meeting

I go to lots of meetings. Just this week I was at a joint meeting of the Merger Groups of Memorial and Westminster; the Finance Committee; the Nominating Committee; and our Merger Group meeting by itself. I usually attend 7 or the 9 Session Committees; plus sometimes the Board of Deacons meeting and Trustees Meeting. Things can get accomplished in meetings; or we can spin our wheels and waste time.

I just read The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith. I once took a crash course in economics, so I should understand crashes, but I don't. There were many pages in Galbraith's book that I didn't understand. But I appreciated the account of President Hoover's action in November of 1929. He called some meetings.

Galbraith writes: "This is the rite of the meeting which is called not to do business but to do no business." He goes on to say that meetings are called for various reasons. They are held to seek companionship; or to create the impression that business is being done. Or they are justified by the "exchange-of-ideas." Salesmen (sic) and sales executives meet for "spiritual" reasons: the warmth of comradeship, the interplay of personality, the stimulation of alcohol, and the inspiration of oratory. The no-business meetings of the great business executives depend for their illusion of importance on something quite different: a solemn sense of assembled power. Galbraith says, "The no-business meeting was an almost perfect instrument for the situation in which President hoover found himself in the autumn of 1929."

The more authoritarian a church structure is, the fewer meetings that are necessary. Presbyterians meet a lot because we are a representative democracy. We have to have lots of meetings. We don't trust anyone enough to allow them to make decisions by themselves.

I wonder what would happen if we had a three month moratorium on meetings of the church (besides worship). My fear would be that people would get so used to not attending meetings that they wouldn't start back again.

One of the most significant meetings in church history took place in Jerusalem. It's described in Acts 15.

Perhaps we should try to do something fun in every meeting.