How much time do you spend in meetings?

Imagine if you had the opportunity to sit down with the best children’s leaders in your city every week. And imagine that you could troubleshoot, dream, plan, create, challenge and share ideas together on a regular basis.

That’s what I feel like happens for me every Monday. Some of the best leaders I know, gather around the table and work together to share their collective intellect, creativity and resources to create environments to reach the children and families in our community with the message of Christ.

Very few of our meetings are the “sit and listen” type of meetings. Most of our meetings are the “jump in and participate” kind of meetings. For the most part, we create the big picture of what is going to happen in our ministry areas together.

We really hate to waste time and there is nothing worse than being in a meeting that everyone can’t wait to get out of, SO we regularly evaluate our meetings and discuss their value and who all needs to attend. About once or twice a year these meetings get tweaked a little bit.

Two important things to know:

First, I do not attend or lead all of these meetings.

Second, Not every director or every children’s ministry staff member attends all of these meetings.

Here is Part 1 of a list of our consistent meetings, who attends, and their purpose:

Monday:

Multi-Campus Directors Meeting: (3x month-1hr)

•    All Waumba Land, UpStreet and KidStuf Directors - every campus.

•    Purpose: Information and communication of big items that affect all of us. Keeping us on the same page.

Multi-Campus Department Meeting: (3x month – 1.5 hrs)

•    Waumba Land Directors meet together and UpStreet Directors meet together at another time that day

•    Purpose: Planning ahead, discussing upcoming details, sharing projects, making programming changes, talking       through bigger issues/problems from Sunday, discussing content needs and changes, planning programming for events

Multi-Campus KidStuf Directors Meeting: (3x month – 1.5 hrs.)

•    All KidStuf Staff

•    Purpose: Look at upcoming deadlines, discuss upcoming marathons or smaller creative meetings, discuss any changes to the script, discuss next steps on items such as the Take-Out, podcasts and new video elements

Tuesday:

Multi-Campus Family Ministry Directors Meeting (2x month – 1hr)

•    Multi-Campus Children’s, Middle School and High School Directors

•    Look ahead and discuss things on the calendar that will affect us all. Work together on key items that involve all of our departments. Step back from the current work load and talk about future items like a new campus, hiring needs, budget planning, events, connecting to parents, etc.

Multi-Campus Groups Directors Meeting (1x month – 2 hrs – Sept-May)

•    All Groups Directors from every campus.

•    Development time with our Groups Directors, create tools to better manage and develop healthy small groups, discuss evaluation tools and training tools for small group leaders, learn more about our target audience, develop detailed management systems

Part 2 will outline the rest of our consistent meetings.

Post written by:  Kendra Fleming - Multi-Campus Children’s Ministry Director