219: Mistake #4: Requiring Them to Come to Meetings | Church Volunteer Series

In Stop Doing This to Volunteers: Top Mistakes Our Churches Are Making, we’re talking about meetings - and how they often do more harm than good. 

We say we value people’s time, but when we gather by default instead of by necessity, purpose, or engagement, we teach people that showing up doesn’t actually matter.

In this episode, we cover:

1. Why meetings are often more about leader comfort than team support
2. How requiring presence can quietly drain goodwill
3. Easy alternatives that respect people’s time and still develop volunteers like rockstars

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Transcript

Laurie Graham  0:01 
Hey, welcome to the Small Church Ministry Podcast, where we help volunteers and ministry leaders experience less stress, more joy and greater impact as we share strategies that actually do work in smaller churches. I'm your host, Laurie Graham. Let's dive in.

Laurie Graham  0:22 
Hey, hey, welcome back to mistake number four in our Stop Doing This To Volunteers series. I don't know about you, but I'm having a lot of fun, because it is so cool to be able to call out, I guess, some pet peeves that I've had over several decades of ministry in just working with amazing people, and often finding them frustrated, or seeing them get burnt out in churches, or people emailing me now, even last week, talking about how they don't feel very valuable. And as I talk to them, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, you are so amazing, like you're why the church is still standing, but without that title, or without the pay, we think, just a volunteer. 

So having some fun in this series, just calling out common mistakes that most of us, most of our churches, most of the modern church culture, huge mistakes that we are making, most of which we've been taught, we've seen muddled, and I'm just having a lot of fun calling them out. So today's episode, I'm wondering how many people might not even listen to it because of the title, but we're talking about how it is a complete mistake to require volunteers to come to meetings. 

So week one, week two, week three, we're headed into week four right now. Week one, we talked about how we need to stop locking people into roles and ask them what they'd rather be doing. Week two, we talked about how we need to stop making it easy for people to volunteer, because, honestly, people crave growth. They crave significance, and we know that's not always easy. Week three, we talked about how we need to stop treating volunteers like their helpers instead of partners, and today we're going there. We're talking about meetings. Now I know a lot of us have an affinity for meetings. We believe they are needed. We believe they are necessary, and we require volunteers to come to meetings. 

And we wonder, in today's day and age, why it is so hard to recruit volunteers, to find them, to develop them, why people don't want to serve in the church? And I'm just calling it out right now, sometimes it has to do with meetings. Meetings. I'm so done with meetings now. 

Let me say this clearly. I am not anti-getting together. I'm not anti-gathering. I am not anti-requiring training, even, but I am anti-meetings. I'm anti-corporate-feeling-sit-at-a-table, calendar clogging, information dumping meetings, meetings that could have happened in an email, because I want to say, I value my time. I value your time. It's not that people are too busy for meetings, it's that we've raised our standards. We're a little pickier now because we found other valuable things in our lives, and honestly, I think we should be picky. I think we should have high standards. I think we should stop wasting people's time in meetings. 

So now let's just have fun with this one. Go with me if you're feeling a little cringy right now, just stick with me until the end. Because if you value training volunteers, like I do, if you value evaluation, vision casting, doing things with excellent like I do. If you value accountability, like I do, I want to talk about how we can have all these things without requiring meetings. We can separate the purpose of what the meetings are for, from how we've fallen into a pattern of doing them in the way we've always done them, because development matters, our personal development, developing others matters. 

But meetings, meetings are not sacred, so let's talk about what is happening in a lot of places. In our places right now, we join a ministry team or a board, and we require attendance. We put meetings on the calendar, and we say, this is how leadership works. And then at these meetings, at these required meetings, we go over updates that we could have gotten an email and maybe we already have, we review details that could have been in a checklist. We report on things we could have shared in an online like chat group. We spend 90 minutes sitting in a chair, and we call it team building, and then we're confused when attendance drops and energy feels flat and people drag themselves in or don't always show up, we get deflated ourselves, if we're the ones leading the lackluster meetings, the way that, I just want to say we've been taught to do. 

But I want to say, maybe this is not a commitment issue. Maybe this is a format issue. Maybe there's a better way we could have the results that we really, really want. Now, before anybody panics again, I want to say, I believe in training, I believe in accountability, I believe in evaluation, I believe in skill building. I believe in alignment. I believe in unity. I believe in high standards. I believe in excellence in ministry. 

So not having meetings is not about lowering expectations. It's about raising effectiveness and like, let's get creative and do things better than a meeting, because requiring people to sit in a room these days, it is not the same as developing people. Meetings often feel corporate and impersonal. They're typically incredibly inefficient, and they're typically, oftentimes they are. They're things we've inherited from the office culture. I mean the early church, Jesus, were we calling meetings, sitting around a table with an agenda? It's just interesting to think about, isn't it? 

We don't need to have that vibe of a boring, impersonal, highly controlled corporation. What we need is growth and relationships and honesty and authenticity and discipleship and mentoring and great communication, two-way communication, a meeting often implies, if you think about a meeting, there's one person leading the meeting. There's a division that's already happened here that is much more one way than two way, let alone the Body of Christ with all the pieces and parts. 

So let's just talk before we get into what it could be, why we often default to meetings, because, let's be honest, meetings help us feel organized and in control, even if they're not effective. Meetings help us feel like we're leading. Meetings are predictable. Meetings give somebody a microphone, and often give a place for the loudest voices in the room, but not always every voice. 

Meetings, like I said, they're predictable, but it doesn't mean they're productive. And adults, just like children, may I say, adults don't grow best sitting in chairs. You know, there's so much talk these days about neurodivergence, about people. You know that we're all on a spectrum, by the way, we're all on the spectrum like, that's the whole point of neurodivergency, okay, being neurodivergent. And we talk about, oftentimes, about children and ADHD or different learning styles. And when I've talked to experts in these fields, because we have them at our Children's Ministry conferences, and at many adult ministry conferences as well. 

And the reality is, the best way to teach people who are neurodivergent are actually the best way that everyone learns. Everyone, no one learns best sitting in a chair and being stationary, it doesn't even help us think creatively. Our brain doesn't fire up the same way as if we were moving. That's why we get the best ideas when we are running, when we are outside, when we're in communication with people.

Laurie Graham  10:24 
And when we're in the shower, by the way, when we have water falling on us, we grow best in motion. In other environments, nobody grows best sitting in a chair. Nobody has their best ideas sitting in a chair. So why do we think that we should be vision casting and developing ministry statements and evaluating how things are going, sitting around a table in chairs? Why do we think that this is the best place to do team development or training? 

So let's talk about what it could be instead, if we got rid of meetings, if the purpose of the meeting is training or team building or evaluation or alignment or getting on the same page with vision or mission or connection, what other options do we have? What better options do we have? I'm just going to throw a few out there. I really do hope that you take this podcast episode and you take it to your team, you take it to your team teacher, you take it to your friend, if you don't have a team. And let's talk about what church could be, because I'm going to tell you, this is the kind of church I would rather be in so I'm going to run through just a couple purposes that we often have meetings for and talk about what they could be. 

Instead, if we want to train people for jobs, for ministry and skills, how about shadowing somebody for a Sunday? How about on the job training? How about a 10-minute screen recording video. How about a quick audio update. How about conversation? How about pairing newer volunteers or people in different roles with experienced ones. How about skilled coaching after an event. How about immediately following an experience, an event, a Sunday Service, saying, Hey, what did you learn? What could you learn? Doing a quick recap of training. If you want to do meetings for trainings, any of these options is better. 

If the purpose of a meeting is for team building, how about a dessert night, a backyard cookout, meeting up before the service for coffee, celebrating with a party after a big win, attending important events in each other's lives, unpacking things in a different way after we've all served together, or before we go to serve together, the quick meetups before and after, with purpose, with affirmation, with prayer, with whatever you want to throw In, that's team building. If the purpose of your meeting is for evaluation, what about a 15-minute standing debrief right after the event or the program? I'm going to tell you right now, that's the best time to evaluate. 

When you go to evaluate something a week later or a month later, the freshness is gone. And by the way, trying to evaluate something in a group around a table shuts down most of the voices in the room. Terrible way to do evaluation. How about for evaluation, throwing out a shared Google Form, or a text thread, what worked, what didn't work, or a quick walk and talk kind of a thing, if the purpose of your meeting, let's hit one more is for alignment or shared vision. What about a short weekly email? What about a shared document? What about Slack or a Facebook group, that's a small group, right with your team, a project board, a place where we can pin things and take things down and keep it up front, not just at a meeting. So any of these examples, gathering yes, maybe in different ways, in different formats, gathering yes, meeting as a default, nah. It's just not effective. It's not fun. It's not the way that most people would choose to spend their time these days. And it's not because we're not committed. It's because we've seen better. We're just at a different place. 

Now we know that we learn better by movement. We know that team building happens more in activity than in sitting at a table. We know that personalities are different, and by putting people at a table that's offering a comfort level of communication and participation to very few people, quite honestly. So here's a shift. Here's how to make a shift before scheduling your next meeting. Won't you ask yourself, maybe bring others into the picture. What is this actually for? What's the purpose of this meeting? Could it happen in a different way? Are we gathering for actual growth or out of habit. Is this efficient? Is there a better way? Let's get creative. 

And here's the bigger question, if people, volunteers and others consistently don't want to come to meetings? Are we building something that they don't want to step into, something to think about? Instead of having meetings that could have happened in an email, we could instead respect people's time, honor them in a different way. We could build real skills in an active way, where people are practicing. We could keep energy high. And by that, I don't necessarily mean you know, on the scale of activity, where the people who are high extroverts or high energy are happy and always at the top. 

But by keeping energy high, I mean momentum and passion and that internal fire. Instead of stomping it out with meetings, we don't need more meetings. We really don't, but we could really use some better moments. So if this episode stirred something fun for you, if you want to do something different in your church, in your ministry, in any area you're in, no matter what position you're in, if you have a title or no title, if these conversations are stirring something in you come hang out with us. If you are not yet in our free Facebook community these conversations, there's tons of idea sharing happening in there. It is a great place to not feel like you're the only one thinking about this stuff, wanting to see something different happen, fresh ideas in your church.

 Come join us there. It's called Creative Solutions for Small Churches. The link is in the show notes. And if you're ready to go deeper, not just with new ideas, but actual growth and support, building new skills, new confidence, maybe tackling some even internal issues with burnout or frustration. Come join us in the Small Church Network. The Small Church Network is where we have monthly master classes. We have trainings, we do monthly Q&As. We have live Zoom coaching calls that happen. We walk through what healthy, effective small church ministry actually looks like, and how to be moving toward a healthier path, more effectiveness, more efficiency, deeper relationships, more authentic community. That's what we do in the Small Church Network. 

The Small Church Network is training. It's community. It's real change. It's taking the changes in ourselves, taking it back to our churches, and watching some cultural shifts start happening there too. So the link for the Small Church Network is also in the show notes. Whatever level you want to join us on, please jump in. We have ongoing support all year long. It's not just the podcast, so come join us in all our other venues and avenues where it fits in your life. 

All right, next week on the podcast, we're going to continue the series of Stop Doing This To Volunteers: The Top Mistakes Our Churches Are Making. Next week, we're getting into something that is all too common. It has been taught and modeled to most of us. We have seen it over and over again, and honestly, it's a bad habit. And what we're talking about next week is Planning First and Asking for Help Second, that that is mistake number five, and we'll talk about how to flip that. One on its head too. 

So, all right, we'll talk again next week, until then, do something. Cancel one meeting and try something better. All right, talk to you next week. Be a light.