Rev. Ron Brooks gives five reasons why a church structure built on numerous committees and meetings is hurting your local church’s Kingdom impact, then offers an alternative model, the Simplified Accountable Structure (SAS).
REV. RON BROOKS
Coordinator for Simplified Accountable Structure (SAS), Michigan Conference
All churches — regardless of denomination and affiliation — are organized around some form of central leadership hierarchy. Our United Methodist traditional model comes from the business world and consists of numerous committees, each with a chair and an agenda.
That structure works well when you have lots of people who need places to plug into the life of the church and who love meetings. The problem is that one or both of those conditions are no longer true in most churches.
But even if those two things are still true in your church, let me give you five reasons all those meetings and committees are hurting your church’s Kingdom impact.
Your real work gets pushed to the margins.
Ideally, your church structure would help people use their gifts to the fullest. Now, there may be some people who have the gift “of meeting,” but those folks are exceedingly rare. Instead, we tend to take people with passion and commitment and put them in a place where we slowly drain both of those things from them.
Most churches that move to a Simplified Accountable Structure (SAS) single-board model are drawn to it for fewer meetings, fewer committees, and fewer leadership gaps. They realize that the church’s work is not to meet but to transform themselves and their communities.
Most of the work of traditional committees is spent on maintenance and on asking questions like, “What did we do last year?”
We need meetings that empower leaders to focus on what truly matters — missional clarity, accountability, and spiritual growth. Churches that adopt a SAS model and do it well find it helps them move from maintenance to movement, from managing to leading.
Is your current church structure enabling the real work of the church? If not, you may want to consider a change.
You create a culture of delay.
The traditional church structure is divided into work areas. One committee handles finances, another property, another paid personnel, and yet another volunteers. This creates a bottleneck in the decision process. Every idea must go through multiple committees, each with its own ideas for how to make it better, often leading to a return to a committee to “approve” the new and improved idea. What you end up with is a culture of delay, and a culture of delay is a culture of decay.
Have you noticed how fast things change in our world today? Of course you have. It only makes sense that our structure is nimble enough to take advantage of opportunities when they come or to respond quickly and effectively to the latest “crisis.”
SAS offers more than structural modification — it provides a steering wheel for ministry direction. It gives churches the framework and freedom to shift from reactive management to proactive leadership, from busy committees to empowered teams, and from a culture of delay to one focused on Kingdom impact.
You kill courage.
Sure, committees are famous for creating delays. A part of me dies whenever a committee decides to table something until next month. But another thing committees are really good at is killing courage.
Given the pace of change in our culture and the need for innovation in our churches, we need more courageous decisions. If you sit around a table trying to reach consensus on ideas, you tend to get watered-down, vanilla, or just plain bad ideas. There is a reason the first question at a meeting is often “What did we do last year?” It took us forever to reach consensus on that, so let us keep our meeting short and just keep doing what we have always done.
Do not get me wrong. Ideas can be improved and perfected in a meeting. But that is the exception. When people start thinking “realistically,” the great idea will, more often than not, die the death of a thousand paper cuts (and all too often real paper is involved).
Consensus kills courage.
The SAS structure reframes leadership roles. For example, if you need “approval,” a much better path is for a visionary or two to pitch an idea (as crazy as it may seem) and have the team or the pastor who oversees the ministry approve it. The difference is that courageous individuals create the idea in its final form, not a committee, team, or board. The board, team, or pastor merely approves the visionary’s initiative. The leadership board maintains a balcony view of the ministry to keep those ideas aligned with the mission and ministry of the church, but they do not micro-manage; they lead.
You rarely work on your mission, only in it.
Over a decade ago, Andy Stanley, Reggie Joiner, and Lane Jones taught us the difference between working on it and working in it — whatever your it is. When you only work in your mission, you never advance it. In the church world, this means most leaders in most meetings prepare only for what is next, not for the future.
SAS underscores the importance of “balcony time” — intentional moments for leaders to step back, gain perspective, and ensure the church is steering toward its mission rather than staring into the rearview mirror. Without that strategic view, even faithful activity can become aimless. I am reminded of Yogi Berra’s wisdom, who said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you will end up someplace else.”
Does your current structure give your leadership enough balcony time to look at and plan for the future, to work on your mission, not just in it?
You waste way more time than you need to.
The biggest complaint I hear about meetings is that they lack a set end time or routinely run past it.
They rarely start on time because people need to chat and catch up. Social time is important, but not at the expense of going over the time allotted for the meeting.
Every traditional meeting includes a moment when the finance report and minutes from the last meeting must be approved. Inevitably, someone says, “Just a moment, let me read those.” Maybe something needs to be added, corrected, or removed, but why waste valuable time on something that could have been sent out ahead of time, with corrections made before the meeting? SAS requires a packet of information to be sent out so everyone can review the materials they will need for the meeting in advance. Minutes and financial reports are reviewed a week in advance, and any questions and clarifications are addressed before the meeting so they can be approved as part of the consent calendar each month.
Then there is the time wasted on reporting on events since the last meeting. How many times do we need to hear the details of the Easter egg hunt or the rummage sale? SAS reduces wasted time by having reports written and distributed in advance, as part of the packet I mentioned.
How much time do you currently waste in meetings that could be better spent on other topics, such as the mission and ministry goals of your church?
Well, there you have it — my five reasons your structure may be holding you back from the impact you could have for the Kingdom of God. If you are curious and would like to explore the SAS model further, contact me at [email protected] or 269-779-6131.
The publication of this article was made possible thanks to generous financial gifts from local United Methodist churches in Michigan through Ministry Shares. Thank you! Learn about the impact of Ministry Shares on mission and ministry in Michigan and around the world.
Last Updated on July 9, 2026