Wow! Another rousing forum at the Process Work Institute last night. This time the crowd consisted of the gay and lesbian community. The challenge revolved around the community’s response to a new evangelical, mega-church called Mars Hill, which has just moved into Portland city. Mars Hill takes a particularly vehement stance against gays and lesbians. The Q Center director Logan had stirred up controversy in the gay and lesbian community by attempting to reach out to Mars Hill and open dialogue. While many of the community applauded his actions, some were incensed and felt that the only proper response was to abhor and avoid the new church. I’d say there were about forty people, so it was a decent sized crowd especially since emotions ran high. Dawn Menken and her student Alex ran the meeting. I loved watching her work. It was like watching an improvisational dance moving to the needs and responses of the group. It was so instructive of really good group work, especially for a group that size; I thought I’d go over the highlights of the meeting.
First of all, here’s the structure of the meeting. Dawn started by laying out the issue, the history, the present, and then said some inspirational words around the goal of open dialogue to understand the problem more deeply. She brought up the concept of hearing all points of view, even of people not necessarily in the room but who are involved. Then three speakers spoke for about five minutes a piece to share there point of view and a bit of history with the group. After they spoke, microphones were handed out to anyone who wanted to share a thought or question. After an hour and a half, Dawn and Alex summed up what was learned. So far, as you can tell, the meeting was not so different from other meetings. Now I will go over the differences…
First of all, Dawn reframed the outside conflict by bringing up the concept that the conflict on the outside had a mirror on the inside, that many in the gay and lesbian community had internal conflict over how to handle prejudice even in their own families. Then she asked people by a show of hands how well they handled high emotion. Then she asked the same for a bit of emotion and then a tally of who had difficulty with even a little emotion. (I think asking people to measure the their level of comfort with emotions is brilliant. It brings that issue immediately into awareness.) She then asked that people to be aware of the different levels of comfort as they spoke. She asked that people share themselves instead of giving speeches, and to be aware of the amount of time they took at the microphone.
What really caught my attention, however, was that Dawn continually asked for opposing viewpoints. Traditionally, a few people set the preferred viewpoint early on and everyone just repeats it or stays quiet. Dawn specifically requested the different viewpoints and pointed out the value of hearing them. When someone had the courage to state a different view, Dawn praised that person. At one point, Dawn pretended to be the view point of the Mars Hill Church member, because they were clearly involved with the issue and no one had come to the meeting to represent that viewpoint. Yes, some people were shocked to hear such a different viewpoint, but Dawn had done such a good job expressing the value of hearing all viewpoints, even that rigid view was accepted. But what really pleased me was the sudden freedom some of the more marginalized people at the meeting felt to now express themselves. And because these normally quiet voices got to speak, everyone learned very valuable things about the prejudices with their own community and about the nature of prejudice itself. I could feel a level of compassion deepen throughout the whole room. Such is the value of hearing from all points of view in a safe environment. Dawn created a truly safe place to hear from everyone and everyone was blessed by the result.
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