Making it Personnel

The title isn’t a typo. It’s a veiled allusion to the phrase “making it personal,” yes, but it was a church Personnel Committee that conveyed God’s revitalizing encouragement to me – made it personal – hence the title.

Having strung together the trio of words church Personnel Committee, please don’t hang up on me. Depending on your history with Personnel Committees – performance reviews, action plans, annual reviews, grievances and such – just the sight of the words may have triggered a knot in your stomach or a latent resentment. I get it. But, as I asked at the outset of this paragraph, please hang in there with me for a few minutes. 

I’m doing an interim ministry at a church that has its share of mid-week evening meetings.  Some start at 5 pm, some at 6 pm, and some at 7 pm. Depending on the agenda, they end one to two hours later.  For the past seven months, I’ve averaged two per week.     

Nobody likes meetings. Legion are the stories of younger pastors who tell with a sigh of their backing away from the dinner table, shuffling toward the door, and hearing a child ask, “Do you have to go to another meeting tonight?”

I did the math. Two evening meetings per week minus vacation weeks is about 100 per year. Multiply that by my 40 years of ministry and I’ve sat in on 4,000 meetings – and that’s just evening ones! I thought I was done with them when I retired, but then came the call from Broadway and now I’m in extra innings.  Another 100+ meetings.

Church meetings run the gamut from the inconsequential (Once a month whether they’re necessary or not) to the interminable (During a Trustees meeting that began in daylight and ended after the streetlights came on, the chairperson, a beloved, feisty octogenarian grande dame of the church, returned from having excused herself, sat down, and declared, “I just peed.  If I have to get up and go a second time, this meeting is over!”) to the infuriating (A lay member of a previous church, a veteran of meetings of the vexing variety, said to me in the parking lot after a headache-inducing meeting at which Jesus’ disciples had pulled off the terrible trifecta of neither loving one another, speaking the truth in love, or deciding anything of kingdom consequence, “Sometimes when you serve the church where the sausage is made (on boards and committees) it makes you sick to your stomach”).  Meetings: sometimes inconsequential, sometimes interminable, sometimes infuriating. Pass the Maalox, please. 

But despite my familiarity with the above, I’m a steadfast believer in the potential of church meetings to accomplish things for the cause of Christ. I’ve seen it happen! Outbreaks of imagination and inspiration. People disagreeing agreeably, leaning in to listen to each other, really listen. Honest to goodness discernment taking place. Meetings that were paused for prayer.  Meetings that reached a mutually satisfying compromise, a win/win, or a both/and solution, a way forward nobody at the table could have foreseen.   

I’m reminded of the lone course I took in divinity school forty years ago that had to do with church meetings and such. The professor said, “Look closely at the word administration. It contains the word ministry. Ad-ministration. Ad-vance ministration.  Administration is preparing for ministry in advance. Carefully and prayerfully plan the work, then work the plan.”   

So it is that though I’ve been at my share of meetings that missed the mark (Planned for nothing and voilà – nothing happened), I’ve been at many that prepared for ministry. Just last week I sat in on one that prepared me for whatever months of ministry remain for me at Broadway. 

As Interim Lead Pastor, I’m ex officio on Personnel. Broadway’s Personnel Committee has had a lot on its plate this year. Don’t ask for specifics because I’m not tellin’ – personnel matters are confidential!  What I will say is that over the course of my ministry I’ve served on certain committees that fulfilled their sacred calling – they ad-ministered, prepared for the ministry of Jesus Christ to unfold. The people on those committees are in my pantheon of saints. There are enough of them to fill a sanctuary. The seven men and women on Broadway’s Personnel Committee are the latest additions to my Committee Member Hall of Fame.

At the end of last week’s meeting, having given ourselves again to the delicate tasks at hand, Mary, our Chairperson, said, “Everybody get up. David, stay seated. Everybody gather around.” They then walked to where I sat, stood behind me, laid hands on my shoulders, and prayed for me.

Hear me when I say there are prayers and there are anointed prayers. Mary’s prayer that night, accompanied by the chorus of committee members’ whispered Yesses, Oohs and Mmms, was the latter.  I’ll not rehearse the specifics of what Mary prayed (I’m not tellin’ – It’s confidential), but one of Mary’s petitions was for God to continue to make me adequate to the task at hand, giving leadership to Broadway in its season of transition. To which I whispered Yes, Lord! and added my own Ooh and Mmm. 

Which is to say a revival broke out at a church not in worship in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning but at a committee meeting in a conference room on a Thursday night. I was revived by that laying on of hands and prayer – felt it viscerally within. Whereupon a phrase formulated deep within: “I can finish.” Whatever weariness I dragged into that room that night was ad-ministered in that moment, absolved by the Personnel Committee at prayer.  

I can finish this interim and hand off the baton to whoever my successor will be knowing that no matter what they face, they will do so amid people who will pray for their pastor. They will be in good hands, praying hands, God’s hands.    

Mary, Tim, Luci, Adrienne, Doug, Marilee, Jack: thank you for making God’s attending grace so personally present to me in your demeanor, deliberations, and discernment.  Thank you for making it … personnel.