"the u", and you

this last weekend, i was part if a group of people who showed up to try and see if a large number of people could make a decision which was too difficult for a small number of people to make.  when put that way, it seems pretty clear what the result would be.

if you weren't there, the rest of this post probably won't be too interesting.  feel free to read it, but it might not make much sense and i don't feel like explaining everything.

at the level of "how many checklist items can i mark off per second of my time", pretty much what you would expect to happen happened.  we entered into a process which is apparently called "the u" and came out with ... i'm not sure what.  we talked and listened to each other a lot, and accomplished very little in terms of concrete decisions.

i'd love to write the redemptive turn paragraph here, where i talk about the surprisingly beautiful and wonderful thing which was created which is so much more important that some mundane thing like a decision.  that paragraph is eluding me.  i want to write the paragraph because i was in a room with 20 other really beautiful people who suspended their pragmatic on-the-clock-my-time-is-important self protection to give to each other and to a process.

there was suprising beauty.  there are things too personal to share for me, and things that other people shared which are too personal to write.  if you love people, you have to love that.  we all spoke of dreams we had, dreams for a better world, where the church is aligned with justice and healing and all the stuff that we hope for.  we talked about the way that a movement bigger than emergent village, realy a movement bigger than christianity, seemed to be in process and we also talked about our weakness and how we needed something, something like the emergent village, to help us continue to reach for that dream.  so very fabulous and wonderful.

i personally learned a lot this weekend.  learned some things from people who have no idea how much they have changed me.  and as i read blogs of other people who were there, they are all looking back on the weekend tenderly and gently.

so i am not allowed to say that it was a huge waste of time which didn't accomplish anything.

however, if our task was to make decisions, then we have to live with the above sentence hovering over all that beauty.  because a lot of really hard decisions are now going to have to be made by a smaller group, which will somehow have to channel the spirit of the larger group, and the even larger group of people they came to represet.  questions like these:

• does there need to be an organization called "emergent village"?
• what are the goals of such an organization?
• what are the resources needed by that organization in order to accomplish those goals?
• what are the values of this organization which help it focus, say no to the right things, and also say how it wants to accomplish it's goals?
• what structures wil serve the goals and values of the organization?
• is this an organization which needs to be "for everyone", like a eccumencial council which is shamed if there is even one person left off, or is it comfortable with being "for" a smaller group of people than everyone.

we spent a lot of time learning to listen to each other and trying to tease common themes out of individual dreams, and all of these questions were mentioned in the process, but we never had a real down and dirty, ugly enough wrestling with the above questions.  as a result, someone else will have to wrestle with the questions.  i don't feel like, the output of the "u" weekend is strong or clear enough that even if 3 people from the weekend sit in a room and have all the data from the weekend in front of them, they would be able to answer those questions feeling like they had adequately represented the will of the weekend participants.

and i feel really badly having said that.  this weekend was a joint art project, a loving creation put together by a lot of great people. i think the art is indeed beautiful.  i am wondering if it is useful.  if it isn't useful, that doesn't mean it isn't art, in fact it might signifiy even more the artistic validity of the thing.

the question i have been mulling over in my head is, what else could you do?  if i knew the answer to that one, i'd probably be writing a book.  to try and answer that would just be a stupid, arrogant move, like a drunk fan in the stands at a sporting event yelling at the brilliant coach about how his strategy sucks.  so here goes:

i think the "u process" needed to be modified for this group of people.  it seems like it was designed to help task oriented people reach beyond their local concerns and think globally and creatively.  we had a room full of people who had by and large already made that leap.  we needed to figure out how to narrow our creativity into actionable statements, and we had too little time narrowing compared to the time we spent broadening.  this group needed more time and more help reducing and less help imagining.

i think we needed a clearer overall goal for "why are we in this room" because the focus kept shifting from the narrow set of questions which would help emergent village decide what to do, to the broader set of questions on what people of faith can do with themselves to actually help heal a broken world.

that's my report from the weekend.  if have been harsh or unfair with a thing of beauty that someone really treasures, i apologize.   i tried very hard as a i wrote this to honor the gifts that were given, both on that weekend, and the gifts given which had created and sustained  "the emergent conversation" as long as i have been a part of it.

Comments

[Rick Bennett]

yours is the one reaction I wanted to read (and only one I will probably read) because I knew it would move beyond what is usually written about any such event and get to deeper meaning. I guess one old man wants to know how another old man thinks about such things.

Thanks for the friendship.

[Deanne Gibbs-Brown]

I really appreciate your report. On some level I feel I know from you some of what went on in the room. The drawing out is important. It bridges, unifies, energizes and allows space to create out of strength. And I've been in many groups where that is hard to get started. But I am not surprised that this EV group would be so creative that it would require more "reigning in" or 're- focusing on defining some 'Next Best Steps."

Intuitively I believe that these great gifts will generate the energy, and the space..... to define 'next best steps' one at a time, over time. Perhaps not as quickly as some might like. But still it will generate goodness in our world.