Triaging in Elders’ Meetings
Triaging (in medical use) is to assign degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment. It is the process of determining the most important people or things that require attention.
Conducting a triage is something that elders could do on a regular basis as part of the way they care for and lead the church.
Specifically there are 3 areas of church life which might require it.
1) Triage People
Review all the people part of or associated with the church. Rick Warren's groups of "Community, Crowd, Congregation, Committed, Core" could be helpful categories to use.
Who is in each group?
Who in each group has specific needs (do they need to go on the care list)?
Who are the people that need to be visited?
Who amongst the core, committed (maybe even congregation) could be an elder or deacon in the future?
Who needs specific training or mentoring?
Why is that person who is part of the crowd not part of the congregation? Or part of the congregation but not the committed?
2) Triage Meetings and Ministries
Review all the meetings and ministries the church runs.
What are their objectives?
Are they meeting them?
Does anything need to be changed?
Are they bearing fruit?
Is there something we are not doing that we need to be doing?
Do we need to stop doing something in order to do something else?
3) Triage Resources
What resources do we have? e.g. buildings, PA system, website.
What resources do we need to do what we need/want to do?
Are the resources we’ve got best suited for what we need?
Lots more questions can be asked under each area.
Once these questions have been asked and answered, the aim of the triage is to determine what the most important people or things are in each category so that the elders can make sure these are being prioritised.
Field Notes
A reminder that every Saturday I send out a Substack with 10 links from around the web worth checking out and the latest resources I’ve produced at Blog of Dan (my online Notion page).