At the end of his elder exit interview, Ted* leaned across the table. He looked the head pastor of their large urban church in the eye and said, “This is my parting shot: Lots of gay people are starting to show up at church. But you never talk about the issues. There’s a lot of noise in the system – we need to find our stance.”
A week later, the pastor announced to the new board that they would spend the coming year discerning where they stood on LGBTQ inclusion. He gave them each a copy of A Letter to My Congregation by Ken Wilson and committed to discussing part of it at each elder meeting.
there might need to be more to discernment than handing out a book and discussing it.
Stage 3 in the process of your church’s own discovery journey around LGBTQ questions focuses on the discernment team. Frankly, there might need to be more to discernment than handing out a book and discussing it.
Building the Team
There are three main options for building a discernment team.
One of the key conversations with your board is about decisional clarity (more in the Stage 2 blog). You must decide WHO is doing the discerning when it comes to LGBTQ inclusion. There are three main options for building a discernment team, and all of them can be executed well. They each come with strengths and weaknesses. The choice depends on both your ministry context and your church governance.
- The board itself is the discernment team. The advantage is that if the board is making the final decision, then it’s convenient to have your board do the work. The difficulty is that it takes a lot of time to discern well, and boards often have a lot of other responsibilities weighing on them. And sometimes the board isn’t representative of the sorts of conversation partners you’d like on the team.
- The board creates a sub team of board members. The advantage is that it’s still kept to the board; plus members with more time can be chosen. The disadvantage is that a sub team may not represent the full range of the board/congregation. Also there needs to be crystal clarity about how the sub team communicates with the whole board and who has ultimate decision-making authority.
- A discernment team is chosen from the church. Often this includes a pastor and/or board member or two plus several other congregants. The advantage here is you can build a team both that has time/energy and that intentionally reflects the congregation (e.g., having a youth on it; having the parent of a queer child on it; having a therapist on it, etc.). The challenge again is getting to crystal clarity about how this team communicates with the whole board and who has ultimate decision-making authority. Plus it can be difficult to build such a team.
There are a couple other things to think about when choosing a team, most notably its theological makeup. We know churches that have chosen teams to balance a diversity of perspectives, ones that all have a similar perspective (and are open to learning more), and ones that have made sure not to ask team members their perspectives before beginning. Again, your particular context matters so much.
Guiding the Team
Whether it’s your elders or a group from the congregation, your discernment team will need some specific guidance. First off, you’ll need to define the scope of the team. For example, a church we’ve been working with recently has found these major questions helpful for its discernment team, each with a few specific sub-questions (about kids ministry, weddings, etc.):
- What is our posture towards LGBTQ people?
- What is our position on core questions of LGBTQ inclusion?
- What are our practices around LGBTQ inclusion?
Besides laying out the scope of the team, training is required as well. At least the first meeting must be devoted to how to have difficult conversations. In addition, we recommend that each subsequent meeting has an intentional piece focusing on how to disagree well. Every bit of energy you put into strengthening your ‘conflict muscle’ will pay off tenfold by helping people of diverse perspectives remain in close fellowship when the process is over.
Resourcing the Team
What the team studies matters.
What the team studies matters. It’s simpler just to drop a couple of books on the discernment team and have them read a chapter or two before each meeting, but that may not be the best approach. On the side of being overly thorough, one of the LGBTQ Study Team members at our church asked if they’d get a degree after they finished our curriculum! (It’s HERE – a bit dated, but quite thorough!).
Depending on the team and the context, a curriculum can span 3-12 months of meetings, and typically it covers a diversity of material from Jesus-centered and scripture-honoring perspectives.
A thoughtful curriculum makes a huge difference in the team feeling confident that they’ve considered the matters at hand.
Some churches have people in them who have invested a ton of time into these issues and can put together their own curriculums. Others need coaching on that element of the process. One way or the other, a thoughtful curriculum makes a huge difference in the team feeling confident that they’ve considered the matters at hand, thus enabling them to discern with clarity and to draw the process to a close with unity and strength.
Small Church Big Table offers coaching around how to build a discernment team, train that team, and resource the team with appropriate curriculum. You can learn more HERE.
-Bill
Read the next post in this series: Stage 4 (Congregation)