Reconciliation

Our Unitarian Universalist Church of Flint is a diverse community struggling with some growing pains. We embrace, in our words, a mission that says we are "growing in numbers, diversity and purpose," and at the same time, fear that by growing in numbers we will lose something of our intimate community. Our shared culture contains, like that of many churches, some behavior patterns that are from the small, family-sized church, some of the slightly larger pastoral church we have been for decades, and aspirations to be a larger, program church with an exciting program in lifespan learning, a diverse music ministry a campus ministry, etc.

You can tell that there will be missteps and hurt feeling when the community represents such a clash of cultures. It can't be helped! I know that I disappoint people every day, act (and act out?) in ways that are inconsistent with people's expectations of me. When I can, I say a heartfelt "I'm sorry" and hope that it will be accepted and we can go forward. But other times, it is the inevitable conflict of expectations that exists in a complex system that puts me in a difficult place--and puts our volunteers in difficult places, too. And it feels as if there is no way out.

One "way" ("iter" in Latin, right??) that we are trying is an iterative dialogue that has been held on two occasions, facilitated by Bob Brown, Associate Director of University-Community Partnerships of Michigan State University. Our first conversation of reconciliation looked at what I consider an essential for accomplishing shared ministry, the notion of co-creation. I was pleased that the following words were created by the first group of conversants--although I'm not sure any of the others expected that I might use them in a liturgical setting for our whole church. But I did!

The resulting Sunday service, yesterday, moved many of the participants. It affirmed my thought that, if we are to be about establishing the "new norms" that will let our church grow in numbers to be more effective in Genesee county, more dialogue like this needs to undertaken. More liturgies need to be created. Fuller celebration of the ideas of shared responsibility and opportunity needs to be experienced by our community, starting, I think, with me. (You may say that it needs to start with you!)

Reading of Reconciliation
Leaders: To co-create is to be collaborative, to be mutually beneficial to all and our church.
People: It is about the well-being of the whole, about the best interest of our church.
It is about intentionally planning change together, finding common direction.
It is about teamwork, inclusion and respect.
It is about achieving more together than can be achieved alone.

Leaders: To co-create is to seek diversity in voices and ideas.
People: It is about honoring differences in viewpoints and ideas.
It is about finding space for the expression of those differences.
It is about reconnecting with those who feel left out, alienated, overlooked.

Leaders: To co-create is to share power; it is the exercise of shared power.
People: It is about shared leadership, empowering individuals & committees to act.
It is about building our collective capacity to act.
It is about accountability to the whole.
It is about understanding that we as individuals will not always agree with the whole.

Leaders: To co-create is to move from what is, to what can be.
People: It is about being open to change, to new ideas.
It is about unlimited possibilities and realizing potential.
It is about not being restrained by what is.

Leaders: To co-create is to be responsive to each other’s and the church’s needs.
People: It is about all of us being sensitive to one another’s feelings and beliefs.
It is about everyone feeling safe and free to express points of view.

Leaders: To co-create is to check our egos at the door.
People: It is about inter-subjectivity.
It is about “I-Thou” relating, instead of “I-It.”

Leaders: To co-create is to build on all of our strengths.
People: It is about accepting that our entire community is in the process of co-creating.
It is about respect for each other in all interactions.

Leaders: To co-create is to work together in an understood and agreed upon process.
People: It is about deciding collectively how we work together.
It is about the ongoing dissemination of our working-together processes.
It is about evolving our processes together if needed.

Meditation

Words of Encouragement
Leaders: How do we know when we are not co-creating successfully? We are not co-creating:
People: When we are not listening or communicating.
When goals are not mutually agreed upon.
When goals are not being met.
When things go bad.
When nothing new is being made.
When challenges to authority are stifled.

Leaders: How do we know when we are co-creating successfully? We are co-creating:
People: When mutually agreed upon goals are being met and they are good for our church.
When we hear the collective, “Wow!”
When grievances are resolved.
When diversity is apparent.
When it feels that things are going right—we’re “in the flow.”
When we are interconnected and not in silos.
When we honor multiple ways of making meaning.
When we are communicating and connecting in a positive way.
When our traditions and history are being honored.
When we check the relevance of our history and traditions.
When we feel safe to voice any opinion.
When we hear laughter.

Conflict and the Too-Busy Life

Life has been too-full of late, including a weekend in Des Moines, Iowa filling the pulpit of a colleague on sabbatical, and a weekend in Cincinnati for the Heartland UU District Board of Trustees, on which I am a Member At-Large.

This doesn't mean I haven't been writing, but it does mean that until my laptop got fixed (It is now, hurrah!), I haven't had the capacity easily to post. I'll post a few thoughts in the next couple of days, but for now I want to share my latest newsletter column from The Flint Unitarian Universalist.

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Dear congregation, our members and friends,

You may know that I have a somewhat split personality when it comes to matters of faith. I’ve told you that my working faith understanding is one of humanism, an understanding that the natural world contains all that is, and that we don’t need the supernatural to reliably live with one another—and the earth—morally and ethically, joyously and aesthetically. Still, the religion of my upbringing ties me to the stories of Jesus, teacher, brother and friend, organizer and rabblerouser, and—mystically, impossibly—the savior and redeemer of all that is.

The task of resolving the conflicts among these understandings is mine. That’s what I believe, and that’s what our liberal religion promotes. Each of us uses this religious community to help us on our spiritual growth, letting us create provisional answers for life’s large questions. We seek universal answers even as we expect that we must remain wide open to the unexpected, to the challenging, to the diverse.

We say we want to behave with one another in ways that allow for a multiplicity of provisional answers to our many questions. We say that we want to welcome the stranger, to encourage each other, to allow for difference. Still, we get into trouble with each other because—well, because we are human. Our human differences, the differences of our experiences, the differences of our self-assessments and our assessments of other people’s capacity (or incapacity!), our brokenness and alienation often leave us in bad behavior and conflict.

Conflict is not a bad thing. Understood and addressed, it can be a motor for improvement, evolution. When those of us who are in conflict bring, face-to-face, our differences; when we listen as well as speak; when our interaction causes us to better refine our own positions, we may learn better who we, ourselves, are and what the specific contribution is that we might make to our common life.

Conflict that is avoided can cause us to look at the world around us not as it really is. Conflict that is avoided can send up that marvelous river “Denial,” and leave us adrift. Conflict avoided can harm us.

By the same token, conflict that escalates—and conflict can escalate quickly!—can be very harmful and hurtful. Conflict escalates when, rather than bringing a question or problem to the person who can help resolve the question, it is spread around through rumor and gossiping and further avoiding the real problems and personalities.

Speed Leas of the Alban Institute identifies five levels of conflict in congregations:
I is “A Problem to Solve”;
II is “A Disagreement”;
III is “A Contest among Parties”;
IV is “Fight or Flight”; and
V is “Intractable Conflict.”

When we have confusion or disagreement about something, we can resolve it in the first two conflict levels and decide how to act together. (Sometimes we vote. Sometimes we figure out who is supposed to be responsible.)

When we get into that difficult place where the conflict is not about the “issues” but about the people or personalities with whom we disagree, or when we begin to threaten to leave, or when we know that the only way out is the annihilation of the opposing party, then we are stuck in a place that requires some outside help to work things through and find a resolution—one where, usually, not all parties will be happy!

Our interactions with one another reveal plenty of places where we there is lack of clarity about process, and some confusion about responsibility for programs and decisions. Some places we find that we don’t all agree with the decisions we’ve made with one another. This is normal. We keep talking, trying to listen more completely and speak more precisely. Sometimes we learn just to be quiet and listen to the sound of our own hearts.

We have times set aside this month. An “after church conversation” on Mar. 2. The “Open” service on Mar. 30. Additional times which will be set for small group interaction in a more relaxed setting.

When the conflict we face is larger, (Level IV? Level V!) we may need to ask someone outside to help us talk through our differences. We may need to look at other congregational “right relations” policies to address challenges that we have. We might need to ask a consultant to help us express a radical honesty about our differences. We might have to unearth our fears about the church, its direction and future.

Maybe it is here that I’m happiest that I have this “Jesus loving” side. On the Christian side of my split personality, I know that there is a God—and it is not I!—and that there is a resurrection hope beyond the pain of change and conflict. I know that there is, somehow, a way that everything can be saved, redeemed.

My practice each spring in the weeks leading to Easter is to set aside time daily to be quiet, to study and meditate, even to pray. I’ve been blessed to do this, since Paczki Day (thanks for the Polish pastries!), in ways that make sense to my spiritual quest: watching a video class on great ideas in philosophy, reading the biblical prophets, listening to devotional music, leading interfaith chanting among colleagues . . . and keeping you in my heart.

“Morning by morning new mercies I see,” says the old evangelical hymn, and my quest for mercy has you at its center. I long for ways for us to more fully embody our liberal religion with each other, to be the community of right relations which honors our faith. To embrace conflict well. To change. To grow.

Happy (Humanistic) Easter, one and all.

Love, just love,

(Rev.) David Carl Olson
minister

P.S. Please join members of the Greater Flint Interfaith Community on Tuesday, March 18 at the Life Enrichment Center for a Peace Service on the evening before the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. This non-partisan service is an expression of our deep desire to end not only this war but all war, and asks us to call on our spiritual resources to imagine ways out of this war and all war. The Peace Prayer Service is sponsored by the Genesee County Committee for Community Peace, and members of the Life Enrichment Center will lead the service itself. Leaders of the congregations of Temple Beth El, Woodside Church, Lou’Helen Baha’i Center and the Al-Saddiq Institute & Mosque have indicated interest in attending. I hope you can be there, too, at the corner of Lennon and Dye.