Well, I tried. The agenda for our board (Session in Presby-speak) meeting was for a meeting that lasted one hour and thirty minutes (7:30-9 pm). Yet I did not leave the church until after 10, counting post meeting conversations. Actually the agenda plan worked well, because there is no telling how long we would have been if we discussed everything on the agenda in the same time it took to talk about what was not there.
I should say that we spent all of that time on important stuff, very important stuff. The problem is that when you are on the edge of extinction, everything is critical, and we can not seem to get everything done.
We did take time, as sheduled, for breakout sessions to ”vision” personnel and marketing ourselves. These are areas that we do not seem to address. The approach was eye-opening into what we should and could be doing if we could stop talking about the clutter. Yes, I know that personnel sounds like clutter, but it starts seeming more important when you are running a deficit and personnel is 60% of your budget. We do not even have a committee, and somebody really ought to ask where 60% of the money goes.
May God bless the Session members who were there. They did some heavy lifting tonight.
