CM@SMC is the name given to the board held by Year Three Christian Ministry students as part of the course. The board can be broken down into two main areas: the day-to-day running and reflection on the board process. We shall look at each in turn.

On a day-to-day level the duties of the board are dealing with aspects of the Christian Ministry course, such as: deadlines, representatives for committee meetings, assessment procedures, and retreat days. We dealt with this through weekly board meetings where people in turn took on the roles of chairperson, secretary, and a number of other roles. For example, our chairperson took primary control for time management, for keeping people focussed on the matter in hand, and also had to take charge of the decision making process, making sure everyone had their voice heard, and that all objections and possible problems were raised. Our secretary had a responsibility to make sure everyone knew what had been discussed in the meeting as a result of keeping accurate minutes that were distributed among the members during the following week. The purpose of this was so that we could work in an organised way to achieve whatever was on the weekly agenda

I mentioned above that there were two main parts to the board so lets look at the second one, the board reviews. These are an integral part of the board process as according to the documentation for the board, the primary task is:

So how did we achieve this? Through regular reviews of the board process and the individual roles we took on.

A major part of our work on the board was decision making. Since we had responsibilities in the areas mentioned above we occasionally had to make decisions regarding them. A point of issue that came up regularly in the reviews was the way we make decisions within the group, both on and off the board. We did a lot of reflection on this and came to an agreement on the model we would use. Later reflections focussed on how effective that model was and whether we ought to change it.

I mentioned also the individual roles we took on. While specific people had specific roles they were not fixed for the entire year. Each role was reviewed regularly and the post passed onto someone else, so that we could all gain experience in the areas covered by the varying roles. This was deemed to be a valuable learning experience and one that served us well. We could all learn from how others carried out the roles.

The Board process is related to a major theme of the third year of the course, responsibility for learning, and also partly to our work on vision.