In search of the perfect Annual Meeting

There were a lot of things they tried to teach me in Bible college – how to construct a sermon and how to preach one, how to study the Bible and how not to take verses out of context, a little counseling, a little philosophy, and a lot of other Bible-related topics. But for an aspiring pastor who hoped one day to serve a local congregation one thing they glossed right over is how to conduct an Annual Meeting, that once-a-year coming together of a local fellowship to discuss “business” – especially money business. In the course of a given year, a lot of money flows into the coffers of even a small fellowship and that means that there needs to be an accounting of where the moolah goes. And given the nature of people and how we think money should be spent and on what, these gatherings have been known to be anything but harmonious.


I was grounded in the faith by what I would call a “big” church - a (at the time) 1,000+ member congregation. In the six years I attended there I recall going to an Annual Meeting only once and that was because as an intern that year it was part of my job. As I remember, it was a simple, straightforward, up-and-down event. Our executive pastor, who oversaw the money end of things, handed out copies of the financial statement and answered any pertinent questions. I don’t recall if there were any elections but it was over and done fairly quickly. Following Bible college, while helping a friend of mine establish a new fellowship in another community, I remember being a part of one or two Annual Meetings there but again they were fairly innocuous gatherings – a financial statement was handed out, questions – if any – were taken, and the meeting summarily motioned to be closed. All this to say that nothing that I had experienced up until that time prepared me for my first Annual Meeting at Chetek Full Gospel Tabernacle in January 1992.

Okay, it wasn't that bad...

I have a faint memory of being reminded by my secretary sometime in early January that year that we needed to get things together for the Annual Meeting (by constitutional rule, our Annual Business Meeting is held on the last Friday night in January) and being puzzled by that. “The Annual what?” I asked. So she prepared the financial statement and I put together some kind of agenda (collector that I am sadly I do not have a copy of it) and appropriately informed the congregation two weeks ahead of time. The members of the board of trustees assured me that since I was new here they would run the meeting so I showed up thinking that this would be a fairly run-of-the-mill congregational gathering. How wrong I was. People didn’t show up as they did on Sunday morning, smiling and shaking hands and with an air of being happy to see everyone. As I recall they came with their game faces on, as if an ugly scrum was ahead. The board of trustees sat at a head table and it looked like they were bracing for a storm. The meeting was called to order, quorum (I’m pretty sure until that moment in time I had never heard the word before) was established by taking the role (if there were only 20 or so of us here why did we need to be so official? Couldn’t the person taking the minutes take a quick head count and note, “Yeah, we got quorum?”) and the gathering began.

Things were moving along mostly according to plan until we got to the reviewing of the 1991 Financial Statement and then all heck broke out. $10,000 was “missing” from our savings account and there was a great hue and outcry from the members gathered. (“SHOW ME THE MONEY!” is probably the way someone might have said it had that movie been made yet.) As it turned out, the money wasn’t missing, it had been spent - primarily in the replacement of the roof in the month or so prior to our arrival. “How do you think we paid for that roof?” I recall one of the board members yelling which didn’t defuse the emotional tension one iota. The money that had been given in trust was supposed to have been used for something other than capital improvements apparently (for what the offended could not say) and the board had done wrong by spending that much money without congregational knowledge. But as far as the board was concerned, nobody had ever told them that this gift had been especially earmarked and figured why hold a meeting to discuss replacing the roof when we have the money to do it?

In the end, the money was still spent, a much needed repair had been done and a new rule was put in play: from herein out unless it was already in the operating budget there could be henceforth no expenditure exceeding $1,000 without duly informing the congregation. Twenty years later, that rule still stands to this day. But there was one other lasting change that came out of that gathering that night as well.

People who were there (and there are not many of them left in our present congregation) tell me that whenever they hear me recount this story they think I exaggerate, that it wasn’t that bad, that while things got a little heated it was, after all, just a simple misunderstanding. Okay, but there was a whole lot of yelling, too, as I remember it and I made a vow that night that we would never have a meeting like that again. We’re a family and while families have their moments you do not build a loving community in an atmosphere of accusation and mistrust. Besides, an Annual Meeting of a local Christian fellowship is supposed to be different than your Annual Town Board meeting and so I began to re-craft the way we did our gathering.

The business meeting of ’93 ran a whole lot different than the one of ’92. For starters, we had the report out 2-3 weeks ahead of time (following the principle that “forewarned is forearmed”) and even had it impressively bound in a cloth folder. I asked for the gathering to be held in the sanctuary as opposed to the fellowship hall (the fear of God, I figured, would help everybody be on good behavior) and I ran the meeting. I also began the gathering politely putting people on notice how they should conduct themselves. In retrospect, it was overkill. We had a very quiet and subdued meeting that went on without incident. As one of the folks told me later, “Of couse it did. You had us all walking on egg shells.” She was right. I had yelled at them to behave and they had (they would of anyway) but this atmosphere was not representative of a loving, Christian fellowship either.

For several years I ran the annual gatherings but somewhere along the way I relinquished my hold on them and began to allow one of the trustees to conduct it. The meeting place has bounced between upstairs and downstairs during that time depending on the year until the hybrid version we now use was decided upon (which is both). We’ve had a few threshold gatherings – the year we embraced our Vision and Mission Statement (’05) and the year we became Refuge (’07) – but for the most part up until a few years ago they have been fairly standard Annual Meetings as those things go, cordial and generally respectful. A couple of years ago when we were reviewing the Financial Statement of the previous year we got derailed a bit as a few well-meaning people took up a lot of time to mention where they could get a deal on paper products given the amount of money we were budgeting for this item but never have we returned to that screamfest in the basement of Chetek Full Gospel Tabernacle in January 1992.

But I was still not satisfied with the way we conducted this gathering. People shouldn’t show up to the annual meeting of the official membership looking like they’ve come for their yearly proctology exam. This should be a celebratory-thing, a high-fiving, “look-at-what-the-Lord-has-done” kinda thing. So a few years ago we began including dinner and “a movie” – a slide show that one of our guys has put together featuring the highlights of the previous year – and worship and sharing. Last year, I think we got the closest to what I think it’s supposed to be like: we sat down to dinner together in the fellowship hall, convened our meeting after dinner that lasted all of 15 minutes (admittedly there wasn’t a lot of official business to conduct) and then moved upstairs for the movie, worship, prayer and sharing. It was, in my mind, fun.

We now call it The Annual Gathering – dinner and a movie along with fellowship, prayer and worship. Yes, we do our business and elect our Deacons and approve our budget but the mood is different. We come together to recognize God’s work in and through us during the previous year and anticipate what he may do in us in the year ahead. Admittedly, there’s a few who don’t like the changes – “If you’re gonna have a meeting, let’s have a meeting and go home” – but my argument is we’re a family and a family should at least enjoy getting together once a year.

Okay, this has NEVER happened at our Annual Meeting...yet

The third week of January has, for me, been “Annual Report” week for many years now. With the help of my secretary, we put together the, on average, 20-page Annual Report that will include the previous year’s Financial Statement, the current year’s Proposed Budget, minutes from the previous gathering, and several other documents. They’ll go out this Sunday with the hopes that some of the folks will read through it before our official gathering next Friday night. We don’t do the cloth folders anymore (paper will do fine) and admittedly it’s not what you call great literature. It’s just a record of what we did, what we spent and what we plan to spend this coming year but it’s just the sort of thing that helps keep everyone in the know of what’s what and it’s my experience that this sort of thing only reassures us that at Refuge the more you know the better you feel about the fellowship you are a part of.