I wish I had the time to do a research project on building healthy decision making processes in church life. It seems to me that a fundamental question is how we use patterns of democracy in decision making. People often pray for the involvement of the Holy Spirit or for God’s guidance at church meetings and I often find myself wondering what they mean by such sentiments. God’s vote does beat anyone else’s, after all.
There was a time when I would very rarely have asked a church group to vote in order to come to a decision. However, my tolerance for interminable meetings is lower now than it once was. It seems to me more important to allow everyone to have their say and then take a decision that a group will stick to rather than trying helplessly to persuade everyone to agree that a course of action is correct.
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