Tag: theory of consensus

Healthy Churches and Football

Healthy Churches and Football

Healthy churches remind me of football teams. Last weekend here in Australia the grandfinals were played in two major football codes. Well done Sydney City (NRL) and West Coast Eagles (AFL)! The analysis of why one side won and the other lost will continue for some time. The answers have a lot in common with why some churches are healthy and others are not healthy churches.

Here at Making Church Decisions we are very passionate about the importance of using consensus decision making. We know that this approach makes it possible to create healthy and effective churches for mission. But we also know that we can teach all the “rules” for running a connsensus building approach but that just isn’t enough for your success!!

Both teams in the football grandfinals knew the rules. Both teams had the same number of players and followed very similar tactics. Yet one side was victorious and the other was defeated. Therefore it is clear that knowing the rules and the playbook doesn’t guarantee that you will succeed!!

Successful Football Teams

The successful grandfinalists have a lot in common with churches that succeed in applying consensus discernment. The successful teams had these features:

  • players who just kept improving – never settling for the standard they had reached up to that time. In physical fitness and skills  they were “fit for purpose”
  • they played as a team and not a collection of “star” individuals
  • there was a captain and/or play makers who people trusted and followed, playing their part in response to that leadership
  • one or two sets of players who just “clicked” as a unit – partners who together were better than each one on their own
  • the coach had a plan and the team consistently put it into practice
  • creativity – they saw opportunities and took hold of them. It’s like they made something out of nothing.

Successful – Healthy – Churches

Healthy churches are essential for the effective implementation of consensus discernment. So, here are six supports for healthy churches. They have an amazing similarity to how to be a successful sporting team!

  1. Growing in Discipleship: mature disciples behave in mature ways. So churches need to never let their members settle for where they are in their discipleship. Leaders need to challenge people to constantly recognise their growth points and help them to achieve them. Consensus decision makers need to be “fit for purpose”.
  2. Fostering Healthy Relationships: healthy churches are not a collection of individual stars – and that includes the Minister / Pastor too!! Healthy churches know that to play as a team they have to make good relationships possible. So learn how to apologise, to forgive, to listen carefully and empathetically and to speak with care and respect. These are essential.
  3. Providing Strong Leadership: organizations need leaders. They also need people who will welcome that leadership and work with it in hopeful and expectant ways.
  4. Building Respectful Partnerships: help people to collaborate. Create environments that encourage partnerships and allow people to play to their strengths.
  5. Following a Clear Decision-Making Process: when people don’t know how and why things happen then it undermines teamwork. When using consensus discernment people need to know the game plan. They need to understand the process and how it gets to a decision point. Knowing the rules only makes sense if we know how they come together into an effective plan.
  6. Be open to Transformative Change: God doesn’t always work in with our strategic plan. Sometimes there are opportunities that just open up  in unexpected ways – and we have to take them. The whole process of consensus discernment assumes that God will show us something that we haven’t thought of yet. Therefore the churches that are best equiped to use it are those who know how to do transformative change – who know how to spontaneously create something.

Conclusion

The practices and tools of consensus discernment can be learned by anyone. Any group can use them – it isn’t that hard. But like knowing the rules of a game it doesn’t mean that you will be any good when it comes time to use them.

In order to be effective in using consensus discernment tools churches need to be healthy churches. So grow the quality of your discipleship and relationships. Honour and work with yor leaders, build partnerships, teach and follow good process and expect and delight in transformative change.

Six things that work against consensus

There are a number of things that work against consensus being achieved. They need to be recognised and addressed.

Group Think

When being a member of a group creates pressure on members to narrow down the range of opinions Groupthink occurs. When a group is very homogeneous in character, and attitudes among group members are too similar, it works against consensus. In such cases it is very difficult to generate new ideas that lead to the best decisions. This risk is not limited to groups that seek to build consensus for their decisions. However when coming to consensus is highly prized in a group, there can be pressure to conform. Groupthink can be minimized by allowing individuals to first independently collect information before presenting their recommended course of action.

When there is no group

A collection of individuals who have no shared purpose or common interests cannot make a group decision. There must be something that binds  people together and there must also be a shared willingness to work on the project together.

A major challenge facing churches that want to move to consensus building in decision-making is a high level of conflict amongst their members. The level of brokenness in relationships, limited trust and major positional differences are significant challenges and work against consensus.

Nevertheless every effort should be made to find the common ground of some shared values or higher level shared goals.  Serious disagreements should not be used as an excuse to avoid trying to build consensus.

No agreed purpose for the meeting

If people think that a meeting is only a rubber stamp for the leadership’s preconceived ideas then you can’t use consensus processes. When a meeting is seen as a source ideas that will be decided upon later then genuine consensus will not be sought. In The Church Guide For Making Decisions Together  we make the point that it works against consensus if participants in a meeting don’t agree about its purpose.

In emergencies

As the old saying goes “there are no democrats in a foxhole.” Different kinds of leadership are required for different purposes. A crisis needs swift action and usually a decision about which issue is most important to address at that time. Authority based leadership is most suitable in this context.

When there is no decision to take

Sometimes this occurs when a decision is particularly trivial. You don’t need a sophisticated process to decide the color of the table cloths in the church hall.

On other occasions it will be because not everyone has to agree on a given course of action. A church meeting might gather to consider mission strategies at which many ideas are shared. As interested people gather around the ideas that they support, they don’t need everyone to agree to do their thing before it can happen.

It isn’t the right time

Sometimes a group will not have all the information that it needs so it cannot reach a good decision. In such situations a pause should be taken. This allows for more data or resources to be gathered to inform the next stage of the conversation.

On other occasions people may have a clear idea on what should be done, but  will know that now is not the time. Many a good idea fails because it is planted out of season. Being willing to consider “when” is as important as the “what”.

Conclusion

Clearly there are obstacles to coming to consensus – where that means a unanimous decision. For other examples see here. Please share a comment  about when consensus building has proved to be difficult and what you did about it.

Even if it is unlikely that you will reach a unanimous view on a given subject – do not stop using consensus building techniques. Continue to show respect for one another. Listen carefully to all the voices. Seek common ground and be prepared to change your mind. Even if you don’t get to full agreement there will be many areas where consensus can be built. By identifying the areas of agreement it is possible to clearly identify continuing disagreements and to generate strategies for addressing them.

Five foundations for consensus

Foundations matter. With these five foundations you will be able to build a solid process for consensus based decision-making.

A common goal

People gathered together in groups can have a wide range of aims when they come together. Unless these aims are aligned in some way then building consensus is not possible. It is no accident that the effective examples of consensus based discernment or decision-making are seen in groups that have a shared goal (web link to historic egs post).

Goals need to be aligned at a very high level – the detail is not as important as the highest shared value(s). Examples of high-level goals include making a commercial profit, maintaining peace and stability in a community, seeking to do the will of God, community action groups seeking change in their community. If the focus is too much on lower level objectives then the divergence between participants magnifies.

Identify and agreement about the high level goals.  People will support and strive to achieve these. This is an essential prerequisite foundation for building consensus. These goals or objectives may be served by a wide variety of strategies. The individual ideas about the way to achieve the goal become less important than the end point. As a result people can change from their initial ideas, or can accommodate more than one approach. If people see alternatives as a better way to support the main / common goal then they will accept them.

In The Church Guide For Making Decisions Together  we make the point that it is crucial to ensure that everyone agrees about the purpose of the meeting. For churches the fundamental priority for meetings is to discern the will of Christ for his church in this place and time. With this goal people can exhibit great openness to new insights, people changing positions and a growing consensus be developed. But don’t just assume that everyone is pulling in the same direction!

Commitment to reach consensus

Consensus building is a journey. The end point of that journey is discernment. You can’t abduct people and take them on this trip! People have to take it on voluntarily. This is the second of the foundations – people want to be part of the process.

Everyone must be willing to really try. Participants in the process need:

  • honesty about what it is they want or don’t want
  • genuine listening to what others have to say
  • humility so they can receive the wisdom of others and be prepared to change their position
  • patience – take the time to understand and to explain oneself
  • trust and openness – including that people will not seek to abuse the process

The Setting

How people are arranged in a meeting and how they “gather” are critical foundations for the success of a discernment process. Use a space that is hospitable and welcoming. If possible have refreshments and comfortable chairs. Arrange the room so that people look at each other face to face and not at the back of someone’s head.

Make sure that you spend time gathering and building the community. This can include prayer, a time with Scripture and “reconnecting as a community”. People come with all sorts of things on their mind. So time needs to be spent acknowledging each other, supporting members and reminding ourselves why we are there.

Take time

Don’t rush! If the process of consensus building takes longer than expected it rarely matters. Most business can be deferred if a final position has not been reached. Rushing the introduction of material, the listening to one another and the generation of options, undermines the process of building consensus. Some journeys are quick and others take longer. That’s OK – reaching the destination in good shape is the important thing.

Good facilitation

If your group is inexperienced in consensus building then your leaders may not have knowledge of all the steps in the process. There may be tools that can be used to build consensus that they don’t know. Training is available through resources like this website, trainers  in consensus building, and The Church Guide For Making Decisions Together.

However when your group is particularly large or the issues are quite complex give serious thought to using an external facilitator. Facilitators bring external expertise that support your leaders, make the process go smoothly, produce resources for use in the meeting, and ensure that all the important parts of the process get covered.

All of these conditions can be grown in your group over time. You don’t have to have everything perfect before you start on the consensus building road for decision-making. However like all wise travellers – you will want to know that you have the key requirements for the trip packed with you: a common goal, commitment, the setting and the time needed, and good facilitation. Are there any other “must haves” for this trip to discernment that you can share with us in the comments section?

 

Drafting Groups – devil or angel?

Drafting Groups are the most contentious part of a consensus building approach to discernment. Sending proposals to small groups where members discuss them is a strategy that can be used for complex business. These discernment groups have a facilitator who works through a well prepared process. Their views, along with recommendations for changes and new ideas, are sent to a drafting group.  The role of the drafting group is to bring all the ideas together.

Devils or Angels?

The most frequent objection to this process is that drafting groups have a lot of power. Cynics say that this small group can impose its views on the meeting and manipulate the process to achieve what it wants. The members of Drafting Groups are sometimes accused of being self serving and manipulative.

Drafting (sometimes called Facilitation) Groups take the information that has been provided through a small group discussion process. After attending to all the input they re present the views that have come to them. They do this by writing a report that is presented back to the meeting in a plenary session. The report explains what was reported to them, what they did with the information and why they made the decisions that they did. Drafting Groups help the members to have their say and to influence the final outcome of the discussion. If this group did not exist then the small group time would just be a lot of hot air.

Why you can have confidence in Drafting Groups

  • People are appointed who are known to be fair, trustworthy and true servant leaders
  • Members are not chosen to represent interest groups but because of their skills and maturity
  • Response sheets that are used in Discernment Groups are prepared by an experienced leader and are in a standard format
  • Reports from the Drafting Group explain every step of its work and the reasons for any new proposals that they bring
  • Members can ask questions of the report and have to receive it
  • If the new proposals do not reflect the developing consensus in the meeting then there will be significant push back
  • The Drafting Group makes no decisions but seeks to support the discernment of the members of the meeting

Trust is an important part of any meeting process. Appointing the right people and using tried and tested reporting formats means that members can have great trust in Drafting Groups.

Rev Norbet Stephens was Chairperson of the Drafting Group at the recent General Council meeting of the WCRC. He acknowledges that it is a challenging process, but with a skilled team it is possible to produce proposals that move forward the process of discernment. Hear Norbet in his own words.