Attend A Board Meeting (Tyler)

The church board meeting that I attended was at Davis Wesleyan Church in Hamlet, IN. The church board meeting was on a Wednesday night in one of the Sunday School rooms where children are usually taught on Sunday mornings. Davis Wesleyan Church is a relatively small congregation. The same is true for the Board of Directors. The Board is made up of about 6 people (I'm not sure if all were present at this meeting). Besides the pastor, Aaron Cloud, there are about four women. This is one of the biggest surprises for me personally. I am proud of Davis Wesleyan Church for the diversity in both sex and age. Aaron is by far the youngest member of the board (about 23), and there is a member in her 60s. I loved the thought of how this diversity might play itself into discussions.

I was expecting the meeting to be very formal and structured. My expectations were not completely met. I have attended a board meeting at a church of about 7,000 people, and that was like attending a board meeting for a Fortune 500 company. However, this was a little more casual than that previous meeting that I had joined. This was more low-key and informal. While they did bring official business into the meeting, it wasn't in an extremely structured matter. They began the meeting by saying, “What is first on the agenda?”. This was the starting point and it just went on from there. I was expecting sort of a Robert's Rules of Organizational Structure. But I did not hear any sort of official start and end to the meeting.

Decisions were made by voting. But before a vote was called for, there was a discussion about the issue. However, there were not many issues to be discussed. One of the issues that was raised was concerning the use of the building for weddings and other congregational meetings. Apparently a recent couple that had gotten married in the church took down the Christmas decorations that were put up by the congregation member, Billie. When Billie came to church on the following Sunday, she realized that many of the decorations were put away incorrectly. This bothered her and she wanted to make sure that it didn't happen again next year. She has a very particular way of putting the Christmas decorations away, and she would like to be involved in that process. In essence, this was the most “controversial” issue of the evening. Past that, they discussed some of the issues and events dealing with AWANA's and Sunday School meetings. They are excited about how there is a growing congregation every week. The average is almost up to 40 now. They briefly discussed the ways to keep those numbers high. Then the meeting ended with prayer requests. This actually seemed to be the most important part of the evening. The members of the board truly seemed to care about each other and asked how each other were doing. I loved to see this and joined them in the prayer to close the meeting.

Some of the observations that I had was how informal it was. However, I know this is typically not the norm. I understand that most churches use Robert's Rules to run meetings. But, this is not the case at Davis Wesleyan and it works for them very well. I learned that people are the main parts of meetings and business, while important, is secondary. This was evidenced by the fact that they spent the majority of the time discussing issues relating to the church in general and the board as a group.