EXPANDING THE CONVERSATION
For over twenty years, the Presbyterian Interracial Dialogue deliberately provided opportunities for inter-racial study, worship, social events, and shared ministry projects. As mentioned, the story of that effort is told in the book, Let’s Have Lunch, which is available at my website, www.smccutchan.com .Yet one of my disappointments was that we never had the majority of the congregations participate in any of our activities. There were always the dedicated disciples from each of the congregation, but what about the others.
Lately, I’ve begun to dream about how we might make use of our INTERNET abilities to encourage in depth conversation throughout each of our congregations. What if we could learn to listen to each other in depth about both our hopes and fears surrounding our experience of race in our churches, and maybe even eventually in our society.
USE OF TECHNOLOGY
This is in its experimental stage, but imagine if the whole congregation agreed to participate in such a conversation. What I am suggesting is that we use a program like Survey Monkey to gather the thoughts of our membership in a way that we could build a picture of our congregation and their understanding of our Christian response to racism. I know a number of pastors and congregations that are reluctant because talking about such a volatile subject can lead to strong disagreements and even splits in a church. But what if we could gather that information anonymously from our members and share graphs of our church’s thoughts and beliefs.
BUILD AN IMAGE OF YOUR CHURCH
I’ve begun to construct a series of survey questions around the church and race that could be sent out by email to our whole congregation and their responses without names attached could be shared in graph form. Each set of questions would guide the church’s thoughts deeper and deeper into the subject without making any individual feel exposed while at the same time they could see how their personal thoughts measured up with the church as a whole.
INITIAL STAGE
If you email me, steve@smccutchan.com, I am willing to share a pamphlet outlining the procedure and sharing a sample of the types of questions that I suggest. You could then talk to your church leadership about the value of having such a conversation. In this initial stage, the cost to you would be to offer me feedback on your experience.
I will share a sample of such questions in another post or blog.
