THE (ALMOST) LOST ART OF HOLY CONFERENCING

Earlier this week, I was on a Zoom with a church council meeting from a different time zone - meaning that it started at 10 pm at night (from where I was).  In addition, I was visiting family with very sketchy wifi - so it is a miracle that I heard anything at all of the meeting. People froze and unfroze the whole time.  Further, it was a meeting that ran out of its intended 75 minute bounds, pushing to nearly 2 hours.  If all of that doesn’t sound bad enough, the major agenda item was a debate on what to do about the church’s mask policy as the pandemic slowly subsides locally.

It was a perfect storm: the perfect set up to the church meeting from hell.  My father was a pastor - back in the 50s, his student pastorate had a church meeting which devolved into chair throwing and calling the police.  It is hard to throw chairs on Zoom, but some topics do invite polarization rather than finding common ground.

And yet, our church council meeting was such a lovely gathering.  I felt like I was at church, really at church.  This particular church happens to be pretty good at taking a deep breath when hard topics present themselves and conferencing well.  It is a skill that many churches would be wise to develop.

The mask question came in two parts: what would be the rules of the road for weekday food ministries, with lots of homeless folk in and out of the fellowship hall, and what would be the rules when it was time for public worship.  The first question proved easy enough, since we take some public funding to feed folks, and so state regulations really apply - or at least, we can honor such regulations and keep things simple.  The second question was trickier.

There are surely 101 different approaches to Covid mitigation at church across varied parts of the world and various faith traditions.  And Americans, who always love to fight about something, have fought more over masks in the past year than just about anything I can remember.  I am involved in the three congregations these days, beyond the scores of churches and pastors that we coach globally at Epicenter.  As of this writing, the policies in these three churches are a bit like the three beds in the Goldilocks tale.  One church is still meeting entirely online, one meets in the building with masks required for all, and one meets in the building with masks optional and normal music.  None of the three are sloppy or irresponsible in the seriousness with which they have approached the pandemic.  Each is committed to providing a safe space for worship.

Back to what should have been the church meeting from hell: there were three basic approaches proposed: (1) keep masking up everyone out of an abundance of caution, (2) treat people like adults and let them make a call in terms of what makes them comfortable, since many of them will go straight to Sunday lunch, where there is not a mask in the house and (3) allow the vaccinated to go unmasked, but insist that the others wear masks for everyone’s safety.  The church leaders chose number 1, and by a reasonable consensus with a few abstentions.  Their reasoning: John Wesley’s General Rules: one of which is do no harm.  Thinking of both the people who are immune compromised and of the people who are un-vaccinated and who would be embarrassed to have to reveal their medical info at the welcome desk - the best “do no harm” pathway seemed to be keep the masks for just a few more weeks and then review.

Here is what I loved about the meeting:

(1) The group came expecting that God would help them find a way forward that everyone could live with.

(2) The issue was framed in terms of caring for all, especially for the vulnerable among us.

(3) All viewpoints were expressed clearly and great points made. 

(4) The pastor asked the oldest and longest-standing member of the church (the matriarch) to weigh in with her wisdom - it was this woman (Marge) who gave us the Wesleyan theological framework to use with the conversation.

(5) The conversation evidenced a bit of practice - in other words, this was not the first time they had tried to listen respectfully to one another and to the Spirit and discover together a way forward.  (In fact we had just had a conversation about converting half the church’s land to affordable housing a month ago - a conversation also fraught with possibilities for division.)

(6) The church came out stronger for having had a tough conversation and found a reasonable solution.  Its like building muscles.  If we keep at it, we may be able to tackle tougher questions in the future.  And in this century, holy conferencing muscles are a decided asset!

If your church would like to learn how better to do this, I would welcome a single-call consultation where we can lay out a framework for how to create ground-rules and capacities to tackle a big question that may be looming (such as denominational identification).

I wish each of you a blessed summer!!