In September we moved the second service from eleven to half past. It was a twenty-nine minute decision at a board meeting and it cost us most of a year.

I am writing it down because the mistake was not the decision. The decision was right, and we have kept it. The mistake was everything around it.

What actually happened

The reasoning was good: the children’s groups were running into the second service, the building was emptying and refilling in fifteen minutes, and the volunteers were doing two jobs at once. Half past eleven fixed all of it.

We announced it three weeks before it happened, from the front, once. By November about forty people had drifted, and when we finally went and asked them, almost none of them mentioned the time.

What they actually said

• “I found out from a notice sheet.”
• “It felt like it had already been decided.”
• “I have been here twenty-two years and nobody asked me.”
• “It made me wonder what else was going to change without warning.”

Not one person said half past eleven was inconvenient. The time was fine. The process told them they were not part of the church in the way they had thought they were, and that is a much larger thing to have said by accident.

A change costs whatever the change costs. A change that arrives without warning also costs people’s sense that they belong to the thing being changed, and that bill arrives later.

What we do now

Four steps, and we do not skip them even when the decision looks obvious.

1. Name the problem publicly before naming a solution. Six weeks minimum. “The building is emptying and refilling in fifteen minutes and the volunteers are doing two jobs” is a sentence people can engage with. “We are moving to half eleven” is not.
2. Ask, and publish what came back. Not a vote. A genuine question, and then the actual answers, including the ones that disagree with where we are heading.
3. Say who decides. Ambiguity about that is what makes people feel managed. We say: the board decides, in March, having read all of this.
4. Set a review date and keep it. “We will look at this again in six months” is only worth something if the six-month meeting happens and is minuted.

What this is not

It is not consensus. A church of six hundred will not reach consensus on service times or anything else, and pretending otherwise produces a slower version of the same damage.

It is the difference between being consulted and being informed, and most people can live with a decision they argued against as long as they were genuinely in the room for it.

Where we are now

About two-thirds of the forty came back. The service is at half past eleven. The children’s groups finish before the building fills.

We would make the same decision again and we would take four months over it instead of three weeks.