Prior to the pandemic many churches were struggling to fill their committee slates. This was due to a host of reasons:
Many church structures are holdovers from an era when congregations - and thus their leadership needs - were bigger.
There are so many tugs on congregants’ time, making it hard to make monthly, multi-year commitments.
Church members who are older or who have children with early bedtimes are less likely to attend evening meetings.
Recruitment is often geared more toward filling slots than helping people discern how their gifts might help a church live into its purpose.
Many congregations don’t develop leadership pipelines, which means current leaders tend to be burned out and potential leaders aren’t sure how to contribute.
All of these factors remain, hence the present tense used above. In this pre-post-Covid time, there are now added considerations:
Some of the former stalwarts in congregations have drifted away to other churches or no church.
People have connected with the virtual or hybrid manifestations of church and are now engaging in that space rather than coming as often to the church campus.
Certain segments of the general population are completely wrung out from their pandemic experience (e.g., caregivers of young kids or aging parents and healthcare workers) and unwilling to add on big commitments.
People’s priorities have shifted under the pressure of long-term crisis.
What all of this is resulting in is a never-ending cycle of nominations for a committee system that isn’t working in many places. So what can you do?
Send the structure on sabbatical. There must be a mechanism for making key decisions and for extending congregational care. Beyond that, lay leadership can take a proactive break - as opposed to the one forced by the pandemic - for three months. After that time, talk about what that was like. What relief did that pause offer? What did you all miss? What wisdom bubbled up?
Note where the energy is. After the pause have conversations with leadership and beyond about the hopes they have and the needs they see in and beyond the congregation. How do these align with your church’s values and mission? What does that mean for what you might want to experiment with?
Consider how shorter-term projects could increase involvement. Standing committees are one way to get things done, but they are not the only way. Some ministry areas lend themselves to seasonal teams. By inviting people to join a group for a one-off event or a certain period of participation (e.g., plan worship for Advent), you increase excitement and the available pool of people (including those who join you online or who have busy seasons in their paid or unpaid jobs they have to work around), decrease the risk of the same few people doing all the things, and bring in new voices on a regular basis.
Make meetings worth participants’ time. Gather at the times and by the means that work best for those involved. Create a plug-and-play agenda template. Have a spiritual formation/worship piece, a relationship-building piece, a business piece, and a wrap-up piece that ties the other three together. (If your structure is doing to look different, why not make the meetings run differently?) Here’s one shape that closing piece can take:
What invitations from God have we sensed in our time together?
What does that mean for next steps?
To what actions are we committing?
What’s left hanging?
How are you feeling about how we worked together today?
Look at the by-laws. If you blow up your committee structure, your documents will need to reflect this change. Accurate documents build trust and transparency in processes and provide a touchstone when there’s confusion or disagreement. Don’t let this step stop you from making needed changes, though. Dotting the Is and crossing the Ts will be a small price to pay for renewed and refocused congregational energy.
So let’s do it. Let’s call time of death on the committee structure, bury it, and see what new life results.
Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash.
