I found some brilliant groundrules for discussion on the wonderful church planting blog i follow. They were devised by the blogger and colleagues in a planning session, but are really applicable to any meeting in a church context. They are:
Seek first to understand and then to be understood.
Fruits of the Spirit trump everything else.
Playful curiosity wins first prize.
Periodic silence is golden.
Test inferences.
Breathe…
I think they’re pretty spot on. I wonder if our diaconate would accept them as guidelines for all future church (and deacons?) meetings. Or perhaps now might not be the best time…
New Beginnings 
Those work. 🙂
Could I also suggest this addition: “God’s agenda may be quite different from the agenda you bring to the meeting”? I’ve been rather conscious of this lately because I got dropped in a church when visiting my parents in April (generally speaking my church is a somewhat amorphous body that not only doesn’t have a building but wouldn’t have a use for one, since we are spread out over such a wide area), and I was called to pray for it. I conscientiously informed the minister of this. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake. The minister wanted me to pray for his Thursday night prayer meetings and so on… all very laudable stuff, but what God wanted was for me to pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the place.
That works too!
Perhaps a new first point on the list should be to begin every meeting by praying for an outpouring of the Spirit to lead us into all truth?
Oh yes. Absolutely. If all churches did that, perhaps God might have put me into a more normal one! 🙂
Groundrules
Miss Next wrote that she feels led to “pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the place.” I like the prayer and I also wonder if the next step might be to ask the group “What do you think it is that the Spirit is birthing in this moment?”
Tom