Craig

My story is different again, so maybe I’ll go next. I spent 19 years leading a church in a village called Ormesby, which was on the east coast of Norfolk. Towards the end of my time there we changed our building, opening it up with a big glass front which we felt was our way of saying to the community, “you’re welcome to come in” – we weren’t forcing them to go through a narrow dark corridor to get into the church. As I was walking past the building one morning, the builders had just started digging foundations for the new front and I had an idea. I thought: “a new building deserves a new name”. Outside was an old tatty sign board: Ormesby Baptist Church and it suddenly occurred to me that none of those 3 words actually made sense. About 60% of our membership didn’t come from Ormesby, and many travelled in from quite some distance. The village was completely confused by what Baptist meant: people used to catch me at the school gate and ask if I would baptise their baby! And everybody from the area called us ‘the chapel’, distinguishing us from the Anglican church. So none of the three words actually made much sense to the wider community. 

So I thought it was time to ask a question and I brought it to a church meeting. I introduced an open discussion with an introductory sentence going something like: “here’s an opportunity… what do you think?” I thought, quite wrongly, that everybody else would be as excited about the new opportunity as I was. Now, of course, some people were. Other people instantly put their foot down and declared that they liked the name as it was. But the majority in the middle were open, so we began a discussion, which was mostly good-natured, but it was good-natured confusion because I had thrown the cat amongst some pigeons and expected it to go well!  It soon became clear that we weren’t getting anywhere. Then one of our elders stood up and he picked something up from the table and held it in the air. And he said, “I’ve got a suggestion… this represents the name of our church. Can we agree to put it down and agree that we might pick it up again or we might not. But only if we all agree.” And the atmosphere in the room changed. And everybody said, “yeah, let’s do that”, and we agreed unanimously. That suggestion enabled us to have a different discussion. And it was genius. And I was so pleased that somebody else rescued me!

We ended up calling ourselves the Light of Life Baptist Church, which is still its name today.

Simon

My answer to this question requires a bit of a prologue. I was in a church where there had been a lot of conflicts and someone introduced something they called ‘Quaker decision making’. I’ve subsequently talked to a load of Quakers and none of them have heard of this at all, so I don’t know where it comes from! 

It involves simply using all five fingers of the hand to express people’s views in a way that is not just black and white, yes or no. So, in the context of collective discernment in the life of a church, putting up five fingers means, not just ‘yes’, but ‘I feel that God is saying yes, and I’m willing to put my time and money into making this thing happen’. Because in many churches a lot of people will say yes to something and then they’ll forget all about it, and someone else has to do it and someone else has to pay for it. So saying yes can be very easy. Four fingers is something like, ‘I think God is probably in this, but it’s not something that I’m personally passionate about’. All the way down to one finger – and you have to be careful which one finger it is – which means ‘I’m really, really unhappy about this idea. I don’t think that God is behind this’. You can also put no fingers up, which is a fist. And I’ve only been in one situation in the church that I’ve been part of for 25 years where there was a fist. Very early on in the life of the church we agreed that if there was ever a fist we would never progress, even if every other person was for it. If there was someone in the community who was absolutely sure that this was wrong, not just that they didn’t like it or they wouldn’t want to be involved in it, but they were personally convinced that God was against this decision, then we would stop. And weirdly, the only time that this happened in the life of our church was in the name of the church Craig!

We’d founded a youth event called Revive that had become a congregation and I was very keen that our Baptist denomination recognised Revive as a church, and that I be recognised as a Baptist minister. I felt we needed credibility and that the Baptist denomination needed to be able to recognise that what we were doing was authentic ministry. And boy, did some people find it hard! However, in the end the only thing the Union asked of us was that we call ourselves Revive Baptist Church, and not just Revive. And this was something that one person felt was absolutely wrong, that we were compromising on our principles and what we felt God had told us. 

This took us six months, and this is where it gets complicated if you work in consensus. How do you make that person feel comfortable in community when they have the power of their veto? Because they weren’t the kind of person that enjoyed that power. They just felt really, really strongly about this. How do we pray it through? And in that case, It did involve sitting with them and talking through the politics of the decision. Over the course of six months, the person went from a fist to one finger. And we proceeded. There’s now nothing other than our legal documents that will say that we are Revive Baptist Church – everywhere else we just call ourselves Revive. But that person had to feel comfortable saying ‘no’ without feeling pressure from everyone else. And we had to be comfortable with our commitment to this supposedly Quaker model. It may be that this dissuaded people from ever raising a fist in future because no one wants to take six months of prayer meetings and discussions to make a decision. But that person is still involved 27 years later. So I think, for me, that’s a good form of collective decision making.

Craig

That’s interesting. That is a really creative way of doing it. I think I’d have problems being involved in Revive because I could never raise five fingers. If I decide which hand to raise – I could choose four or I can decide on three!

Simon

That’s a bit like the first ever episode of The Traitors where they got rid of the disabled woman for not raising her hand where she didn’t have a hand to raise!

Julie

I really like how that method gives the option of different levels of yes. I may well use that one in my ministry with my church.

Dave

Can I just make two comments. The first is creativity. For example, your elder Craig, the one who broke a deadlock with a simple, I would say, prophetic act. It was a game changer. And I also love the 5 fingers. The inclusivity of that, the non-judgmentalism towards people who disagree.

Julie

I would say it’s not that inclusive, as Craig’s pointed out, but I get what you mean about inclusion about views!

Craig

Except there aren’t very many of us with hands like mine. I think Simon’s community would probably find a way of including me.

Dave

I’m sure they would. And the other thing I loved in Simon’s story about the five-finger exercise is that it makes people take responsibility for their actions. They’re not just putting their hands up and then expecting everybody else to do all the work. By demonstrating that they’re behind it, they’re also taking personal responsibility to see it through, or to smooth its path, even if they don’t totally agree with it.