Naptastic

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I need to ask people for (probably) more time **in service to the church**. (That means doing what the church needs done.) Consider there are 168 hours a week, and we're supposed to sleep about 8 hours per night; if you tithe on that, you'd spend about 12 hours in service. In Texas, that's considered extreme, but where I'm from, that's normal.

And if I may be so impolite as to point out: //they're winning//.

3 hours per week is more than we're used to but I ask you to consider, as the person writing a sermon, I get at most 25 minutes to talk to you about an insanely complicated topic. Some of you already knew everything I was going to say and for others it's a complete surprise. I have to write from a perspective that includes people in any number of mental spaces, and visitors.

We've got count(@{priorities}) social action issues we care about and 52 weeks per year to talk about them for 25 minutes or less. 52 minus Mothers' and Fathers' days, Easter, half a dozen traditional services--you get the picture. It's not enough time.

==Committee Meetings==
We have an addiction to doing things last-minute and half-assed. We have a culture of being very gracious with mistakes, and that's laudable, but it masks a problem: We don't prepare adequately for almost anything.

We could stand to spend a few hours reviewing what makes committees effective, how to have an effective meeting, how to build consensus, etc.

We need to adopt, as a practice, post-event debriefs. Most of our processes do not have a feedback system in place for self-improvement and they all need one.

We need to invest the time to get on the same page about all these issues we care about. I don't mean top-down instruction or education. It needs to be fundamentally democratic and collaborative.

We need a weekly plenary session where all the announcements get //processed//. We don't have to go full formal Robert's Rules and Roll Call, but every committee needs to empty its message queue (or announce that its message queue is empty) and be able to either answer questions, or capture them to take back to their committee.

To facilitate all this, for at least a few years, I think we need to go to a block schedule on Sundays, with slightly increased but mostly just clearer expectations on what people attend. Adult RE should be "mandatory" (as mandatory as we make anything) as should be business meetings. How exactly those meetings get structured I'm still mulling over.

We will use this extra time to cover:
  * evangelism conversations
  * education on all the social action issues
  * training on how to be an effective church