My family and I had our February 2015 family meeting today. It was the first family meeting we had since our strategic planning meeting last January 1.
Holding regular family meetings is a good idea because allows your family the opportunity to sit down as a group to discuss issues and incidents that are important to them. It gives your family a chance to celebrate the wins, learn from the losses, and plan adequately for the future.
This was the agenda of our second family meeting for 2015. It serves as a template for what we discussed during the meeting.
- Opening Prayer. We always start by dedicating the family and the meeting to God. We pray for wisdom, clarity, honesty, and humility during this time.
- Highlight of the Month. The highlight of the month gives every member of the family an opportunity to talk about something that made him or her particularly happy. We frame it in the context of our family values, so we all see how God helps us become the world-changers we want to become for our glory.
- Goals’ Progress Reports. At the start of the year, we set family and individual goals, and this time allows us to review the progress of those goals. As we review the goals, we see how close–or how far–we are from meeting those goals because we can see clearly if we didn’t meet them. We then set clear action items per goal, to help make sure we meet the goals. For example, if one of my goals is to write 12 new songs for 2015, I would need to set time aside to pray and write those songs. (Tuesday nights at 9PM.) If I didn’t do that, I would never get around to writing them.
- Challenge of the Month. The Challenge of the Month is a summary of the individual and family goals that we aim to reach for in the next month.
- Closing Prayer. As the meeting comes to a close, we dedicate the next month to God, and ask Him for strength and wisdom to help us meet those challenges.
The Bible tells us to “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6) We want our children to grow into world-changers who contribute positively to the world for the glory of God, and giving them the structure, discipline, and example on how to meet their goals in an organized and timely way may be one of the best gifts we can give our children as parents.
If you’d like to start family meetings in your household, I hope this simple template proves helpful as you customize it to meet your family needs.
Image taken from here. No copyright infringement intended.
