by Mary Frances

A few months ago, I stumbled on a Facebook invitation for something called Liberating Structures for meetings.  It turns out this is a collaborative of folks who think that meetings shouldn’t be boring, they shouldn’t be predictable, and most of all they shouldn’t be required if they aren’t really necessary.  I suppose that the last year of more Zoom meetings than usual helped to pique my interest and so I dove into a couple of weeks of webinars (yes, more Zoom meetings) and started to learn about this interesting group of ideas and tools. 

The more these ideas percolate in me and the more I get to try on these new ideas, the more I think we need something like Liberating Structures for ministry.  We could start with “are all these meetings really necessary?,” but then we could get down to the meaty stuff like “why are we doing this?”  and “is this really important anymore?”  or “are we just doing this because we have always done it?”  And my favorite, “is our leadership organized to hinder or help support ministry?”

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