. They offer resources, consulting and speaking. Patrick was once described by The Wall Street Journal as “one of the most in demand speakers in America.”

The list, again, could go on almost indefinitely, which is not what you need!

You have enough material here to help you have stupendous church staff meetings, as long as you obey Jesus’ words, as reported by the apostle John 13:17 “If you understand what I’m telling you, act like it—and live a blessed life.” (MSG) or if you prefer, “Now that you know this truth, how happy you will be if you put it into practice!” (GNT).