MEETINGS! MEETINGS! MEETINGS!

I received a phone call from my dentist the other day; it was time for my semi-annual checkup. 

The phone call reminded me of the association I had formed long ago in my days of active ministry between having a root canal and having to attend yet another meeting in my parish.  I concluded that I would always have preferred the dental drill to the agony of having to address the next item on an agenda.

The simple fact is meetings are the bane of pastoral ministry. 

More and more, I hear my Priest-friends complain that they find themselves overwhelmed by the endless meetings which so often  culminate in frustration for  those who sacrifice so much time and accomplish so very little.

There are staff meetings, finance council meetings, parish council meetings, committee meetings, commission meetings,  parent-teacher meetings, meetings of various parochial societies and sodalities. 

There are meetings with the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Youth Group. And let’s not forget to mention meetings with various community groups seeking the parish’s recognition of their existence or soliciting support by publicizing their events and providing sign-up requests for volunteers.  But this isn’t all. 

There are meetings with the Bishop, the Dean, the Finance Office, as well as with neighboring Pastors.  In addition to these meetings in the strict sense, there are meetings (in group or individual settings) with those who wish to initiate this or that apostolic work or spiritual devotion.
 
So burdened by these meetings are Pastors that they have little time or energy (spiritual and psychological) to devote to those meetings which perhaps are truly essential to the life and ministry of the Priesthood.  The more intimate meetings with parishioners who are critically ill or actively dying, with those whose marriages are in crisis, with parents whose teenagers are beyond their influence, with the scrupulous, with those addicted to alcohol or drugs, and with the few who find their lives spiritually arid and adrift.

Pastors are so busy attending meetings that they lack the time to do the work of providing spiritual care and comfort to the souls entrusted to them. 

The sheer number of meetings Pastors are expected to attend or preside over prohibit them from fulfilling the spiritual tasks for which they were ordained in the first place.

But the negative effect of too many meetings upon the accomplishment of one’s mission or work is not a phenomenon that is restricted to Pastors alone.

In a report which appeared in the journal, Group Dynamics:  Theory, Research and Practice, Alexandra Luong, an assistant professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and Steven Rogelberg, associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, state:  “...   despite the fact that meetings may or may not achieve work-related goals, having too many meetings and spending too much time in meetings  may have negative effects on the individual."

Luong and Rogelberg  devised a pair of hypotheses.  First, the more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects.  Second, the more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects.

Then they performed an experiment to test these two hypotheses.

Thirty-seven volunteers each kept a diary for five working days, answering survey questions after every meeting they attended and also at the end of each day. That was the experiment.

The results speak volumes.

"It is impressive," Luong and Rogelberg concluded, "that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee's level of fatigue and lack of work was found".

Pastors need to get control over their ministry and curtail the amount of time and energy expended in multiple and useless meetings.

Psychologists have suggested any number of ways this can be accomplished. 

But, here’s a suggestion which I recently discovered and wished I would have had available to me when I was a Pastor.   The perfect way to cut meetings short before they start rambling out of control:  the Pastor announces, “All those opposed to my plan say, ‘I resign’.’” “Meeting adjourned.”

End of this post!