Moving From Condemnation to Understanding

Quote of the day:
“Who will you love when the savior you were promised never comes?”
--Dead Heart Bloom

Constructive dialogue doesn’t just happen. We don’t have the patience for it. There needs to be a structured process.

Most of the members of the United Methodist California-Pacific Annual Conference participated in such a process a few years ago. It was called “discernment.”

A bit of background. In deciding policy and direction, the United Methodist Church operates as a pure democracy. Matters are decided by Roberts-Rules debates followed by votes in legislative session at both the regional and national levels.

This system is by design adversarial. On each motion, those on both sides are heard from, and then a vote is taken. The majority vote prevails. Those who are not in the majority have to live with it.

We had attempted through legislation for many years to come to terms about the role of gays and lesbians in church leadership. But our conference remained bitterly divided and stuck.

The aim of the discernment process was not legislative but rather attempting to sense the direction of the church in the midst of people opening their hearts to each other. It may sound a little strange, but it was quite powerful.

The central method used was simple. Groups of eight to ten people would agree to basic ground rules and then each person would answer some specific questions about their experience. This method was repeated in many venues over almost two years.

Listening to the experiences of people in the structured setting of discernment was extraordinarily enlightening to me. I had thought I knew everything that needed to be known about this issue.

Hearing from people actually dealing with it every day showed me how little I knew.