Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

conversation

By

Community as action, not just conversation

A dark brown table with red berries garnishing the surface around floral white teapot and cups and saucers.
Photo credit: Anete Lūsiņa

People who care talking about things that matter are important to the reformation of society, but perhaps their talking is not as central to the project as I’ve thought.

For a few years now, thanks in part to Lowell Christy‘s description of the 17th and 18th Centuries as the era of the Great Conversation, I’ve been fascinated by how change-makers can use dialogue and incoming and outbound communications to establish themselves on the social landscape, engage supporters, acknowledge or respond to critics, and connect with their wider public.

But as a friend of mine said today, the research on the impact of conversation is not entirely positive. People become afraid to share their perspectives with others unless they believe their audience is already supportive, and so many of them prefer silence to the specter of disagreement.

Worse, according to Pew: most of us are poor judges of our friends’ views. Social media feeds appear very chatty, yet the underbelly of the full news feed is those of us, any of us, who would rather say nothing at all than risk contradiction or challenge through conversation.

And the Backfire Effect is also real: “When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.” —Dave McRaney

If conversations and new information are more likely to entrench participants than mutually enlighten them, they can’t be a reliable tool for highly polarized contexts. We have to instead address people’s values, the interpretative tools they use to sift current and new knowledge, and the authority figures they depend on when they can’t interpret sources for themselves.

Segments of the climate justice movement have applied this insight. Through the Citizen’s Climate Lobby, people from various parts of the political landscape can gather round a common goal and push together for material change.

CCL doesn’t require its members to rank climate issues in the same order of priority. They don’t have to agree on the degree of human responsibility for climate change (though as Katharine Hayhoe said to an audience earlier this year, the correct answer to that question is “100% or more”). New members simply join an introductory web call, local groups members take on the long-term work of educating each other, and membership is based on collective advocacy for CCL’s carbon dividend proposal.

In other words, CCL sets members up to do together, not to simply to think or believe together. And because members take regular action together, their common experiences shape them over time. They work together as a team, and their teamwork trains them into the habit of taking one another into account as they move ahead together.

Perhaps what best serves emerging communities is not consensus around language, or talk about talk; what’s helpful is common practice.

This morning I reflected on the common practices of local church life: we gather at a specific place and time; we do some things consistently when we are together; we participate in a liturgy together—and all of these actions are formative for us.

I’m beginning to imagine how new common practices might re-form the United States at the level of the community, not just the individual. We’ll never have a country where our substantive ideological differences have been washed out; and only through violence is such a washing-out really possible.

What falls to each of us, then, is the opportunity to join with people as committed as we are to the common good. It might mean participating with a local women’s shelter or teaching community children in a supplementary school. Whatever it means, it means more than raw information, more than facts. When I can’t seem to understand something no matter how many articles I read or how many stories I’m told, “the facts” aren’t at issue. Something else is at work—incommensurability, perhaps.

Shifting attention from language to action means being free to put energy, time, attention, and funds, not just our words, into the things that matter. It’s through that action that we get to shape and re-shape our communities, and make the futures we hope for more than nice thoughts.

By

A better basis for conversation

A white-and-grey speckled rooster photographed in profile with its beak open. It has a bright red comb atop its head.
Image: Sam Watkins

We are here. We have always been here. The fact that most of the churches have lived in blissful ignorance of our presence means nothing. Our task—our ministry to ourselves and to the church—is not to justify our presence, but to tell the church who we really are by our own definitions, rather than by [others’], because we know who we are…

The gospel is not about smoothing over the issues that divide us, nor integration in the sense of making us all agree, think alike, or even worship alike. It is about affirming the godly identity of every human being, even those whom we find strange (or queer). [The gospel’s] work will continue until we can all take our places at the table without challenging anyone’s right to be there. Whom God has called, no human being has the right to turn away.” —L. William Countryman and M.R. Ritley

This topic came up during the filming of Enough Room at the Table last spring. It comes up during every post-screening conversation I’ve been in.

And it comes up in other community discussions as well, because all appearances aside, the topic isn’t actually about the kinds of people we exclude or debate or marginalize. It’s about the kind of community we are. It’s about “us.”

This topic keeps coming up because we keep designing conversations on the premise that the existence and presence and contribution of the Other is a debate question.

We can have conversations about women ministers as if they aren’t already pastoring, preaching, and serving thousands of congregations worldwide. Our conversations about them don’t take the evidence into account, and we study questions that are already answered in the lives of real people.

We can talk about being “one in Christ” without reckoning with the “every nation, kindred, tongue, and people” already present in our communities, yet not present in our communities’ leadership teams; already active in service and support, yet not factored into programs or policies.

These and other examples represent dialogues that have calcified inequity and skewed our thinking. From design to execution, these conversations undermine our ability to build more sustainable community dynamics because they fail to acknowledge the communities we already have.

But “we are here. We have always been here.” Blissful ignorance is no longer an option, and some of us are going to challenge the basis of conversation until it changes.

We deserve communities with a more solid ground floor than quicksand.

By

Building Beloved Community on Bones?

The principles for managing great community conversations are about the same as the principles for managing great relationships: mutual respect, equity, integrity, freedom from violence or abuse, and a bias toward care and common growth.

Enough Room at the Table is now available for digital view: Go to enoughroomfilm.com and pay what you can.
Watch Enough Room at the Table online; pay what you can.

Last spring I worked with Daneen Akers and Stephen Eyer, co-directors of the narrative film Seventh-Gay Adventists, on a new project designed to model dialogue on gender, sexuality, and faith.

Enough Room at the Table is now available for digital streaming, and a limited DVD print is in progress. If you haven’t watched it, it’s worth it.

Showing up in another state with people I hadn’t met to talk about things that are precious to me—my life, family, faith, church, and communities—all on film: that was a real exercise in trust.

And it was the best work I did all year, not just because of the energy I put in to showing up, but because of the openheartedness and common values our group used as the soil for our weekend together.

Unfortunately, faith organizing isn’t always that rewarding.

As the Adventist community wrestles with faith, sexuality, and gender, the United Methodist community is navigating the same ground.

The UMC General Conference’s process has included “court trials,” proceedings where LGBTQ-supportive clergy members have been prosecuted and either threatened with expulsion or expelled, as well as public panel-style conversations where theologians and other church leaders discuss LGBTQ people. Only in the last year have these panels also included people who are themselves LGBTQ.

Love Prevails’ Rev. Julie Todd recently described what dialogue in these conditions can cost some of the people being asked to participate. Group unity built on the foundation of ongoing abuse is not “an unmitigated good,” she writes.

Liberals tend to think that any form of inclusion is good, as an end in and of itself. Inclusion on a panel is better than exclusion from a panel and therefore it is a good thing, right? …Methodist holy conferencing is especially good, because it is holy.

In fact, this logic is not good. This kind of thinking is lazy analysis that fails to include the dynamics of power and pain…

None of these panels nor proposals to General Conference, not holy conferencing nor the invoking and implementing of a Rule 44 alternative process for General Conference – none of this has anything to do with the true welfare of LGBTQ persons at all. None of this is about “balanced views,” respectful dialogue, shared Christian values, or the gospel of Jesus Christ. All of these efforts are about how to maintain the institutional church at the expense of queer people. (Read the rest.)

"Expecting marginalized people to disregard their own emotions to calmly educate you is the epitome of entitlement." —Sangeetha Thanapal
Image via Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

As we filmed Enough Room At The Table, our group explored these questions in our own way:

  • What assumptions are we designing into our challenging conversations? How do they affect the policies we take for granted?
  • What historical and ongoing damage do we need to recognize and end before we can legitimately speak of “reconciliation” or “unity”?
  • And how can we ensure that the Beloved Community we want isn’t built on the bones of the vulnerable?

As large groups figure these social dynamics out, the constant grind of stagnation dressed up as progress and progress shrouded in apathy can become tiresome. But Todd is absolutely right on this point:

The terms of a dialogue are critical.

If those terms foreclose our ability to acknowledge harm, our conversations will be hollow and won’t be able to benefit the entire community we hope to help.

Newsletter subscribers got free access to the dialogue film at the end of December. If you’ve not yet subscribed, sign up here.

By

Schedule: Back from Napa and heading to Tampa

I’m spending this March bouncing between the two coasts of the US for three projects including a film event, national communication conference, and a non-profit board meeting at the end of the month. This means I’ll be away from home for my birthday, but I’ll also be in the thick of more than 3,100 highly engaged writing, communication, and rhetoric professionals at the 2015 Conference of College Composition and Communication (CCCC) convention in Tampa, FL.

This coming Friday afternoon, Versatile PhD‘s Dr. Paula Chambers and I will talk about the risks and rewards of the alternative academic professional journey and life beyond the traditional tenure track. We’ve been asked to share our respective experiences and dig into the deeper issues of working outside the academy. We’ll also talk with smaller groups of attendees through the day on Thursday and Friday.

Our dialog: Find us in the Tampa Convention Center Ballroom A from 2 p.m.-3:15 p.m. this Friday afternoon.

Our mentoring conversations: On Thursday, find us in the Action Hub, Tampa Convention Center Ballroom B from 10:15 a.m.-1:15 p.m. and 2:30-5:30 p.m. On Friday, find us back in Ballroom B from 10:15 a.m.-1 and 3:30-5 p.m.

The convention image for the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Tampa, FL this March 18-21. The top half of the image is a photo of the Tampa skyline at night. The convention theme, Risk and Reward, is on the right of the image. At the bottom in black print: "Attend the 2015 CCCC Annual Convention." (Image via NCTE.org.)
The 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication is in Tampa, FL, March 18-21. The year’s theme: Risk and Reward. (Image via NCTE.org.)

Follow along via the conference Twitter hashtag, #4c15, and watch for any scheduling or availability changes with our session’s tag, #altac.

In about four months, I’ll be able to share the details of my Napa trip and the project that I worked on there. I enjoyed a few intense days with several people inclined to the art of open-hearted conversation. It was the applied version of an approach I’ve been encouraging informally and through my writing for a number of years and I can hardly wait to say more.

For now, though, I’m inspired to head back to that area for less work and more rest: it was a welcome reprieve from the Eastern seaboard’s extended winter, and it was beautiful.

A photograph overlooking the Napa Valley near sunrise. In the foreground are two wooden chairs. They and the stone-tiled ground are wet from morning rain. In the distance, the hills are still dark and the clouds are tinged with red. There are sparse desert shrubs to the right and across the valley.
Overlooking the town of Napa. 2015 (c) Keisha McKenzie

Up next: Check in again in about 2 weeks for an abridged version of my presentation at Creating Change in February (with audio if I can wrestle Audacity into submission), and an article on working across faith and secular lines for the common, public good.

By

Christy—On Education and Entropy

“The most powerful symbol in the universe is the “=” sign: it’s a commerce between worlds, symbolic or real. That commerce is the heart of education— greasing the skids between one side of the equation and the other. Remember that the “-” symbol marks a mere subtraction, the one-way interaction present in much of our teaching today. The one-way sign is also emblazoned on every tombstone where the date of birth is only separated by the “dash to death” of the death date. We do not need education to be only a dash to entropy. We need to consider entropy in the evaluation of our teaching, testing, and education systems.” —Dr. Lowell Christy, Cultural Strategies Institute

This week, Lowell pointed me to some new research on the importance of conversation quality in language learning. The instructional designers who developed World Book’s Early World of Learning back in the 1990s certainly knew this—but it somehow didn’t become common knowledge for educators being advised to boost the quantity of words they exposed learners to.

From the New York Times:

“A growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough to overcome the deficits they face. The quality of the communication between children and their parents and caregivers, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.

“A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on ‘bridging the word gap’ found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (‘Look, a dog!’); rituals (‘Want a bottle after your bath?’); and conversational fluency (‘Yes, that is a bus!’) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.

“‘It’s not just about shoving words in,’ said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study. ‘It’s about having these fluid conversations around shared rituals and objects, like pretending to have morning coffee together or using the banana as a phone. That is the stuff from which language is made.'”

Language skills development and socialization through relationship are related, and the “commerce at the heart of education” requires a relationship of equality that is not part of the conventional education system.

This fall, I’ve been doing some slow writing/thinking offline on the 18th-19th C Age of Conversation. The Seventh-day Adventist community missed out on that Age because of its belief in separating from “the world” and its rules about the salons and coffeehouses that hosted the conversation culture. The church’s founders warned members away from these conversation spaces and some of its leading writers and philosophers, but because they did not introduce a comparable analog, the community missed an important “language-learning” developmental stage. My sense is that it hasn’t yet developed either a non-defensive listening culture or a healthy respect for the chaos and uncertainty that supports learning.

In the absence of these features, perhaps expectations about civility and clarity in the denominational conversation are premature, but I do hope some micro, in-relationship changes will be possible.

By

Time to Speak Up

"Where are our LGBTI voices?
A new meme asks “Where are our LGBTI voices?” at the GC’s summit on gender and sexuality this March in Cape Town, South Africa

As I wrote last year, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists has planned a global summit on gender and sexuality for March 21-24 this year. The summit falls under the planning authority of Elder Pardon Mwansa, a GC vice-president and chair of the committee on “alternative sexuality practices” [sic] that will report to the church in session in 2015. He has been receiving a great deal of feedback on this summit far more graciously than most.

Despite recent criminalization initiatives in Nigeria and Uganda that were influenced in part by US-based Christian evangelicals and received limited on-continent pushback from local or international Adventists, the General Conference decided to host this meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa is one of 9 African nations that has embedded anti-discrimination principles in its law, but it also has a disturbing culture of sexual violence against women, especially women known or assumed to be non-heterosexual.

The summit schedule and presenter line-up has now been released and several observers have wondered how the global church can gain from excluding so many participants from a conversation that already affects them.

A Possible Approach to Conversation

I know several more people who have met with attendees or plan to do so ahead of the summit. If you’re among them, reflect on and/or pray about your approach before you do. I offer you a few items you might consider to help guide your thoughts:

  • Concerns: What most concerns you about the summit given what you already know? What are you hearing from SDA Kinship, from the Seventh-Gay Adventists film community, and other sources? Believe Out Loud published an article on this today too; are your questions being answered? If not, what other questions do you have?
  • Goals: What do you think the church wants to accomplish with the people it intends to gather? What might the church worker you reach out to be able to tell you about the denomination’s goals? What questions might you have about whatever they tell you?
  • Your Own Story: What’s your personal stake in what happens at the summit? Does your contact already know about it? If not, how might you share your story with them in a brief, but relevant way? What about your biography and experience do you most want them to remember when they go to all the sessions at the summit and/or vote on any statements that result from it?
  • This Friendship: How do you plan to keep in touch with this person after you talk? What if you might be able to share with them over the long term, no matter what their opinions are right now? Would that continued relationship be meaningful to you? If so, how can you let them know?
  • Overall: Simply enjoy being one human sharing conversation with another: you and this person, regardless of their organizational status, are peers. Enjoy their company as much as you can and consider that they may be even less at ease with the conversation than you are! Whatever is said, however it’s said, offer them grace.

Climate Concerns

The climate for workers at the General Conference hasn’t been too open in the last few years. Some have shared with me that they feel hyper-monitored or even repressed because of informers and backlashes. They don’t want any drama; they want to keep working and serving, so they guard what they say to colleagues and church members, especially in sensitive cases like this. This is one of a few possible adaptations to a surveillance subculture.

In this climate, should you have the chance to speak to a church worker, please do whatever you can do to show that you want to keep their confidences and honor their willingness to discuss freely with you. Also, the denomination is quite comfortable framing the “issue” in terms of arguments and decontextualized text debates. If conversants refocus their discussions on real people, their lives, families, and consciences instead, that’s likely to produce more effective and more humane outcomes all round.

My Thoughts

To be sure, as an individual, I have very strong opinions on the arguments and the last 40+ years of research and experiential evidence, and I continue to pursue my own inquiry about the subject. I could argue confidently about this with family and friends, but for the last several years, I’ve chosen not to. I don’t see these debates as a good use of my time or energy or as beneficial for the people involved in them. The Backfire Effect is real.

I also don’t accommodate these debates for the same reason that I wouldn’t debate a White supremacist about ethnic segregation. I don’t accept the core premise that the mainstream’s “approval” or “agreement” is required or appropriate in this case. If they don’t own the “standard” from which Others deviate, they also have no authority to police it.

We are each born into this life and come to know ourselves as one of billions. We’re not responsible for the demographic categories we occupy. We are responsible for the quality of relationship we nurture with people in and beyond those categories. That’s what guides me.

What about SDA Kinship?

As far as the SDA Kinship membership goes, I think there is an incredible, mostly latent power in its stories and in how widely members’ stories vary. I don’t think Kinship should respond to the denomination’s Single Story about LGBTI people (“Not a category of their own, just a broken, maladjusted subcategory of us!”) with a Single Story of its own (“Just like you, but with a twirl!”). At minimum, SDA Kinship is an LGBTI group and not just a “gay” one; not all members remain Adventist today—some have been chased out of membership and others have voluntarily moved on.

But beyond these basics, the organization shouldn’t agree to tell a Single Story because it’s not the Borg. It thrives because it isn’t. Members have different experiences, different beliefs, different approaches, and different strengths to bring to the organization’s table as well as to the commonly held table of their church. The under-acknowledged fact is that LGBTI people have co-built, co-funded, and co-staffed the Seventh-day Adventist church from its founding days and continue to do so. They don’t serve the church to claim any special stars in their crown; they serve because of their religious convictions and beliefs in improving the world and witnessing through healing work. For decades, LGBTI Adventists have worked alongside heterosexual members to advance the church’s mission regardless of those heterosexuals’ marital statuses—whether they are unmarried, married, or remarried, whether they are content, struggling, or suffering. And this will always be true.

The diversity of the people who have co-created the church as it stands today—that is what I think makes SDA Kinship such a powerful continuing witness to the mainstream, mainstreaming SDA church. Variance makes learning possible, but we have to be open to that variance in order to draw its best out of it. I do hope the church learns to listen to its own diversity: listening is a holy act, and not listening isn’t sustainable.

Fortunately, the church will have plenty of opportunities to choose new directions for this and similar conversations in the near future: Kinship’s community and its growing cloud of witnesses and advocates isn’t likely to fall silent, and the LGBTI Adventists around the world won’t disappear.

It’s time to start learning; it’s time, they say, to speak up.