If you think of the final goal of your ministry is to have a meeting (or meetings), then when you have a meeting you’ve reached your goal. Somehow that doesn’t seem adequate enough to qualify as a final goal; it turns 
out things are more complicated than that—the vision is too small.
From the point of view of being a follower of Christ, it’s important to ask yourself, what kinds of things can I learn from the life and ministry of Jesus Christ that are of relevance to forming a Christian community in academe? What were the things He was thinking about? How did he go about building His ministry? What were His purposes and how did He relate to his people?
To get a sense of how to answer these questions, we need to first get a perspective of the Big Story--the meta-narrative of what God is doing in this world. As we have suggested elsewhere there are turning points in the Biblical narrative of that story. Some key features of the BIG Story of what God has done and is doing include 1) His Creation, 2) the Fall of both humanity and Hisn Creation, 3) the process of redemption of humanity and Creation, and 4) the eventual consummation of all things in Christ.
From that larger context we can get a sense of God’s redemptive plan in Jesus Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. His plan was for all nations (ethnos) to be blessed (cf. the Abrahamic promise of Genesis 12: 1-3) through the eventual coming of an anointed one who would take upon Himself the sin of the world. Through the work of one person the many would be saved.
So let us suggest that God wants to work through you in His plan of redemption for all people everywhere and that you can humbly trust Him to use your efforts. He has placed you in one place in academe to eventually be a blessing to the whole of humanity and Creation. So why not think in those BIGGER TERMS? Why not see your story as fitting in with this larger story?
How can what you’re doing eventually lead to the blessings of salvation to the many?
Meetings: A Means to a More Valuable End
Asking yourself these sort of questions on a regular basis can produce a mind set that makes meetings more important than just having a meeting. The meetings are in some sense a means to a much larger end. That sort of relational (or big picture) thinking can help you to focus on the quality of your work and keep you from thinking too small. It’s up to God to multiply the things you do to the world, but it would be a lack of faith in God’s abilities to lower our sights to something less. God loves each individual in the entire world and has provided a means of salvation in Christ intended for each individual; thus, we should seek to fulfill His desire for the whole world to embrace this good news.
There’s a bumper sticker one used to see all the time in Boulder, Colorado. It said, “Think globally, act locally.”
It wasn’t meant for Christians, rather it was meant for a secularized political movement, but the idea of thinking globally and acting locally could just as well apply to Christians. Think Big Story of what God has done and is doing (meta-narratively) and act locally. Then your meetings and the momentum that we hope you generate never gets lost as an end it themselves. They are the means to a larger global goal of reconciling everyone, everywhere to the Lord. To be aimed at that is part of loving God and part of loving your neighbor as yourself.
Momentum: A Means to a More Valuable End
Well run meetings can create a momentum toward your goals that meeting merely individually with people cannot. Momentum is something a movement experieces as it reaches meaningful achievements that enable it to widen its influence. Remember Jesus had large group meetings (feeding of the 5,000), middle sized group meetings (the Last Supper) and small group meetings (at the Transfiguration). Those meetings were significant steps in the bigger plan of what was in store and you would do well to think of your meetings in terms of the bigger plan of how God is using you.
Of course, when you’re in those meetings you don’t relate how your people are merely fitting into your plans, but rather helping them to see the importance of relating their life’s story to God’s bigger plan and asking them (in groups and individually) how can these meetings help get them to THEIR goals and plans, related to the Big Story.
In short, you are recruiting people to the cause of Christ—the cause of God—for a life time and not merely to your local plans and merely at this time and this place. Of course, you are doing that, too.
Having said that, look over our archive of Christian faculty community meetings and see how they were run. How the introductions were done, how they pointed to things 
beyond the meeting, how they were organized and where they were held. Can you see how these sorts of meetings could add to the momentum of what you are accomplishing?
Relational Thinking—An Aid to a More Valuable End
Your role as a leader (or team of leaders) is to see how what you’re doing (or can plan and do) relates to achieving the ends of the organization you lead, capturing and stimulating momentum and helping those involved see the bigger picture of the progress of the Kingdom of God. If it doesn’t congtribute, it’s out. If it does contribute you must guage what among the opportunities you have, what leads to the most fruitful results. It takes time, experience and the right values to begin to see this better, but that’s part of the blessing God intended for us when we follow His priorities.