Julie

No, the majority doesn’t always get it right, and we could give some political examples there maybe! 

Thinking back over what we’ve already said – the best way to make a decision is prayerfully and it usually takes longer than you think it’s going to take! All those ‘one another’ verses in the Bible are key. Bear with one another, listen to one another… its about listening well and thinking deeply together. There has to be trust between the people in the community to allow an honest discussion, to pray together and to accept that no one person has the answer and that it’s together we learn because we need other people to help us listen well.

A few months ago, on a sunny day off, I set off on a walk up a hill close to my home. As I climbed, I saw two people descending towards me and as I got nearer, I recognised them as a married couple who are linked to our church. We stopped to chat and one of them said excitedly, “Have you heard the skylarks?” I stared at her blankly. I could hear birdsong, but I had no idea what type of birds were making the sounds (I’m pretty rubbish at identifying bird song. I know what a cuckoo sounds like, but that’s about it!). She explained what to listen for and taught me how to recognise the song of a skylark, then I went on my way across the hillside.

As I climbed the Yorkshire moor, I heard many skylarks and stopped to listen to the beautiful song. Knowing what type of bird was making the sound added to my appreciation of it. I was thankful to have met my friends who shared their knowledge and helped me make sense of what I could hear. The whole experience helped me feel closer to the One who created all I could see and hear.

Simon

I think another way of answering the question is to reframe it: can it ever be right to push on ahead against the majority? So, based on what I’ve said earlier about trying to work with consensus, it could be argued that, if this is the decision that we have made together having prayed and sought God, and if we’ve all agreed, then it is the right decision. Even if two years down the line we revisit it and decide it was the wrong decision. In that moment, if we have decided together, then that’s the right decision. 

If you just turn up to a meeting, and it’s the first time we’ve ever talked about this and everyone just has to put their hands up, then that kind of majoritarian democracy is not what I think any of us are advocating. But if we have a genuinely good discernment practice in which we pray on our own, we pray together, we listen to God and we give God space to speak, and at the end we make a decision that turns out to be, in retrospect, a bad decision I don’t think it was a bad decision in the sense that we’ve done the best that we can. And sometimes we will get it wrong. But that doesn’t mean it was a wrong decision.

Dave

Experience tells me that a majority vote that hasn’t been properly processed, hasn’t gone through the processes that we’ve talked about, rarely actually settles a matter in a congregational or a group setting. In fact, experience tells me that it might actually polarise opinion in unhelpful directions and potentially lead to years and years of people feeling they need to push back against the boundaries the decision has made. I think that sort of unhelpful majority kind of decision making is such a minefield. And perhaps that’s why in an ideal world we talk about consensus as much as we do. 

I’ve already suggested that certain decisions may need different kinds of decision making processes. That’s why a lot of organisations break decision making up into smaller groups, committees, for want of a better word. A committee is the body that is formed to think about an issue and feed into the decision making process, and maybe even trusted to go some way toward making the decision. Now that is obviously open to abuse, but sometimes it is important to recognise that different sorts of decisions require different sorts of processes. 

And I guess the final thing I would want to say is that one of the problems we have in organisations is that we think that once we’ve debated something, gone through the process and made a decision, that that’s the end of it. I know as well as you do that groups change, events change, and sometimes we have to revisit something that we thought we’d put to bed years ago, in order to take into account a new set of circumstances.

Craig

There’s a piece of wisdom I wish I’d learned much earlier in my leadership. And, because I learned it so late in my ministry, I’ve only used it once or twice. I remember hearing Richard Rohr speak where he described a process he located within Jewish tradition. He says that within some Jewish communities there’s an understanding right at the beginning of every discussion that they’re working their way towards what he calls a reconciling third position. This basically means that at the very beginning of a discussion we have agreed in advance that, by the end of the process, none of us are going to be in the place we started from. By the end, we will have walked to a new place which none of us is currently at. Because we’ve listened carefully, we’ve been willing to moderate our position, we have heard wisdom that we were not previously aware of, and that makes us want to end up in a different place. I just think that’s so wise. We begin every discussion believing that we are all going to learn something from this process. I love that.

Julie

I really, really love that, Craig. Thank you.

Dave

Richard Rohr is so thoughtful.

Simon

That’s a good way to end…

Roy

Amen!