Week #8 Attend A Board Meeting

Tuesday 3/10/09
By Nick Smith

This past Sunday at Michigantown Christian Church there was a board meeting held at 12:30 which is approximately 15 minutes after the service ended. The meeting lasted about an hour and 15 minutes in a cramped little room.
The decision process was pseudo-parliamentary procedure. They began by having the minister and youth minister share what was coming up in their ministries. Then they moved to old business and talked about issues that had been given to individuals or a couple of people to work on. They did have a chair, he pretty much started with the guy to his left or right and they would go around the room and talk about what they had discovered within their area. It was a pretty open forum. No one really talked out of place, everyone waited patiently. After no one said anything regarding old business anymore, the chair asked if there was any more and seeing there was none, he opened up the floor for new business. When an issue came about regarding adding an overhang to the church, the chair jokingly threatened to assign it to someone if no one was going to volunteer to look into it. So there it did seem like he had some power. When there was a topic to vote on, the chair just asked if anyone wanted to say anything else about it, then he said “all those in favor…” So they do use Parliamentary procedure for voting and finally for the closing of the meeting. It was dragging on, and you could feel that more than one other person was thinking that. Finally someone said I move to adjourn, someone seconded and the chair adjourned the meeting.
This form of decision making worked well for that church. Everyone respected each other and didn’t talk over one another. I wondered if they were talking about a more serious and heated topic, if the chair would step in and have to bring some order. Another thing that I noticed was that the chair was a jerk, one that I wouldn’t be worried about offending. He said a few things that were out of line in my opinion. He made the pastor the butt of a few jokes, and everyone laughed at his expense. I could tell it upset Bob because he was not laughing, just looking at the floor. So I thought they should get a more courteous chair. It was interesting how this meeting worked though. It was like they took the parliamentary procedure and adapted it to fit their style.