Pursuing God's Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups (Transforming Resources) by Ruth Haley Barton

Author:Ruth Haley Barton [Barton, Ruth Haley]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2012-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

7

Practices for Listening to Each Other

There is nothing more hurtful than to try to love one another

and not knowing how to do it intelligently.

Gordon Cosby

The staff and elders of Grace Church were a little overwhelmed by all the possibilities for putting in place practices that would help them open to God in their meetings and interactions. Their hearts were also deeply stirred. They realized that their meetings were usually very businesslike and not all that different from secular meetings. There was always a lot of good-natured banter and joking, but nothing that was intentionally designed to help them seek God together.

Their facilitator encouraged the different teams to begin by picking one thing they thought they could put in place just to get started. The staff felt that since they all worked together, they would start every day with Morning Prayer. They also wanted to at least try starting meetings with a few moments of silence before jumping into the agenda. Since the elders met on Tuesday nights, they decided to start their meetings with Evening Prayer. They also decided to use the lectionary Gospel reading for that week so no one would have to make the decision about what Scripture to read.

They were very excited about opening to God in this way, but they also knew that they needed practices that would help them open to each other. Some of the ways they related to each other were not very productive and were even hurtful at times. As the church had grown and the pastor had become more well-known—a local celebrity of sorts—there was less accountability. He had a tendency to spin truth to get things to go his way, and the rest of the staff was afraid to disagree or point out any discrepancies they might notice. Since he was the only staff member who attended elders meetings, the rest of the staff weren’t sure they were getting the straight scoop, and there was some nervousness about how they were being represented to the elders. It was not an environment conducive to truth telling.

The pastor didn’t feel all that safe either. He had a sense that the other elders sometimes talked behind his back and that they came into meetings having already lobbied for each other’s support. A couple of the elders could not handle conflict, so when there were strong disagreements, they shut down emotionally and sometimes even left the room. As a result, there were several conflicts that had never been fully resolved. People just soldiered on, pretending things were okay and trying to avoid the land mines buried in their shared history. They always felt slightly on edge and that they needed to be careful. On top of that, no one ever repented for anything; if something went wrong in a meeting—an angry outburst, an unnecessary criticism, a person getting cut off or dismissed—no one ever apologized. They just came to the next meeting and pretended nothing had happened. Clearly, these communication patterns were not going to take them where they wanted to go.

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