Annual Meeting Upcoming!

As we mentioned yesterday, our next Annual Meeting is this Sunday following worship.  We've got some changes in the air regarding annual meetings (and really all our congregational meetings) that you should know about.

In the past we've had a business focus to our quarterly and annual gatherings.  We've reported what's happened in the year past, approved a budget, elected officers, and gone home.  Anything forward looking probably came from my report and even then it was mostly about the current state of the church and its immediate future.

That's all fine stuff, pretty much what you'd expect from such a meeting.  It was like a C-level gathering, maybe C+ if we hit it right.

Our church leaders have been talking and we've pretty much decided that a C+ meeting doesn't reflect the A-level spirit of our church, nor the A-level ministry that we're trying to achieve.  So we're evolving the nature and process of our time together.

We're still going to take care of business in these meetings.  We'll still approve a budget and elect officers.  But we're shifting our focus from reporting on what has happened to looking forward to what will happen among us in the coming months and year.  It doesn't make much sense to keep our eyes trained on the past when we gather.  If you participated in the ministries we've done this year then you already know what's happened.  Even if you didn't, we hope you can see the effect of our ministry.  Either way, rehearsing it doesn't seem like a productive use of our time.  Too often these meetings have felt like people who have been working hard having to report on and justify that work to the people around them.  That's not who we are as a congregation and that's not the impression we want to leave on our fellow workers in the Kingdom of God!

We absolutely want to acknowledge and thank the people who have worked to make our ministries run in the past year.  But we want to spend most of our time and energy looking forward to what we're doing next.  We want to give hands-on, visual demonstrations of new developments.  We want to open up the ministry planning process and invite people to jump on board.  We want to engage and enthuse.

Before there was little reason to come to an annual meeting if you thought everything was going OK.  "Yeah, it's fine.  We know it's fine.  Why do we need to sit and hear a report about it being fine?"  That limited participation to two groups:

1.  A core group of members who always come and who care about things like budgets.

2.  People who have problems or complaints, who don't think everything is going OK.

Therefore the only real interaction in these meetings was either of the, "Why did this budget line go up?" variety or a fight.  Yikes.

Now, though, our interaction is going to be more informative, creative, forward-looking.  Even if you think everything is OK and nothing needs to be reviewed that much, even if you hate budget talk and business, these meetings will hold interest for you!  Now we're going to talk about the next things we're doing, where your church is headed, and how you can help.  Instead of dividing us or boring us, that conversation is going to unite us and give us direction.  Our words together as an entire congregation are going to reflect the same exciting vibrancy that our words together as individuals do.

This is a big change for us and we need your support for it.  We need your enthusiasm and your participation.  We need you to be on board with the direction we're headed  in the coming year and to pitch in wherever you can.  The best way to find out how is to come to this meeting.

We hope to see you there on Sunday.  I'm looking forward to it.  We're going to try to give you something you can learn from and look forward to as well.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)