Final pre-Assembly gathering: Let's Walk Together

Rev Kath Behan, Assembly National Consultant

The members of the 17^th Assembly met online last Wednesday evening for a third and final time of community building in the lead-up to the Assembly meeting.

Following the journey of community building from gathering as individuals called by God, to holding the tension of difference in community, this session sought to step deeper again into how a gathered community makes decisions together on behalf of the whole church.

When the Uniting Church makes decisions in community, we do so within the guidelines of the Manual for Meetings.  And while this document may on the surface sound dry and regulatory, it is in fact uniquely the opposite, as it describes and implores a way of making decisions in community that is counter-cultural to the norm.  This is what the 17^th Assembly business convenor, Rev Heather den Houting, spoke about as she brought to life both the spoken and the unspoken habits, traditions and nuances of an Assembly meeting.

Heather reminded the members of such practices as standing for the President when they walk into and leave the meeting, as a sign of respect for their role and calling. Or waiting to be invited to speak in the meeting, as a means of creating space for listening to one another in a compassionate and gracious way. Or that we begin and end each day of the meeting with worship and prayer as a reminder, and perhaps sometimes even a ‘thorn in our sides’, of who we are and to whom we belong.  These practices reflect our identity as a ‘uniting’ church.

But perhaps the most asked question in all these sessions is the most fundamental to how we understand ourselves as God’s church, the body of Christ: How can we make decisions based on the discernment of the holy spirit?

It is to this question that the Manual for Meetings provides the most profound response.  Heather called on the members to come to the meeting open to listening to expertise, open to hearing contextual experiences and issues, but that in the end Assembly members are called to give themselves over to the spirit of God who we believe by faith will speak to us as one body.

This means that regardless of what we may think before we go into a meeting, the actual process and experience of the particularity of consensus decision-making means that we cannot fully know how God will work during the meeting. This is very grounding, because it is a reminder to us that our meeting together and our decision-making together ‘should’ look different to the world around us. We ‘should’ be less interested in what we can manipulate and more interested in what might lie beyond what we can see with our human and limited eyes and mind.

But so too, this creates a level of vulnerability for us.  We can rally and lobby and argue for our position as much as we wish, but in the end, the role of the chair of the meeting (in this case the President) is to lead the meeting in a process of discernment relying on God’s spirit of grace, mercy and transformation to lead us where God wants us to go.

This is the rub! There is both beauty and anxiety in this vulnerability. The anxiety comes when we realize we cannot control or manipulate what God has already gone ahead of us to do.  The beauty comes when we open ourselves to the possibility that when we let go of control, God can work in us and through us to come to a ‘third place’ that is beyond what any of us could have imagined at the start. This is what consensus decision-making looks like for the Uniting Church. 

And so at this moment, the members gather with a little uncertainty, yet also a hopeful anticipation that God will do what God needs to do in each one of us, in order that this council could be brave, tenacious and daring, in the way of Jesus.  Worship and prayer will lead this council through a journey of information and clarification, of sharing stories and building relationships with fellow followers of Jesus trying to make sense of God’s call to discipleship and mission in their own contexts, of deliberation and wrestling with the complexities of issues that threaten to change how we are shaped, and then of making decisions that will be hard, joyful, painful, life-giving, confronting and transformative, on behalf of the whole church.

And so we pray: God in your mercy, hear our prayers for the 17^th Assembly.