Thanks for sharing your thoughts here. I have two notes I'd like to impress upon your heart:
First, I would propose to you that the practices I am suggesting are not rooted in "corporate board room or shareholders meeting" environments but, as I suggested in the article, in the acts of the apostles in the early church (i.e. Acts 15). These are good and God glorifying practices in all times and places - in homes and coffee shops, at church, at Synod, and, yes, even in locker rooms, board rooms, and shareholders meetings.
Second, I don't disagree with you in the least about the vital importance of prayer and seeking God's wisdom as a deliberative body. I think you would agree with me that suggesting one practice does not come to the exclusion of others. My goal was not to cast a comprehensive vision for what Synod should look like across the board (how to meet, when to pray, how often, how committees are formed, etc.), but how these three small practices might be of help as a whole. So, all I can say is I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment that prayer is of vital importance, and that doesn't diminish these small suggestions in terms of best practices when it comes to edifying communication.
You also referenced my suggestions as my "solutions." I certainly would not put that sort of emphasis on these ideas. I am convinced of their validity in effective communication rooted in biblical principles, but they are certainly not, in themselves, wholesale solutions.
I don't know you personally, so I don't want to apply any negative motives in my reply. So, I will do my best to lay out a response that is both candid and kind, and communicates the goal of my article. To do so, I will share with you a little bit of what I shared with Lloyd because your assessments are quite similar. As I noted in the article:
"Delegates are forced into an extremely difficult position where they need to have locker room conversation in front of the press."
Lloyd noted: "I personally did not feel that the gallery or the live stream impacted anything I said or did at Synod." Similarly, the heart of your concern, I believe, is that people are able to speak their conscience with the camera on and a gallery present, and that it shouldn't change anything, and any suggestion otherwise is a guess, or a projection.
But what I shared with him and will share with you is, "I think that is my point, not yours. I am seeking to suggest to you that, in instances of Crucial Conversations (high stakes, emotions, disagreements) it should."
Thinking again of the basketball team analogy (put yourself in "Bob's" position), sometimes as a teammate you need to be able to say, ‘Jimmy, your defense in the first half was lazy. You need to cover your man!’ But to do so in an open forum is a risk to besmirch the good name of your teammate whom you are seeking to lovingly rebuke, and not to make a fool of. The more serious the issue, the more paramount it is to do so in a way they can receive it.
You might have no qualms about doing so publicly but the fact that you have no concern about that is exactly the point I am seeking to make.
I don't know you personally, but let me try to give an example: If you had a serious concern about someone you deeply love (like your spouse or child or very close personal friend) and sought to bring about loving rebuke and correction in a way that brought them back and restored the marriage/relationship, I would argue you would NOT use the tools applied at Synod. Come hell or high water, you'd seek for it to be as private as possible so that they might be willing to receive it with joy. You would make every effort available to you to ensure your motives were not applied negatively and that their reputation was protected. In this way, your actions would be consistent with your motives to bring them back into the fold.
What I grapple with personally is how so many in our system know this to be true in their own lives, but they still insist on all dirty laundry to be aired publicly (transparency is the word), and then we are SHOCKED when things boil over, people leave the floor, ulterior motives are applied, and we are in a worse space than when we begun.
So, my point is not to engaging in "psychologizing and guessing" about how a camera or seating room might affect delegates, as you suggest. My point is that we should feel that, 'for Bob to make exactly the same comment about Jimmy to the media after the game would be both dehumanizing and wildly inappropriate,' and we don't.
I am not seeking to be dismissive and would be happy to chat more (shoot me a personal email if you'd like to keep chatting), but I sort of feel like your and Lloyd's points are making my point.
Here are my questions to you:
1) Is the goal to prune out members you disagree with, or to lovingly rebuke them and bring them back into the fold?
2) In light of that, if they were you and you were them, how would you want to be treated? What sort of methods or tools would you want them to use in order to achieve that goal so that you might be restored? What would you be most receptive to in terms of methods used to seek restoration?
My perspective comes down to one vital question, "Would you rather succeed, or be right?"
If the goal is to succeed (meaning, for Synod delegations to result in good fruit across our denomination), then we need to reconsider our methods to achieve said goals. I think the apostles in Acts 15, in closing the door and deliberating together in private, got it right. Our methods do a disservice to what all of us want to achieve.
At the heart of our disagreement is what you say here:
I disagree that our deliberations at Synod are akin to my serious concern about my spouse or a close personal friend. Those are apples and oranges...You seem to be implying that at Synod we mainly speak about persons.
Yes, yes I do. Because these synodical decisions have a deep, deep impact on the men and women that the church wants to disciple in this. I want our denomination to succeed in discipling people, not just to get our theology right. I am not suggesting you disagree with that, but my contention is that our methods do a disservice to this goal.
While I won't carry on in this medium after this post, I hear your perspective and would be happy to chat further via email or even video conference. Like my "part 1" suggests, I think these conversations often bear more fruit when embodied. So, if you are interested, you have a participant in me.
I certainly don't dispute that. I am seeking to convey the way this conversation is typically framed, which is also why it quickly devolves. We often apply ulterior motives to people with whom we disagree, or we may even mischaracterize their actual stance (or oversimplify it). I suppose I could have made that more clear but, as noted above, my goal in writing this article is not to address whatwe believe on the topic of human sexuality, or even why. My goal is to propose two ideas that would help us in how to move forward to have more robust, and profitable, crucial conversations for the health and vibrancy of the church we love. So, my goal wasn't as much to articulate the intricacies of the arguments, but to challenge readers to use different methods when engaging in said arguments in a way that would lead to greater communication and understanding. If anything, our little chat here helps support that argument (due in no small part because of my inability to convey that more clearly. :D)
Posted in: Crucial Conversations at Synod, Part II
Hi Keith,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here. I have two notes I'd like to impress upon your heart:
First, I would propose to you that the practices I am suggesting are not rooted in "corporate board room or shareholders meeting" environments but, as I suggested in the article, in the acts of the apostles in the early church (i.e. Acts 15). These are good and God glorifying practices in all times and places - in homes and coffee shops, at church, at Synod, and, yes, even in locker rooms, board rooms, and shareholders meetings.
Second, I don't disagree with you in the least about the vital importance of prayer and seeking God's wisdom as a deliberative body. I think you would agree with me that suggesting one practice does not come to the exclusion of others. My goal was not to cast a comprehensive vision for what Synod should look like across the board (how to meet, when to pray, how often, how committees are formed, etc.), but how these three small practices might be of help as a whole. So, all I can say is I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment that prayer is of vital importance, and that doesn't diminish these small suggestions in terms of best practices when it comes to edifying communication.
You also referenced my suggestions as my "solutions." I certainly would not put that sort of emphasis on these ideas. I am convinced of their validity in effective communication rooted in biblical principles, but they are certainly not, in themselves, wholesale solutions.
Thanks again for sharing.
Posted in: Crucial Conversations at Synod, Part II
Thanks for your reply, Eric.
I don't know you personally, so I don't want to apply any negative motives in my reply. So, I will do my best to lay out a response that is both candid and kind, and communicates the goal of my article. To do so, I will share with you a little bit of what I shared with Lloyd because your assessments are quite similar. As I noted in the article:
"Delegates are forced into an extremely difficult position where they need to have locker room conversation in front of the press."
Lloyd noted: "I personally did not feel that the gallery or the live stream impacted anything I said or did at Synod." Similarly, the heart of your concern, I believe, is that people are able to speak their conscience with the camera on and a gallery present, and that it shouldn't change anything, and any suggestion otherwise is a guess, or a projection.
But what I shared with him and will share with you is, "I think that is my point, not yours. I am seeking to suggest to you that, in instances of Crucial Conversations (high stakes, emotions, disagreements) it should."
Thinking again of the basketball team analogy (put yourself in "Bob's" position), sometimes as a teammate you need to be able to say, ‘Jimmy, your defense in the first half was lazy. You need to cover your man!’ But to do so in an open forum is a risk to besmirch the good name of your teammate whom you are seeking to lovingly rebuke, and not to make a fool of. The more serious the issue, the more paramount it is to do so in a way they can receive it.
You might have no qualms about doing so publicly but the fact that you have no concern about that is exactly the point I am seeking to make.
I don't know you personally, but let me try to give an example: If you had a serious concern about someone you deeply love (like your spouse or child or very close personal friend) and sought to bring about loving rebuke and correction in a way that brought them back and restored the marriage/relationship, I would argue you would NOT use the tools applied at Synod. Come hell or high water, you'd seek for it to be as private as possible so that they might be willing to receive it with joy. You would make every effort available to you to ensure your motives were not applied negatively and that their reputation was protected. In this way, your actions would be consistent with your motives to bring them back into the fold.
What I grapple with personally is how so many in our system know this to be true in their own lives, but they still insist on all dirty laundry to be aired publicly (transparency is the word), and then we are SHOCKED when things boil over, people leave the floor, ulterior motives are applied, and we are in a worse space than when we begun.
So, my point is not to engaging in "psychologizing and guessing" about how a camera or seating room might affect delegates, as you suggest. My point is that we should feel that, 'for Bob to make exactly the same comment about Jimmy to the media after the game would be both dehumanizing and wildly inappropriate,' and we don't.
I am not seeking to be dismissive and would be happy to chat more (shoot me a personal email if you'd like to keep chatting), but I sort of feel like your and Lloyd's points are making my point.
Here are my questions to you:
1) Is the goal to prune out members you disagree with, or to lovingly rebuke them and bring them back into the fold?
2) In light of that, if they were you and you were them, how would you want to be treated? What sort of methods or tools would you want them to use in order to achieve that goal so that you might be restored? What would you be most receptive to in terms of methods used to seek restoration?
3) Are we applying all of those methods at Synod?
Be blessed.
Posted in: Crucial Conversations at Synod, Part II
Thanks for sharing, Eric.
My perspective comes down to one vital question, "Would you rather succeed, or be right?"
If the goal is to succeed (meaning, for Synod delegations to result in good fruit across our denomination), then we need to reconsider our methods to achieve said goals. I think the apostles in Acts 15, in closing the door and deliberating together in private, got it right. Our methods do a disservice to what all of us want to achieve.
At the heart of our disagreement is what you say here:
Yes, yes I do. Because these synodical decisions have a deep, deep impact on the men and women that the church wants to disciple in this. I want our denomination to succeed in discipling people, not just to get our theology right. I am not suggesting you disagree with that, but my contention is that our methods do a disservice to this goal.
While I won't carry on in this medium after this post, I hear your perspective and would be happy to chat further via email or even video conference. Like my "part 1" suggests, I think these conversations often bear more fruit when embodied. So, if you are interested, you have a participant in me.
Be blessed.
Posted in: Crucial Conversations at Synod, Part I
I certainly don't dispute that. I am seeking to convey the way this conversation is typically framed, which is also why it quickly devolves. We often apply ulterior motives to people with whom we disagree, or we may even mischaracterize their actual stance (or oversimplify it). I suppose I could have made that more clear but, as noted above, my goal in writing this article is not to address what we believe on the topic of human sexuality, or even why. My goal is to propose two ideas that would help us in how to move forward to have more robust, and profitable, crucial conversations for the health and vibrancy of the church we love. So, my goal wasn't as much to articulate the intricacies of the arguments, but to challenge readers to use different methods when engaging in said arguments in a way that would lead to greater communication and understanding. If anything, our little chat here helps support that argument (due in no small part because of my inability to convey that more clearly. :D)
Thanks for the note, Tim.