This week we are getting into the nitty gritty of some specific meetings that I host every week with my team at Liquid Church. I’d love to hear what you do in these areas at you church so we can learn from each other!

“Leaders who don’t like meetings are like dentist who don’t like teeth!” – Robert Bilmont

Weekend Review Meeting

Why? To regularly review what happened at the weekend service that just happened, settle what is happening this coming weekend and look ahead to upcoming weekends to make sure we are all on the same page.

Who? Our Lead Pastor (Tim – who also does the majority of our teaching), our campus pastors, our lead worship guy (Aussie Dave – who also leads our church online experience) and me. (I’m the schlep in the crowd.)

When? We meet every Monday morning at 10am.  We get started as soon as three folks are in the room.  We can do this meeting in an hour . . . but it usually takes two.  (You know how that goes!)

What? The meeting is broken down in three segments that we hit on every Monday:

• Review – This includes a soft check in (“Hey . . . yesterday was a lot of fun. . . right?”) as well as a formally looking at what was good and bad about our services.  Currently we are asking the “Keep, Stop, Start” questions every week because I like how that focuses us on the future and what we need to improve.  But we have also used the “Good, Bad, Missing, Confusing” paradigm in the past.
• Run Sheet – We then take a final look at the run sheets for the following weekend’s services.  We use Planning Center for this part of our process.  At this point the final run sheet is “locked down” for that weekend so our teams can do the final preparation for this weekend.
• Around the Corner – We also then look at what is coming up . . . this part of the meeting can vary from looking at the calendar for 2-3 months from now to confirm where a series is going . . . or sometimes Tim will want feedback on a prop or element he is thinking about for a message. I keep a running list of things to talk about during this time of the meeting.

Not a lot of rocket science . . . right?  Most weeks it’s pretty straight forward!  One of the nice side effects of having this meeting set as a regular part of our rhythm is that when we do have a train wreck on a Sunday (even a small one!) we know we have this meeting to follow up on it.  Rather than having to call a “special meeting to talk about what went wrong” we have this meeting as fire insurance against the issue from happening again! What about your church?  What does your regular service review meeting look like?  I’d love to hear about it! [Tell us about it!]

On Wednesday we’re going to talk about how we roll out the final details for the weekend service with our staff team leaders.