Effective Vestry Meetings are essential to healthy Congregational life. Here are three questions to make them more effective.
After 42 years of ordained ministry and 10 of these spent
on a Bishop’s staff, I have attended far more Vestry meetings than anyone would
wish. Believe me when I say that I have
seen “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of Vestry meetings. I’ve also seen to many boring ones. Since Vestry meetings are an essential part
of parish administration, I learned early on to try to learn how to run
effective ones. Over the years in Vestry
Workshops, I’ve offered a number of practical suggestions to make Vestry
Meetings more effective. In this blog, I want to share three questions
that should be asked at the end of every Vestry meeting.
1.
What
have we decided?
Interestingly, Vestry Meetings can go on for hours with
lots of discussion, even conflict, with very little actually decided. Some Vestry Clerks are able to record in the
minutes an incredible amount of detail.
I’ve seen Vestry Minutes that go one for as many as ten pages. While such detail may be interesting
especially to Parish Historians, they make clarification difficult. Even when a resolution has been made, one
often has to search the minutes for a long time to locate what a Vestry has
actually decided.
I learned this tip from an Executive Secretary of the
Board of General Mills. Board or Vestry
Minutes should start with the place and time of the meeting followed by a list
of those in attendance. Then there needs
to be an executive summary of actions.
Here is a sample;
These Vestry
Minutes Contain the Following Vestry Actions:
1. Approved
the December Minutes
2. Voted
to authorize the Junior Warden to replace the old hot water heater in the
Parish Hall
3. Approved
a 10% increase in the paper budget for the current year
4. Appointed
a long-range planning committee to address the question of adding a Sunday
night service
Note that the summary lists only the actions and
decisions of the Vestry. Discussions of
items can be found in the minutes when needed.
The summary does not need to include the official resolution. This too can be found within the
minutes. This kind of summary is very
helpful when Vestry Members wish to look up a decision make months before,
i.e. “Didn’t we already authorize a new
hot water heater last year when we began to have problems?” A quick review of past Vestry Minutes can
locate any past action. This is
especially important given the normal rotation of at least 1/3 of the Vestry
each year.
2.
Who
is responsible for carrying out or overseeing the decision?
I warn clergy that if a decision is made and no one is
given responsibility for executing it, then the assumption will be that the
Rector is responsible. This is poor and
often problematic assumption. To help
the collective memory, I find that actions should also indicate the responsible
person when appropriate. (See #2 in the
example above.) When a Vestry is not
clear as to who is the responsible person, then confusion, frustration, and hard
feelings often result.
3.
How
should we communicate these decisions?
I have advocated the first two questions for years
now. Recently I read an article by Bob
Sutton about effective meetings where he shared what he learned from the Human
Relations person, Patty McCord, of Netflix.
“Toward the end of our conversation, we asked Patty
about senior team meetings at Netflix and elsewhere. Patty was vehement that,
in the best companies, executive teams really are teams and that they make the
hardest decisions together. We were especially struck by what she said next:
“The most important role I played at Netflix was, at the end of every executive
meeting, to say ‘Have we made any decisions in the room today, and (if we have)
how are we going to communicate them?’”
This third question is important and has become even more so
for Vestries in the past three decades.
When I was first ordained, most Vestries operated more as “Trustees” of
congregations. Their decisions were
seldom questioned because institutional loyalty was a standard for the G.I.
generation. To question a decision was
often seen as a criticism of the integrity of the Vestry Members. However, the change in generations has
brought a new standard. It started with
us Boomers. I like to say it this way, “Boomers
consider any decision, no matter how good, made without their participation to
be a bad one.” Younger generations have gone
further in expectations regarding the standards in communications and participation.
So, if I were to give a Vestry Workshop today, I would add
this third question and underscore its importance. It is fundamental to leadership today to be
effective communicators even to the point of redundancy. Good businesses
like Netflix have learned this. Good
parishes should learn this. And we could
hope that government at all levels would learn this.
Want to enhance the effectiveness of your Vestry
Meetings? Add these three questions at
the end of every meeting to build organizational effectiveness and
transparency. Yes, the Church is not a
business, but this should never be an excuse for poor leadership
practices. After all, the Church is
about the work of God’s Kingdom and this demands a higher standard than that at
Netflix.
