- Look over your email list of people you invite to your meetings.
- Is it up-to-date?
- Can others be added? Are you occassionally asking or getting more referrals for invitations?
- Are there some people who over the years have never come and that should be winnowed out of the list?
- Use your schedule with your leadership team to plan your specific upcoming dates for meetings.
- Has the date and time you used regularly in the past served you well?
- Is there a better day of the week or time of day? You don’t want to change often, so be careful and be thoughtful with changes.
Decide on the dates and times for the first three meetings and who will be the speakers. - Be ready to inform people on your list, on your first email out for the semester.
- Send it early enough so they can “save the date.”
- Lock down with the administrative powers what would be a good room for your meetings.
- It’s best to be consistent with locations, but it’s sometimes good to have a bigger room setting if you have an outside speaker come in that will likely attract more than usual.
- Avoid the BB in a boxcar ambiance.
- Make your sure your MC at those meetings is prepared with good introductions and has a intuitive sense of your protocol of how to run the meetings.
- Make every effort to start and end on time.
- Say at the beginning of each meeting that people are free to quietly leave at any time in the meeting if they have conflicting obligations that come up before your meeting is over.
- Use your network of colleagues and friends in your ministry to find (new) speakers to speak to issues that you think would be meaningful or challenging to your group.
- Don’t forget your own local Christian faculty colleagues!
- One rule of thumb that has been profitible for this is thinking through, what are the felt needs your group feels (from you acquiantance with them) and what are the real needs of your group. You want to make an effort to speak to those kinds of things.
- Avoid having a hobby horse topic dominate your calendars year over year.
- The only thing you can likely go overboard on and not get into theological trouble is focusing on Jesus more than anything else.
- Focusing on that will still allow you to cover many other topics; you have some control on who you invite to speak and the topics they address.
- Remember that the people come have differing interests and motivations for coming and that’s okay.
- The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.