Most pastors I know have a complicated relationship with meetings. We attend many. We complain about most. Some pastors will tell you they are not “real” ministry, the kind of work that happens in the hospital room or the living room, with the Bible open and a heart in pain. Meetings, in this telling, are the price we pay for the ministry we actually want to do.
In the final section of The Advantage, Lencioni would push back on that framing. He spends substantial space arguing that meetings are not overhead. They are the primary venue where organizational health is either built or eroded. He proposes a structure of distinct meeting types (daily check-ins, weekly tactical, monthly strategic, quarterly off-site) so that each kind of work has a place where it can happen, rather than getting smashed together into one weekly hour where nothing actually gets decided.
The New Testament would also push back on the pastor-skeptic framing. Maybe more strongly than Lencioni does.
The Church Has Always Met
The church gathers. That is the central practice. Worship is a meeting. Council is a meeting. The Last Supper was a meeting. The Spirit fell at a meeting in Acts 2. The first hard organizational decision was made at a meeting in Acts 15. The early church does not exist outside the gathering. The gathering is the church.
The book of Hebrews makes this explicit. “And let us consider each other carefully for the purpose of sparking love and good deeds. Don’t stop meeting together with other believers, which some people have gotten into the habit of doing. Instead, encourage each other, especially as you see the day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:24-25). Meeting together, in this reading, is not a bureaucratic burden. It is a means of grace. The community is formed by the gathering, encouraged by the gathering, sparked toward love by the gathering.
If you set aside the modern instinct to romanticize meetings as something we wish we could escape, the New Testament reads differently. The early church’s life was a continuous series of meetings, formal and informal, with a shared meal, shared prayer, shared scripture, shared decision-making. That is a description of what they did. It is also a description of what they were.
Bad Meetings Are Not the Argument You Think
Most pastors who say “meetings are not real ministry” have suffered a steady diet of bad meetings. The unstructured ones that go ninety minutes and decide nothing. The ones with no agenda. The ones where a single person dominates. The ones that recycle the same arguments month after month. The ones that confuse the venting of opinions with the making of decisions.
I have been to those meetings. I have led some of them. Meetings of that kind are not faithful work. They are the absence of faithful work, dressed up in time on a calendar.
But that is an argument against bad meetings. It is not an argument against meetings.
Lencioni’s instinct is right. The way to address the meeting problem in a church is not to have fewer meetings. It is to have better ones. Distinct meeting types, each with a clear purpose, each with the right people in the room, each with disciplined facilitation, each with decisions that stick.
What Great Church Meetings Actually Look Like
I want to name what a great church Board meeting looks like, briefly. Same shape applies to staff meetings, ministry teams, committee meetings, and small groups, with adjustments.
It begins with prayer that is not perfunctory. Two or three minutes of asking God to shape the conversation, not as a transition but as a posture.
It moves through an agenda that distinguishes between information items, discussion items, and decision items. Each kind of work gets its right amount of time. Information does not consume the time decisions need.
It surfaces conflict early. The most important agenda items go first, when energy is high. Hard topics do not get pushed to the end where everyone is tired and ready to defer.
It makes decisions and writes them down. The minutes are not ceremonial. They are the team’s memory. When the next meeting begins, the team can see what was decided and what remains.
It ends with clarity. Who owns what. What is due when. Who tells whom. Without that clarity, the meeting was a conversation, not a decision-making body.
It closes with prayer. Not as bookend, but as a renewed commitment to do this work in a posture of humility and trust.
That is not a heavy lift. It is also not the default. Most church meetings I have attended drift in two or three of these areas, sometimes all of them. The work is to set the discipline, hold it, and let the discipline shape the room over time.
Worship Is a Meeting
One more piece. Worship is the highest-stakes meeting the church has. Sunday morning is not separate from this conversation. Sunday morning is its anchor.
The same disciplines apply. A clear purpose. The right people prepared. Information, formation, and decision (the call to discipleship is a decision) given their right time. A posture of prayer. A landing that sends people out with clarity. The faithful weekly habit of doing this well teaches everyone in the room what a faithful meeting looks like. Sunday morning trains the rest of the week.
When pastors complain that “meetings are not real ministry,” I sometimes wonder if they are unintentionally separating what cannot be separated. The same God who meets us at the Lord’s table meets us in the room where we decide how the church will spend its money. Both are meetings. Both are ministry. Both deserve our best.
What This Month Is About
Later this month our Leadership Board takes up the final reading section. After that meeting, the eleven posts of this series have one left, reflecting on the whole journey: what changed, what did not, what comes next. I will not get ahead of it here. But I can tell you that the meeting carries the weight of having done something together, across five months, that does not happen often in church leadership. They read a book, they discussed it month by month, and they let the conversation shape how they make decisions.
That is its own quiet form of organizational health.
A Question for Anyone Who Sits in Meetings
This is the simplest question I have for any leader, lay or staff. What would change if your team treated its meetings as ministry? Not as overhead. Not as the price of admission. As ministry. As the real work of the body of Christ, gathered to discern, to decide, to commit, to follow through.
The next post lands September 30, reflecting on what we have learned together across this read-along.
Glad you are reading along.