3 Communication Challenges for Churches (Part 1)
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When you think August, you think busy.
For most churches, the ministry season ramps up as people return to church after the summer. It’s back-to-school for families, and people are getting overloaded by communication—from the schools, teachers, doctors, teams, and YOU.
We’re tackling 3 areas we believe churches could take it up a notch and be the best-in-class organization when it comes to how you communicate: with both insiders and outsiders.
We’re kicking off this series by talking about internal communication. If staff/team communication is a mess, it’s nearly impossible to become excellent at communicating with the congregation, volunteers, or people in the community. In this episode, Sean and I share areas where churches could improve communicating with their staff.
Growth naturally adds complexity around communication. You have to work to get proactive about it rather than reactive to it. [episode 408] #unstuckchurch Share on X When you make a decision, the next thing you have to think is “who needs to know that?” [episode 408] #unstuckchurch Share on X Cascading communication is about ensuring that important information flows smoothly from the top levels of leadership down through every layer of the church, staff and across different departments. [episode 408] #unstuckchurch Share on X Better communication is always a result of intentional leadership. It’s about deciding as a team that you’re not going to settle for confusion, for silos, or for missed opportunities. [episode 408] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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More Episodes in This Series
Better Communication with Insiders – Episode 409
Better Communication with Outsiders – Episode 410
Transcript
Sean:
Hey, listeners, before we get started, I want to tell you about this week’s podcast sponsor Planning Center. If you’re a church that struggles to keep your church organized and connected, you need to check out Planning Center. Planning Center is an all-in-one management software that helps you solve your church’s administrative challenges. You can easily do things like track first time guests, manage volunteer schedules, and create ways for your congregation to get involved all using a single platform. If your church needs a check-in system, a way to sign up for events and online giving solution, Planning Center can help you nurture your community and keep your people connected. You can visit planningcenter.com to learn more and get started for free.
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host, here with my teammate Amy Anderson. Amy, it’s been a busy summer, and it’s unbelievably starting to wind down already. My kids are actually back to school this week, and.
Amy:
Oh my gosh.
Sean:
Since it’s been a while, I know it goes by way too fast. I was wondering if you had any fun stories to share from churches you’ve been working with over the summer?
Amy:
Well, I got home at midnight last night from plane delays, so I was kind of hoping we’d just record this audio today and not video, but in general, Sean, you know, this, I just actually got off of a couple weeks of vacation. So that was really fun. We spent some time in northern Minnesota with my husband and our three kids and four grandkids who are all under the age of three. So I actually, I’m gonna take two more weeks off now to recover, so I’ll be back in a few weeks.
Sean:
That’s awesome. Yeah. I’ve been with a great church in Reno, Nevada. I actually lived in Nevada for a couple of years, but had never been to Reno, so my first time in Reno, which is great. Really fun, and getting prepared to go to a great church in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. So really looking forward to that. But been a great summer. Kids are back to school. Feels like it’s winding down, but we are plugging right away with the podcast. And now at this point, you know, we’re into August, and this is the time in kind of the church annual cycle when churches are gearing up for a busy season. Amy, what makes this time of year particularly challenging for church when it comes to communication strategy specifically?
Amy:
Yeah. Well, first of all, Sean, like your kids, right? Many families, they’re just getting ready to go back to school for families with kids, that means information overload is probably coming. If it’s anything like when I was raising my kids, like so much information coming at them. There’s school supplies, there’s school events. There’s sports teams, which I don’t know, did they even stop over the summer?
Sean:
It doesn’t feel like it.
Amy:
But typically the fall when all that lot fires up. Bus stop, drop off plans times for kids, and if they have more than one kid like you, Sean, just multiply all that communication several times over. Yeah. And then this is also when churches are just gonna be competing for family’s attention. You know, it’s a school sport teams, other organizations, and then for many churches this time of year, it also kicks off a new ministry season. So ministry programs are ramping up simultaneously, and especially if your church is over programmed, there’s lots of upcoming events at your church that you wanna get on family schedules as well. So I think all of that starts to just create this communication conundrum.
Sean:
That’s right. And the reason I asked that question, Amy, and you know this of course, we’re starting a three week series this week on communication challenges for churches. And this is gonna be a short series, but we wanted to share some wisdom that we think can help in the season. And we’ve identified three specific areas that we believe churches could kind of take it up a notch and be the best in class organization when it comes to how you communicate both with insiders and outsiders. And I would add to that, we’re gonna talk about how you communicate with your staff. So we’re gonna kick off this series by talking about internal communication that’s staff or team communication. If this is a mess, there is no way you’re going to become excellent at communicating with the congregation, volunteers or people in your community. So we start by working on what’s closest to home for us. Amy, what are the most common problems that you see when it comes to communication with our staff and team?
Amy:
Yeah, before I answer that question, I just, if you’re feeling, as a ministry leader, that internal communication is constantly a problem or a challenge that rises up, I just want you to know it’s really normal. We ask, on our Unstuck Teams assessment, we ask staff to give feedback to how they’re doing in areas of team health, personal health, team performance, personal performance, organizational culture, and organizational systems. And one of the 72 questions is around internal communication. There is not a church that gets a completely outstanding score in that area, ever. And it’s because it’s a, we have our solvable problems in life and then we have our perpetual problems in life. And for organizations, internal communication is one of those perpetual problems that we just always have to get. We have to be working on getting it better. It will never drift into a place of health.
So, just with that as a foundation, some of the common problems, first, I think churches, they either over-engineer or under engineer their staff communication. So on one side you have churches that create so many processes, so many meetings, so many memos that staff just feels bogged down and overwhelmed. Now I’m thinking about my email after being out for a few weeks. That’s how I feel right now. I am bogged down and overwhelmed. Every decision, you know, requires a memo, requires a meeting, a follow up email. And some people are really good at writing long emails.
Sean:
Yes.
Amy:
But on the flip side, and by the way, when you get an email when someone sends an email, they just assume everyone has read that. Everyone has internalized that. Right?
Sean:
We do. Yeah.
Amy:
On the other side, some churches have like no structure at all. So people are guessing about what’s happening, important details slip through the cracks. And the sweet spot for all of this, of course, is somewhere in the middle. We need enough structure to keep everyone informed and accountable, but not so much that it stifles creativity or slows the ministry down. So that’s probably the first one over or under engineered.
Second common challenge, is that the teams really aren’t aligned around shared goals. Right? So the worship team is focused on Sunday, kids’ Ministry is planning their next event. Outreach team is thinking about their service project. And all of those are good things, but if each team is like working in isolation, I just think it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. And if you haven’t taken time to clarify your church’s vision, like where you’re going the next three to five years, confirmed your strategies, set those organizational goals for the year. Honestly, your team won’t intuitively know how their work fits into the bigger picture. And with that gap, especially when goals aren’t clear, what I see is that ministries just get busy. And they fill the church calendar schedule with their own projects, their own passions. You know, kinda like dibs. I got dibs on this week, and, this collaborative culture can break down. So I was, I’m was just working with the church, I’m still working with them, and they’re really, building out that directional level of the pyramid for the first time. They’re rallying around goals really for the first time.
Sean:
Oh, that’s good.
Amy:
It’s not unusual, but, you know, there are many churches out there who just go, we aren’t talking numbers, we’re just. We’re, we’re doing this through relationship. But I, I’m trying to help them carve out their language. ’cause the leadership’s on board with this, but they just know culturally this hasn’t been a part of their culture. But I said, goals really just drive intentionality, right? We’re intentionally focused on the goal. So it helps us prune busyness, it helps us ask the right questions. At the end of the day, if the goal’s 20 and we get 15, we’re not, you’re fired. You know, it’s not that. It’s right. But if I really want 20 of this to happen, how am I gonna spend my time? How am I gonna, what are my priorities right now? So, I don’t know. What about you, Sean? Are there challenges that you’ve seen out there?
Sean:
Yeah. I know you’ve seen this Amy in the staffing and structure work, but it, for me, it’s a lack of information flow effectively between departments and the church. You know, sometimes it’s obvious. It can seem obvious to our team, probably even obvious to our congregation that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing, right? And, you know, maybe the youth ministry planned a big event on the same night as your prayer meeting, or the facilities team just didn’t know about a room change until the last minute. I think that’s probably happened in every church. And these are the kinds of mixups that usually result from information getting stuck in those silos that we talked about. So that, that’s one of the standout challenges for me that I’ve seen in churches.
Amy:
You know, Sean, as you were going through that, I was just smiling. ’cause I worked with a large church this summer and we were doing the staffing and structure part of the engagement and, in the conversation, I can’t remember it triggered it, but the leader who’s over like all the next steps at the church, so like the discipleship, spiritual formation pastor. One of his leaders is a groups guy over college.
Sean:
Okay.
Amy:
And he said everybody knew about this huge college event that was happening, but me, he never told me he was doing this event. And it was said with a chuckle and a smile. But, you know, he oversees that ministry. They had a major college event and, you know, didn’t know it was happening, so.
Sean:
He didn’t know about it.
Amy:
Yeah. Yep. So it happens everywhere. Absolutely.
Sean:
Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think, Amy, that these communications challenges don’t seem to go away, right?
Amy:
No. No.
Sean:
Why do you think that these things kind of persist over time? Even as a church grows larger, you would think they’ve got a, a larger team, more people, more people who are on top of the communications side of it. Why do they persist over time?
Amy:
Yeah. The key thing there is just more people, right? Because growing churches know this well, growth creates more layers of complexity and communication. And if you think about it, when churches are small, you know, they just pop into someone’s office. They have a weekly staff meeting where everyone’s all together, you catch someone in the hallway and pretty much everybody knows what’s going on. But you can imagine if that was the system for large churches, nobody would know anything. Right?
Sean:
Right, right.
Amy:
But as your congregation grows, so does your staff, your ministries, and the number of moving parts, and suddenly there’s just more people to keep in the loop, more events that are happening all at once and more chances for things to get missed. And it’s not that anyone is like trying to drop the ball, like they’re trying to control information or hide it.
Sean:
Of course.
Amy:
It’s just that the game has gotten a lot bigger. So you have to recognize that growth naturally adds complexity, around communication. And you need to start to work to get more proactive about it than reactive to it. Because, like you mentioned, Sean, these challenges, also stick around because of how many churches don’t have clear systems for how information should move from one team to the other. So, you know, sometimes we assume that if something’s important, you know, people will just hear about it. But in reality, without a defined process for communication, I just think information, it gets stuck. It gets stuck, or it gets lost. Like, maybe, you know, the youth pastor tells the office manager about an event, but he forgets to mention it to the communications team, so it never makes it into the announcement slides or the website. Or maybe updates are shared in a staff meeting. Right? So now we’re like, we were all there. We shared all the information, but not everyone was probably there. Right?
Sean:
Yeah. Yeah.
Amy:
So without a simple kind of reliable system, those little details, they fall through the cracks. You know, my issue as a leader in ministry, I oversaw the weekend, and so there were a lot of decisions I had to make in real time, just kind of fast pivots. And one day my service producer, she just like Amy, and she kind of squared up right to me, looked right in my eyes. When you make a decision, the next thing you have to think is who needs to know that? ’cause I was That’s good spewing decisions left and right, but the right people weren’t hearing them, but I knew, so I thought once I know I just got comfortable with it and let out of that.
Sean:
Yeah, of course.
Amy:
But I was leaving people behind. And the other reason I see is that a lot of confusion comes from not having a clear process for making decisions. And we talk about this a lot on the podcast. But you have to answer questions like, who gets to decide what, who needs to be consulted and who just needs to be informed? When these three roles decisions can get without them, excuse me, they can get delayed or worse, they just get decisions get made in isolation.
You know, I’ve seen, situations where two teams thought they both were in charge of the same event, or where no one made a call because everyone assumed someone else was doing that. So, I don’t know. I, you know, we talked about growing churches. I, I knew how to make decisions when we were smaller. Our team lost our decision making ability when we added multiple locations and we’re growing. So this discipline, you have to define how decisions are made, who leads, who gives input, how the final word is communicated. When you do that, you’re gonna bring clarity and help everyone move forward together. So it doesn’t have to be complicated. We don’t have to over-engineer decision making, but it does need to be some form of, it needs to be installed in how you make decisions.
Sean:
That’s good. Amy, I’m sitting here as you’re talking and I’m just thinking, you know, when I was leading in my local church, I probably would’ve been listening to this podcast just amening everything you’re saying because, all of those challenges feel, I can think of examples personally where I’ve been through that. So leaders on the other side of this podcast are probably saying, oh, yep, we’ve done that. Oh, yep. I’ve been there. So because of that, let’s talk about some solutions. What is good information flow actually look like in the church?
Amy:
Yeah. Let’s get to the solution side. Well first start by asking who needs to know what and when. There’s a concept that our team picked up years ago from Patrick Lencioni called Cascading Communication. Cascading communication is about ensuring that important information flows smoothly from the top levels of leadership down through every layer of the church, staff and across different departments, right? It’s not just about sending out a memo, it’s about making sure the right people get the right information at the right time so everybody can act. He says it with clarity and confidence. But yeah, even as I say that, Sean, I think cascading communication, that word cascade is a terrible picture of how it actually works in reality.
Sean:
Okay.
Amy:
It’s not that easy, you know, it’s not that easy. In fact, I don’t know if it was Andy Stanley or another leader years ago, and it was on a different topic, but he flipped his org chart up upside down. So that like, the volunteers looked like they were at the top of the org chart and everything kind of funneled down. But I love that visual. Just picture your org chart upside down and think about how am I gonna push all this information to the people that need to have it? It’s the same concept, but it’s not the easy cascade route. It’s the I have to be intentional, and get some discipline and use some muscle to push this information in the right space that it needs to go right?
Sean:
That’s good. Yep.
Amy:
So like hallway decisions not a good idea, in general, when you’re making decisions, you know, through a door. When you’re in motion, you’re gonna lose that intentionality and you’re probably not gonna have enough input or perspective. So I really want us to come back to, you have to schedule your decisions where possible. And you need discipline in order to actually think about that cascading role.
So, this starts, let me just bring it up to the top. This starts at the SLT. So if you are on your senior leadership team. You need to model this, you need to model good communication habits. And let me just try to make it more practical. Here’s a simple step that you could begin to implement at your next senior leadership team meeting. Reserve the last 10 to 15 minutes of your meeting. Well, really every meeting that you and the other SLT members lead. Always reserve 10 to 15 minutes at the end of the meeting to summarize things like what was decided, what was discussed, and what needs to be communicated beyond this room. Then agree on the key messaging, including how it connects to your mission or vision.
Sean:
Okay. Okay.
Amy:
You wanna ensure that every person in that meeting, you know, you’re about to break, is communicating the same thing at relatively the same time to their teams. And that extra thought around how it connects to your mission or vision, it just adds that extra component of answering why as you communicate it. And we’ll get into some of this in more detail in just a minute. As I mentioned, the next component is really the timeframe of when you’re going to communicate it to your respective teams. And typically that’s 24 to 48 hours after the original meeting. You know, while there can be some very small decisions that could be handled through email, Sean, most messages, I believe should be face to face, with like things at departmental meetings.
Sean:
Agreed.
Amy:
That way people can interact with the information, they can interact with the decision, you can hear their verbal concerns, you can see their nonverbals. And then lastly, end that meeting. Well that last to 10, 15 minutes to do that, the folks in the meeting need to know what and to whom they need to share the information with. And by when we just talked about that. But you see that’s pushing, right?
Sean:
Sure.
Amy:
Setting the 15 minutes, talking through the key messaging, who needs to communicate, when will we do it by? That’s pushing. So I think I’m gonna call it push cascading. I think that’s a new word. It’s an oxymoron. I might have to trademark that. Yeah. But push cascading is probably better.
Sean:
I like it.
Amy:
The key is that messages are intentionally being communicated consistently and quickly in a personal way. Okay? So that, that would be a new muscle for you as a senior leadership team to do. And, just to add this in, you obviously will need to create clear channels for information to flow down, push down across teams, right? So for this cascading communication to work, you need information to move both downward and sideways across different ministries and departments.
So, best practices from churches who do this well, they actually use digital platforms like Slack. That’s what we use as The Unstuck Group: Slack, Microsoft Teams, even a well organized email system where updates can be posted and accessed by everyone. And so that’s why I’m saying we often have to nurture decisions, share updates and things. Again, face to face for the big ones as much as you can.
Sean:
Yep. Yep.
Amy:
But you can nurture things through these digital, you know, communications. And I’m a big believer you should, make sure you have an all staff meeting at least monthly, right? Use the all staff meeting to review key updates, upcoming events, reinforce vision, and ensure everyone hears the same message at the same time. And, I guess for all of these, the key is just to be consistent. Consistent in how you’re using this push cascading system so that it fits in your culture and the size of your team.
Sean:
That’s really good. I love push—maybe it’s push cating?
Amy:
There we go.
Sean:
I don’t know. We’ll continue to work on that. We’ll workshop it later.
Amy:
We’ll bring you an update.
Sean:
Or if listeners have an idea, they could send it in our direction. Amy, you mentioned you, you kind of covered the communication side there, which is really, really good. Very practical. You also mentioned that it’s critical to have face-to-face meetings. Face-to-face communication, I wonder if you could talk about just in related to communication, what makes the actual meeting itself effective?
Amy:
Yeah. And meetings are necessary. I know we off, they often get a bad rap, but that is where a lot of our communication happens. Here’s a few specifics that I coach churches on, to maximize that time where we spend a lot of face-to-face time together, it’s a big investment, right? So first, really basic, but every meeting should have a clear, defined purpose. When you design a meeting, it’s important to be clear about why we’re meeting—that’s the purpose. And what the result would be if we do this well, you should be able to communicate and express the meeting’s purpose in simple ways like the senior leadership team meeting purpose, discuss and make decisions around the high level important strategic initiatives of the church that release our leaders to lead.
Sean:
That’s good.
Amy:
The monthly planning meeting from the message, monthly message planning, purpose, build out and plan future message series. So the weekend teaching stays relevant, fresh, and applicable. The weekly programming meeting, communicate and coordinate the details of the upcoming weekend service. So everyone involved is on the same page about the priorities of the weekend.
Sean:
Yeah. Love that.
Amy:
You know, it sounds so basic, Sean. But I have been around teams. They’ve just had this meeting forever, right? And so it’s just on the calendar, and honestly, it’s fat. Meaning we can do that meeting in a lot less time if we really were focused, you know, on why we’re getting together. And then some meetings, you know, should end. But anyways. And when you do define these things, I just find that meetings stay focused, right? You can avoid the creep that often comes into meetings. You can, team members can ca when they know the purpose, they can actually call a foul if something gets outside of the scope of the meeting. So for senior leadership teams, it’s funny, a lot of them still share with me, even for large churches. So we shouldn’t be talking about last weekend’s service in our senior leadership team meeting, or this weekend’s service? And by the way, that’s probably the lead pastor bringing that one in. But no, throw a foul, we’re, we’re future focused. We put that in our purpose.
And another benefit here is you can actually evaluate your meetings. Meaning you can ask the team, are we still accomplishing our purpose? Do we still have the right people in the room? Right? For growing churches, we might need to change that invite list, you know, at a certain time, a certain season. We ask, what can we do to improve this meeting? What should we stop? What should we start? What should we continue? So as a result, sometimes you can shorten meeting lengths, rotate members off, add a new one, get more focused. So evaluation, I just think keeps you from having a meeting just because you’ve always had it.
Sean:
That’s good. Yep. Yep.
Amy:
And also then you need to be sure to identify decisions and clear next steps from your meetings. And this is what I was getting at a few minutes ago, but you know, I literally did just get home at midnight last night, but I have been on hundreds of flights the past few years as I’ve served churches across the country. In fact, Sean, I’m now a million miler. Are you impressed?
Sean:
That’s very impressive. I don’t know if that’s an award you want to have or don’t want to have.
Amy:
I’m not really sure. I am not impressed because of what’s behind all that. But as my friend Lance Witt says, who’s also a very frequent flyer, he said, never has the pilot neglected the landing. Every pilot knows, it doesn’t matter how good the snacks were, how good the inflight movie was, if you don’t land well, the flight was a disaster. And I use that a lot with churches I meet with, because the same is true for meetings. It doesn’t matter how clear the agenda was or how good the snacks were or how much good discussion there was. If you don’t land in a meeting, well, it can be an organizational disaster. In fact, in his book, “High Impact Teams,” to quote Lance, he said, “After sitting in thousands of meetings, I’ve concluded that the most important part of any meeting is the landing. And yet it is usually the most neglected part of the meeting. It’s the norm to walk out of a meeting without clear decisions, without clear action steps and without clear deliverables.”
It isn’t that true? How many of us just want the meeting to end? So like being, it’s the end of the hour. Everyone’s just out the door. So He recommends, like we were just talking about, to take the last 15 minutes of a meeting to set aside time to answer these three questions. So I’m just gonna drill down on what I said a few minutes ago. Last 15 minutes. Question one for the team. What did we decide? So before you leave the meeting, you should be clear on what is a decision and what is still just a discussion. You know, you would think, Sean, that everyone is on the same page. We were all on the same meeting. But it is not true. I can’t be the only one who’s experienced that. Right? Where the meeting ends, and everyone scattered. And some people think a decision was made.
Sean:
No, not at all.
Amy:
Other people don’t remember even talking about it anymore. Here let me use a football analogy because it is August and my Minnesota Vikings are still undefeated right now.
Sean:
We’re almost to football season. Yes, they are.
Amy:
It’s the difference between standing in a huddle and running the play, right? When we are standing in the huddle, we are just discussing options and possibilities. But running a play means a decision has been made, and now we’re free to move into action. So there is one moment that signals that transition from the huddle to the play. It’s the moment the center snaps the ball, and at that instant, everyone moves into action. So, likewise, at the end of every meeting, last 15 minutes, you need to clarify what plays are now ready to be played. Right? Where are we snapping the ball?
Sean:
Yep. That’s good.
Amy:
And if this isn’t a strength of your team, hey, buy a football, bring it to your meetings as a reminder, right? That we have to huddle up.
Sean:
That’s a great idea.
Amy:
And call the play now. Right? Visuals for me are always super helpful, especially when I’m trying to create a new habit.
Sean:
That’s good.
Amy:
So that’s question one. Question one was, what did we decide question two in the last 15 minutes, who is responsible, you know, related to that decision? And what are the actions steps? So as important as it is to have clear decisions, it’s just as important to know who’s responsible for certain actions. Let’s not assume this, I mean, ultimately all ideas and decisions become work that somebody has to own. So sometimes the responsibility will be obvious because of people’s roles, but other times it’s less obvious. So in those times, clarity is key. After writing down a decision that the team made, we need to write down any key actions related to that decision and who is responsible for the items.
You know, Sean, this is where a lot of churches are actually using AI these days. In fact, at our, at our home church where my husband’s the lead pastor who’s a slower adopter to technology and things, has an executive pastor who has fully adopted it, and I don’t know what it’s called, but this AI program listens to their meeting. And at the end, how they land their meetings is they have AI summarize it up, and they walk through the action steps so if they’re all on the same page.
Sean:
Oh, that’s great idea.
Amy:
So it’s easier than it used to be. My husband’s a bit freaked out by it, like doesn’t quite know a little, scare them a little bit, but this type of discipline is how you land a meeting. Well, and this, by the way, is really why most senior pastors should not be running this meeting. Right? They should be in them, but you need a good facilitator of those meetings, someone who’s gifted and to drive this discipline to land the meetings well—to dot the i’s to cross the T’s so that when we snap the ball, we are all running towards the same goal line. We’re all running that same play.
Now technology wise at the Unstuck Group, we use a task management management system called Asana to keep track of actions, due dates, and the people they’re assigned to. And again, you don’t have to use a project management software, but you do need to make sure those decisions are visible and managed. Remember, accountability is a great motivator for action.
Sean:
Yep. That’s good.
Amy:
All right. Last question. Question three. This is the big one for push cascading or push-cading, whatever we’re gonna call it. Who needs to know what we decided? Right? As a part of our consulting process, we work directly with many staff leaders at the church. And communication, again, is almost always one of those top challenges we hear from them. And the challenge with communicating decisions is that once the team making the decision knows the decision, it’s easy for them to leave the meeting with that knowledge and just move on to the next task. So as, as we’ve discussed the question, who needs to know what we decided that that helps decision makers think through not only the who, but by when and by whom. So again, this is push-cascading.
Sean:
I love that. That’s really good. Amy, so again, just very, very practically, wonder if you have any thoughts about around one thing that churches could do this week just to improve their team communication.
Amy:
Yeah. Here’s one very practical one, which is easy for any team: Audit your current meetings, and probably your current meeting rhythms. One of the most common pain points I see in churches is the way meetings can multiply without anyone really stopping to ask if they’re actually helping move us forward. That’s why it’s so important to regularly audit the meeting rhythms. So start by identifying the purpose of each meeting, right? Is this a meeting where decisions are being made or is it one where we’re just sharing information? You know, too often I think we blur those lines and people walk away a little unclear of what’s expected to them.
Then define who really needs to be in each meeting. If you’re inviting everyone just in case, you’re probably wasting people’s time and diluting the value of conversation. Let me give you an example, Sean, of where I see this happen, where it’s time to maybe put one a put a meeting out to pasture and it just came up with a church I was just with. We were restructuring their senior leadership team, and the pastor asked, well, what about that next level meeting down from this. And I said, oh, that meeting where you invite everybody who used to be in this meeting, plus everyone who has a director title. So you can have a meeting where, we’re gonna re-talk about what we talked about in leadership team because we don’t want those people to feel distant from decision making. I mean, I see this meeting so often that is just created really to help people feel valued. And I’m just telling you, there are better ways to make people feel valued than creating another meeting. So what’s the purpose of that one? Right? If the purpose truly is to value their input, well then that should drive what agenda you do. And it shouldn’t just be version two of our senior leadership team.
Sean:
That’s good. Right.
Amy:
Okay. And then finally, establish an annual rhythm for actually evaluating your meetings. This was a discipline I had when I was in ministry. I had a time of the year where every meeting I led, I audited it. And I, you know, I actually asked everyone to give me feedback on, is this this is the purpose of the meeting, are we meeting the purpose? And kind of probe into it? Is it still necessary? Is it working? Is there anything we need to add or eliminate to this meeting? And again, if you’re a growing church, this will help you identify what meeting systems need to change when you do this audit. All I can say is the healthiest churches I work with are ruthless about making sure every meeting has a clear purpose with the right people in the room. Meeting should be a tool for alignment and action, not just a calendar filler.
Sean:
That’s good. Amy, I think that everybody who’s been listening to this episode who has that meeting or maybe several meetings that they hate going to has appreciated your coaching around what good meetings and good communication look like. So I think this has been a great start to our series. Do you have any final thoughts before we wrap up episode one?
Amy:
Yeah. It’s a fun topic because it’s so relatable. I have a couple thoughts. One, if you want to see real change in how your team communicates, again, it won’t happen by accident. So better communication is always a result of intentional leadership. It’s about deciding as a team that you’re not going to settle for confusion, for silos, for missed opportunities. So just, I’m just reminding you have to be proactive. You have to define what healthy communication looks like for your church. You need to set clear expectations. You need to hold one another accountable. When you lead with that intentionality, you create an environment where people know what’s happening. They know why it matters, and they know how they can contribute.
And here’s the deal. Don’t underestimate the power of small changes. I think sometimes we think we have to do this total overhaul right now. But often it’s the little tweaks that make the big difference over time. Like, so I joked about bringing a football with you, right? If the senior leadership team just develops that habit of landing, not only the senior leadership team well, and clarifying what decisions we make and when are we going to communicate them, how are we going to communicate it? If they start doing that in that meeting and then carrying that over to the meetings they lead, guess what’s going to start to happen organizationally over time. Right? That habit’s going to begin to get embedded into all the meetings that are happening at the church.
Sean:
That’s good.
Amy:
So small changes add up to improvement over time. Small changes help build trust, reduce frustration. So don’t hold off on improving your meetings because you don’t have time to do everything that we’ve suggested here. Just start making the one or two small changes and see that ripple effect through your organization. And lastly, I just want to, maybe I’m banging a drum, but culture always starts at the top. So if you want your church to communicate better, your leadership team has to model it first. Good communication habits at the top. That’s what’s going to create your alignment and momentum for a healthier church culture in this area. Remember, your team will follow your lead. So start with you.
Sean:
Well thank you listeners for joining us today for this episode of the Unstuck Church Podcast. Don’t forget, you can actually find the show notes for each episode and all of the additional resources at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. You can subscribe via email so that you never miss an episode, and you get full access to our podcast resource archive with all of our episodes. We’ll be back next week with part two of this series on the three communication challenges for churches, all about better communication with your insiders, and featuring an interview with Blue Van Dyke of Studio C that you’re not going to want to miss. Until then, have a great week.
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