The last several issues of the Record have focused a great deal on our ability or inability to have reasonable conversations about thorny issues within the church. As some letters to the editor reveal, dismissiveness and closed – mindedness all too readily appear as soon as someone questions what another person considers dogma.
Perhaps it is, in part, a lack of understanding about how to conduct a conversation. We are so used to the sound – bite declaratives of politicians trying to score points, that I wonder if we have forgotten the art of conversation, let alone dealing with the content of a conversation?
Andrew Faiz explores one kind of conversation in his cover story about art and the related conversation he has with Christian Worthington.
All art—whether visual, music or literature—are a kind of conversation. Initially, it’s a conversation between the artist and the viewer/listener/reader. But inevitably it engenders conversation among the wider community who engage with the art—e.g. a book club, the whispered discussions of people in art galleries, the passionate exchanges after watching a dramatic opera or ballet.
Usually people are relaxed and have their guard down in these encounters, so they more naturally employ one of the techniques that is useful to remember when there is more at stake in the debate. That is the value of asking questions.
Overwhelming research demonstrates that asking questions—leaving something on the table, in business parlance—engages the listener and is far more likely to be persuasive than simply throwing down the gauntlet with strident declaratives.
Search the Internet and you can find the benefit or virtue of asking questions applied to everything from teaching—”to question well is to teach well” is an old maxim—to dating. So I wonder if it might not also be a useful technique for us in the church to consider, especially as we debate and discuss difficult issues.
Declaratives tend to surface when we are afraid: When either we or the institutions we value are questioned, we circle the wagons and load our weapons.
And while we do that figuratively, others in the world do that literally. This is not to suggest there is any moral equivalence between murdering journalists in cold blood and calling people heretics in a religious debate. But there is a terrible common underlying insecurity and fear that manifests itself through an inability to tolerate questions.
The Boko Haram terrorists who slaughtered possibly 2,000 people and wiped the Nigerian town of Baga off the map have the same worldview as the gunmen who killed the Parisian journalists. Questioning is not an ability they have or will tolerate.
We may feel completely overwhelmed by these world events. But what would happen if we start small? What if we work at changing our own attitudes and to begin to ask questions?
My hope is that anger and fear will dissipate. We might not change our views, but we might be able to understand others’ points of view better and to accept whatever decisions the church makes.
