And the way of getting there will be — well, they’ll see how it all works out. The General Assembly Council is dipping its toe into consensus decision-making, which involves bringing a group to a point of decision by sharing of ideas and sensing the flow of direction, rather than using the familiar parliamentary procedure. (“Call the question,” a council member said during one committee meeting. “Call the consensus,” someone else joked back.)
It’s trying to be more “holistic” — spending less time divided into committees, more time in conversation as a group, focusing more intensively on a few things.
The council is being challenged to study the budget harder, to understand it better — the full group spent time one evening in “Budget 101.”
People are talking about what they’ve seen and what they hope to see, what’s working in the denomination and what’s not. And there’s a hope that the discussion will lead people to a common sense of what’s most important in four priority areas — leadership, justice, evangelism and spiritual formation.
There also was an acknowledgment at this meeting that the council has, at least twice in recent years, tried approaches to budget priority setting that haven’t worked very well. Three years ago, meeting at this same conference center in North Carolina, the council was asked to rank existing programs as high, medium or low impact. And last fall in Louisville, the council used the Six Great Ends of the Church as a framework for trying to set program and budget priorities.
The first try “was an uncomfortable process for most everyone,” said Kathy Lueckert, the council’s deputy executive director. One staff member described that as “forced-choice” rankings. And in the effort last fall to use as a framework the Six Great Ends of the Church, from the PC(USA)’s Constitution, “we got a little hung up on language,” leading to different interpretations and questions about what the council’s role and purpose really is, Lueckert said.
But she also said some valuable lessons were learned from those misfires. For example, this time around, the council is being given more time to talk and to brainstorm about what they see as the council’s most important work, before setting any budget priorities.
On Friday, the council members broke up into five small groups — one each for the four priority areas, plus a fifth for “doesn’t fit” any category — to talk about what the council realistically can and cannot do. Among the questions they were asked to consider was: “In this goal area, what should be the key areas of focus of the GAC for the next two years?”
They talked about “silo mentality” and trust and communication and how there’s not just one way for churches to be. What does “justice” really mean? How should Presbyterians worship and study the Bible?
In the spiritual formation group, council members talked about the need for creative, engaging, exciting worship that’s still grounded in the Reformed tradition.
“We see churches that are growing but are throwing the baby out with the bathwater and simply abandoning any semblance of Reformed worship,” said John Pruitt of North Carolina. Worship should be more than entertainment or “watching a concert,” another person said.
At the same time, young people often come to Presbyterian churches and “their sense of our worship is that it’s too archaic and too liturgical,” said Mark Hong of California.
“We don’t have to change everything overnight,” Pruitt said. “But start doing some little things” that are an effort to try new things.
The justice group talked about how world realities shift — about how terrorism is much more on people’s minds now than it was a few years ago, how justice can be anything from fighting hunger to protecting the environment to economic justice to racial-ethnic inclusiveness and gender equality.
And they tried to narrow down things to their top concerns.
The council can “talk and talk and talk,” said Andrea Catherine Stokes, but “unless we focus on something, it’s pointless.”
After talking it out for two hours, the groups reported back their top priorities — everything from recapturing the passion for telling people about Jesus Christ to encouraging multicultural leadership to crisis management for the denomination. Before the meeting ends, the council intends to use consensus decision-making to make decisions on areas of focus for each of the goals — choices that then will be used to shape the budgets for 2005 and 2006.
