Ministry Basics: Leading a Staff Meeting

Call me weird, but I love a good meeting, especially when the meeting is about something that I’m passionate about.  As a kidmin professional, I spend a lot of time in meetings and leading meetings.

Over the years, I have learned a few things about meetings:

1. People lead busy lives; therefore they don’t want to waste time sitting in an unnecessary meeting.  Only meet when necessary.
2. Speaking of time, people want you to respect it.  Start and end on time.
3. It’s helpful if people know what to expect.  Send an agenda ahead of time.
4. Speaking of agenda, keep the meeting on track by sticking to the agenda.  Try to curtail side conversations.
5. Food and fun decorations makes all meetings enjoyable!

Since I recently hired an Associate Director for our ministry (she is awesome, by the way!), we have resumed our weekly Children’s Ministry staff meetings.  The purpose of our time together is make sure that everyone is up-to-date about what’s going on and to pray for ministry & personal needs.

While we have only had two CM staff meetings so far, I have thoroughly enjoyed them both. Not only are we planning better but our friendships are deepening.  It’s been a beautiful thing to watch.

When designing our meetings, I made the decision to make our time purposeful by keeping each meeting to 60 minutes and having a pretty standard (but flexible) meeting agenda each week.

Here’s a snapshot of what our staff meetings consist of:

• Opening prayer & devotional
• Recap the previous Sunday (God sightings, what worked well, what didn’t work well)
• Updates on ‘action steps’ from the last meeting
• This week at a glance:  We look at Monday-Saturday events & Sundays separately.  We assess volunteer needs and logistics.  Then we assign tasks for the week so that we know who is responsible for what.  We also review our calendars (who will be out of the office and when).
• Other items? (I realize there are other things that might need to be discussed that don’t fall into any other area, so I try to allow some time to discuss other things as well.  But, to honor our time, I will chat with the appropriate person about items outside of our meetings if they will cause us to run over our 60 minute time frame.)
• Prayer (for ministry and personal needs)
• Notes of encouragement (We write notes of thanks and/or encouragement to our volunteers – because we can’t do ministry without them, we need to make sure that we regularly let them know we appreciate them.)

After our meetings, I upload a summary and to-do lists to our shared folder on Basecamp.
For your convenience, I have attached a downloadable Staff Meeting Agenda template for you below.  You can use it to design your own agenda to suit your team’s needs.

What do your staff meetings look like?  Share your ideas in the Kidology Zones!