Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Once the calendar hits late August, the rest of the year feels, like such a rush: Going from the late summer organization of the program year, to the autumn stewardship drive, then finding yourself generally unprepared to “be prepared” during Advent, followed by the grand culmination which is both the joy and demand of Christmas. Granted, there’s a slight pause, a few days’ rest, but what do these early days of the New Year bring? More planning, this time for the annual meeting.

Here’s a thought: why not  move the annual meeting to sometime before the close of the year.

The congregation I serve holds their annual meeting on the first Sunday in December. Frankly, this makes for no small amount of busy-ness; some may call it craziness. Big events collide together on the calendar: the transition to Advent, Thanksgiving celebrations, attention to Advent/Christmas adult formation and, all the while, trying to gather the Annual Meeting reports, next year’s budget, this year’s actual and projected financial activity, presentations, and focus. I’ll be honest: when I arrived nearly seven years ago, my first thought was to change the annual meeting date. No other congregation I’d ever known does it that way. But, being a new rector, I figured I’d let the system play out, as it’s been, in my first few years and then, if it wasn’t working, I’d focus on possible changes. I’ll be even more honest: my first thought was wrong.

Pulling off an annual meeting after, say, October and before December isn’t easy, but it’s well worth the trouble. On the one hand, there’s always a lot that goes into organizing the annual meeting, so it doesn’t really matter when it falls. On the other, I’ve come to realize that it’s actually a lot nicer to have all that work lumped together. What it means, in reality, is that we’re able to hit the ground running on the first of the year.

It also means that we’ve had to put in place systems of preparation that reach well back into August and September. The budget, for instance, needs approval at November’s vestry meeting; that means attention is given during September, October at the latest. Also, we’ve learned you don’t need necessarily to ‘close the books’ in order to report accurate financial standing, though it is helpful to show a reasonable projection. Given that all the paperwork for an early December meeting is assembled before Thanksgiving, the most up-to-date monthly reports we have are those through October 31. It’s straightforward enough, then, to divide by 10 and multiply by 12 and, in so doing, get a fairly accurate projection. It’s not such a big risk to assume that the trend of the first 10 months is a decent predictor for the remaining two. We also publish a year-end financial report in late January or February, for our own purposes as well as for those who truly care.

One wonderful byproduct of moving the annual meeting to early December is that we can value the things that need valuing, and get off the rat-race of the standard, annual parish life-cycle – a conventional series of activities which, by the way, are clearly not leading to growth, in and of themselves. The December vestry meeting has become an opportunity to invite both vestries – the outgoing members and the incoming – for an overlap session. December is a busy enough month in everyone’s life; thus, our December agenda is pretty light and simple: the outgoing members share their joys and hopes, the incoming members organize themselves and elect officers and, in general, the whole body begins to coalesce around common hopes and shared vision, and it’s rooted in the patient practice of prayer.

We know the real work will kick in, soon enough. That’s why there’s no time like the present to take our time with the much more important values of relationship building and story sharing.