Exploring Ecumenism

Elements of Mission 3: Morality

I illustrated a recent post  with Dore's engraving of Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost.  Why?  Because Satan was at the time of Jesus known as the angel of Rome.  His speciality was as upholder of the law.  He insisted upon total obedience.  I'm not at all sure how he mutated into the Hammer Horror monster of popular mythology.  The point is when we think about doctrine and morality we usually think in Satanic terms.  Once I know the truth, everyone else is by definition wrong.  We saw the consequences of this in the totalitarian regimes of the last century.  Christianity offers a radical alternative to these absolutes and this is what Radcliffe  was talking about at the CTE Forum  a few weeks ago.

He went on to describe how the media pressure church leaders to make statements on ethical issues and then take furious issue once they do.  For them morality is even worse than doctrine.  They expect churches to take moral stances.

Participative Methods 5: Non-directive Consultancy

It is a long time since I added to this series.  The others can be found under the category Participation and the first in the series is here.

I thought it would be an opportunity to write about this topic whilst I was writing a recent post about the need for structural ecumenism.  The post makes the case for structural ecumenism but says little about the practicalities of supporting ecumenical work.

Non-directive consultancy was developed by George Lovell, the founder of AVEC, which for several decades trained church and community workers in the basics of non-directive community work.  In later years George was one of the founders of the course Consultancy for Mission and Ministry.  The course continues although George has recently retired.  I have placed a link to one of George's books in the sidebar, go to Amazon to find the others.

The Difference between Volunteers and Activists

There is profound confusion in our neighbourhoods and churches about volunteering.  Community activities and most churchwork is not voluntary work. 

There is nothing wrong with voluntary work.  It is extremely useful for the charities and recipients of the hours of voluntary time people contribute.  It is also a classic example of self interest, volunteers benefit from voluntary work.  They benefit in many ways; a good example is the work of Impasse.

All of this is true of neighbourhood and church work.  But the difference is this ...  Voluntary work is like paid employment, without the pay.  It is in effect working for someone else.  Volunteers can pick and choose and so the work can sometimes be more fulfilling than paid work but in principle it is working for others.

Neighbourhood work is self-help.  It is like self-employment.  When I participate in my local community organisations (or local church) I am working for myself; it is more accurately work for the mutual benefit of my neighbours or fellow church members.  This means I don't simply work for an organisation, I'm a part of it and have an interest in its future.  Usually we call people who work in self-help organisations activists rather than volunteers.

Both volunteers and activists add to the social capital in their communities.  We need to keep hold of the distinction though if we want to understand what is going wrong in our communities and churches.

Participative Methods 4: Citizens' Organising

This approach was first developed by Saul Alinski during the 1970s.  He worked amongst the poorest communities in urban United States and developed forthright methods of increasing the confidence of people trodden down by poverty.  He wrote two books Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals.

After his death in the late seventies, his work was taken up by the Industrial Areas Foundation.  During the nineties IAF attempted to introduce organising to this country.  Although their may still be a few organisations around I believe the attempt has run into the sand.

I took their leaders training in 1992.  Whilst I had difficulty with the whole package they were promoting, much of what I learned has been helpful in my community development practice.  It is not a method that is written down anywhere.  This is a deliberate policy as it is supposed to be passed from practitioner to practitioner.  A good introduction to the principles is Robert Linthicum's Building a People of Power.

Here are a few of the basics:

1. Organising starts with the churches (and perhaps today any place of worship).  Why?  Because churches are there for the long haul.  In disadvantaged communities they can be the only institutions which maintain a presence. 
2. Organising is based upon an analysis of power.  The Statutory and Private Sectors (and to a lesser extent the professional voluntary sector) access power through organised money.  Communities cannot do this, as they have no money.  They access power through organised people.
3. Citizens' organisations are funded solely through the giving of their member organisations.  The reason for this is that accepting grant aid means they become beholden to the donor organisations.  They must unambiguously represent the interests of their members.
4. This is power tempered by love.  Power collectively exercised is used in a disciplined way so that no-one is marginalised.
5. The people involved are motivated by anger and self-interest.  Anger energises the leaders; ensures that things get done.  Self-interest is the deeper motivation that arises out of realising that I benefit when I work for the benefit of others.
6. Leaders are trained and developed but never occupy any position in the organisation for more than one year.
7. They work by ensuring that people with power, eg local politicians, business people, church leaders, etc are accountable to their own aims.  Citizens' Organisations have no permanent friends or enemies, the aim is always to develop relationships.

I think the problem in Britain was that it is culturally very different from the States.  We have a lot to learn but have not yet developed an approach to organising that suits our own culture.  The churches led with organising in the States and could in Britain lead in developing our own brand.  It is in fact an effective way of encouraging real sharing between churches and ecumenists could do worse than study this method.  I will explore the weaknesses of community development in England further in future posts.

Participative Methods 3: World Cafe

I'm not sure whether yesterday's post came over a bit negative.  I certainly don't want to give the impression participative methods are easy but at the same time I want to encourage their use.  These posts are meant to draw attention to a variety of methods and to offer some sense of how I view them at present.  My message is experiment, recognise your limitations and that you will improve over time.  Share leadership and work with more experienced people if and when you can.

In many ways World Cafe is a more flexible and straightforward participative method.  Broadly people sit in small groups, discuss a topic which might be the same for each table or vary from table to table.  From time to time people move around, leaving one person behind to introduce new people to what has been discussed so far.

The method is very flexible and there are a variety of ways of varying it and using it.  This is the method we used at the Participation in Church conference a couple of weeks ago. 

The main difficulty with this approach (apart from the usual one of actually being participative) is resources.  Ideally you need to accommodate everyone in a single large hall around small round tables, room for 4 at each table is ideal.  You also need paper table cloths and various flowers, sweets, toys, information sheets to encourage the right sort of atmosphere.  One advantage of working with churches is that there is no shortage of large halls.  The ubiquitous trestle tables are a bit of a problem but I am told the method can work quite well with them.  Round tables optimise distance and so help with hearing and of course look better.

For more information, there is a website about World Cafe and a book The World Cafe by Juanita Brown and others.

Participative Methods 2: Open Space Technology

I first encountered Open Space Technology (OST) about 7 years ago.  It was being used by the Primary Care Trust in East Rotherham.  It was introduced as a method that could be used in a couple of hours in a community setting.  I used it a few times in short bursts, with various groups engaged with community planning.

At the time I was familiar with a few participative approaches and so OST appealed to me.  Also, it seemed to work well with local people.  As is often the case with participative methods, it is the professionals who struggle with the method.

I found this was much more problematic when I tried to use it in an ecumenical context.  I have run a couple of 24 hour sessions and I have learned a few hard truths.  One is that this method is very difficult to facilitate.  Second, it really needs to be run by people who voluntarily agree to take part in it, groups have difficulty grasping the method when unprepared.  Also, the short sessions seem to work quite well but once you go for a long session, it is perhaps best to go for 2 or 3 days.  One day produces a lot of useful and insightful information but does not allow time to move those taking part to the action phase.

The paradox seems to be that people in neighbourhoods find it liberating from the agendas of the various workers in the community who normally set the agenda.  Professional people have strong agendas and find freedom to explore them profoundly threatening.

My conclusion is that OST is a powerful method where people contract to work in that way in advance.  It is less effective where participants are unprepared.  I by no means wish to write it off as a method to be used in ecumenical contexts;the challenge is to find a context in which it will work well.  Maybe more experienced facilitators than I could make a better job of it, but if we are seeking means to get started with participative methods, OST may have limited practical application.

For more information, Harrison Owen, the founder of OST, is the author of Open Space Technology: A User's Guide.  There is also a useful website that covers contemporary use of the method.

Participative Methods 1: General Principles

Facilitation of participative conversations, using any method, requires an understanding of the principles.  This is not just an intellectual understanding but a feel for what is genuinely participative.  This means you need experience.

I don't think we should allow this to stop us experimenting.  There is a shortage of people with this experience and the only way to get it is to decide to work participatively.  How might an inexperienced person make a start?

• Accept that you will get it wrong, initially frequently and even when experienced, from time to time.
• Wherever possible work with a partner.  Give each other permission to be critical and to point out where you each fail to work particpatively. 
• Watch others at work and take whatever training is on offer.

It is difficult to get information about some methods because the practitioners believe they should not be used without training.  Whilst this may be frustrating it is good policy to heed their warnings.  Nevertheless I think there are a few things to consider when you set out to work more participatively.

• Churches are full of very inspirational and engaging leaders, who do not work participatively.  You need to prepare for any event by explaining to these people what you are trying to achieve.  My experience is that it is not worth going to the trouble of organising anything participative if these people do not support you.  They can wreck an event in seconds and will do so if they are not fully supportive.
• Simply rearranging the furniture can make a big difference.  A move from chairs in rows (an arrangement which enables control of a meeting) to chairs around small tables can make a big difference.
• But don't stop there, think through the changes to ways of working this layout might facilitate.
• Not everything is most appropriately dealt with in this way.  Plan a programme that moves between different approaches depending on what needs to be achieved.
• Working with a team means you can have a team member on each table.  They can explain what is expected at each stage and report back on how participation might be improved.
• Experienced resource people should be held in reserve.  Sometimes experienced people will dominate a table.  Where people are exploring an issue, why not hold the resource people in reserve, to go to a table when requested?
• The information generated needs to be recorded.   Make sure the people present understand that this information belongs to them and will be made available to them.  This is not difficult in this age of Web2 applications.

Participative Approaches for Ecumenical Conversations

If participation is to help us with our ecumenical conversations, it must move us to a lived vision of ecumenism.  We must understand participation to take place both within formal settings and outside of them.  I think conversations in formal settings (by which I mean any event planned for conversations to take place; don't confuse this with formal talks) are important and indeed the lifeblood of ecumenism.  Without these conversations, we are likely to lose focus.  But outside of those formal settings, there is still a need for conversations and the use of participative methods.

So, what I want to do is offer some understanding of the scope of participatory methods. 

1. Good facilitation skills can enhance participation in almost any meeting.  Of course, it is not necessary to use participative methods at absolutely every meeting.  Good facilitation identifies the most appropriate participative methods to use.    But developing a culture of participation can help almost any sort of meeting to be more participative.  I have seen both more or less participative PowerPoint presentations, for example.  Sometimes, it is a question of checking out basics such as the layout of the room. 
2. There are a number of participative approaches to conferences.  The ones I am most familiar with are Open Space Technology and World Cafe.
3. Social research can be conducted through participative approaches.  The best known approach is Participatory Appraisal.
4. Community development requires participatory approaches and almost any of the methods listed here can be used.  A good example of a method that has grown up to this purpose is Citizens' Organising.
5. Finally, consultancy can be conducted in more or less participatory ways.  A good example of George Lovell's non-directive approach to consultancy.
6. Finally, the big change over recent years, has been the growth of Web2 applications.  One reason formal talks have dominated ecumenism, has been the difficulty bringing together the results of talks at more local levels.  At present, the internet is not used in any formal way even to bring formal talks at the centre to the attention of local churches.  This will change as the churches learn how to pool insights from all levels, reported through blogs and networking sites.

Over the next few weeks I shall visit each of these methods in more detail.

Participative Conversations

This is where I introduce a new theme, participation; a one word answer to the question, 'how should we conduct our ecumenical conversations?'. 

Participation is a major topic, with hundreds of websites and books about it.  And yet, in almost any church mention of participation, is likely to be met with incomprehension.  There are a few notable exceptions; for instance, some fresh expressions are exploring the use of participation.  I suspect this is happening where younger people are encountering participative methods in other walks of life and expect to find it in their religious life too.

Too many religious leaders start with the implicit assumption they have all the answers.  Many of them do have answers and some of their answers are very good answers; until they encounter the problem of reception.  People do not buy into their ideas, they remain sceptical or ignore the debates.  The famous symptom of this is the idea it is somehow wrong to bring politics into church.

Sometimes there may be consultation, where church members are graciously permitted to discuss something that has already been decided before they give it their consent.  So, we see the great debates, sometimes in the eyes of the media, where a major council of a church has to choose between a prescribed solution, rejection of the same solution and either way threats of schism.

There are of course honourable exceptions.  In the Catholic tradition, there is the practice of discernment.  The Quakers' search for the spirit of the meeting, may be a related approach to discernment. 

But it is time the leadership of all the traditions took a long hard look at how they make decisions.  How many really make the effort to take all relevant information on board?  How many trust their people?  How many listen to them, involve them and genuinely believe this is something worth doing? 

I believe God speaks to us as communities, not individuals.  The will of God for us is discerned through our conversations.  And that is conversations that are generative.  If we want to do this, we need to learn the skills.  A new 'Participation' category to this blog will explore these skills.

Last Saturday we ran a day workshop called 'Participation in Church'.  About 30 people attended from all over the country and we simply discussed what participation means or might mean for us in our churches.  It was a mix of several traditions, including some fresh expressions and other new independent churches.

This file is a brochure we produced in advance of the day, it includes a brief introduction to participative methods.

Download ParticiaptioninChurch-summary