"What's in a Question?"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
April 26, 2009

Reading: Why?
It starts out quite simply, as complex things can do.
We rise one morning, at the usual time.  We dress, eat breakfast, and set out for the office, in the usual way. We do our usual job, then return home as usual. And so it usually goes, Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday world without end‑
but not this time. Today, something is differ­ent. In the middle of our work, for no particular reason, we wonder, "Why?" and everything changes.
"Why am I doing this?"
"Why should I worry about his opinion?"
"Why am I not eager to get back home in the evening?"
"Why are there nuclear arms?" "Why do I always feel restless?"
"Why are the north side neighborhoods so poor?"
"Why do I have to die?"
The universe shifts when we ask, "Why?"  Things do not look the same after the question, "Why?" Al­though we may go on with our usual routine, it will not feel usual anymore because that "Why?" has intruded.
Wondering why, reflecting on the meaning of what we do, indicates that our lives are about to move in a new direction.  When the old, familiar patterns have been out grown, when the time comes for crossing a threshhold and entering a new existence, the question "Why'?" appears.  Hav­ing once asked "Why?" it is difficult to keep on with our accustomed ways, because that "Why" hints at the possi­bility of something more than the usual.  Like a siren, the "Why'?" calls us to an adventure.

Sermon: What’s In a Question?    Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
Last night marks the 3rd Auction Cece and I have attended at Northern Hills and the second anniversary of accepting the congregation’s call to be your minister.  For Cece and me, coming to Cincinnati has been a great adventure and the source of much joy.  Partly because we were starting a new stage of life and had to change so many things, I have been imagining new possibilities for the church.  Before I ever attempt to change anything, I always ask, “Why are we doing this thing the way we do it now?”  Many times, the answer to that question satisfies my curiosity, and I settle back down and leave the thing alone – no change is needed.  But, asking that simple question, “Why?” is the first sign of feeling something in the church system is incomplete, and it is an invitation to becoming involved in imagining and creating a greater whole.  Why did Northern Hills Fellowship call me and why did I come?  Certainly part of the answer is so that we could accept and support each other as we are, lovable and flawed human beings.  Another part of the answer is so we can grow our fellowship – both in its internal sense of community and in its outreach to the wider community.  Calling a new minister is a big change in itself.  After two years of asking “Why?” I still believe the congregation is ready for more change.   The seeds of change are already in us, in our system, and what is required of us, in order for these seeds to grow, is to continue asking questions.
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The act of asking questions of an organization, as you might expect, influences it in some way.  The questions we ask frame the discussion and point us toward certain kinds of answers.  There is much power in the question itself.  Teachers can appreciate the importance of asking the right questions on a test so students can tell what they really know.  Conversely, students grow in the direction of the questions they ask.  If a student is interested in fishing, she will find ways to work fishing into geography class and possibly even math class.  Likewise, organizations move in the directions on which they focus energy.  The questions we ask and the way we ask them will significantly effect the church we will become.

For the two years just before I came to Northern Hills, I was an Interim Minister in Utah and Northern Hills had an Interim Minister.  Both of us Interim Ministers were helping our churches look at themselves as part of the transition from one Settled Minister to another.  The Interim’s purpose was to facilitate a renewal of the church’s vision, to strengthen its stewardship, to prepare it for new professional leadership, and to motivate the congregation to engage its future with anticipation and zest.  Interim work was designed to get the congregation to ask itself questions about its very core. Among the several questions we attempted to answer during the interim were these: “How can we claim and honor the church’s past?” and, “What is the congregation’s unique identity, its strengths, its needs, and its challenges?”  Performing the Interim Tasks can be a heady process and emotionally trying.  I’m sure our parishioners felt we Interim Ministers spoke with a forked tongue, saying, “I love you just the way you are, you’re perfect; now change.”  I understand Rev. Annie Foerster lovingly shepherded the fellowship into feeling better about itself, something it surely needed after several years of losing membership.  I honor Rev. Foerster and the people of Northern Hills who carried on during the Interim and worked to get the most out of the process.  If Northern Hills’ experience of the Interim was anything like mine in Ogden, there was movement in the right directions, but by the end of the two years, many questions remained unanswered, and much work remained to be done.

When I showed up here I asked how the interim had gone for Northern Hills, what you had learned about yourselves that I should know.   I had a lot of questions, but I felt we should slow down the pace of change from what happens during an Interim period.  Still, there were questions  I had to ask like:
“What do you expect out of me?” and What have been the relationships between the Minister, the staff, the volunteer leaders, etc.?” and, “What things in Northern Hills history have importance for the members and feel most relevant to where we want to go?”  I felt it was important for me, as your new minister, to come up to speed quickly, to understand the family system of the congregation and the needs of the church in order to serve you effectively.  Also, I just like to ask questions – it makes me feel I am learning, like I am fitting in and getting a handle on things, and showing concern for what you do and who you are. Then, last Spring I began asking the Board of Trustees and  the Committee on Ministry what kind of community we’d like to have.  That question grew into the Covenant of Beloved Community project.  I appreciate your forbearance these last two years as I have peppered you with questions.  It feels t me the congregation is more self aware and connected to one another as a result of our explorations.
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When there is something you don’t understand, you ask “Why?”  To really get to the bottom of things, you just keep asking “Why?”  It’s very simple really.  Most 5 year olds already know how to do it.  There is an adult questioning technique called “Ask Why 5 Times,” technique which in my experience has proven useful in analyzing both business processes and relationships between groups of people.  “Asking Why 5 Times” is a great way to get at the root cause of a behavior or process issue.  Here’s an example:

When the Committee on Ministry decided we would like to get the congregation’s input on our Covenant of Beloved Community, we felt it was important to give the meeting facilitators background information on why we were doing this and to prepare them for questions they might hear from a curmudgeon or from someone who had sat thru a few too many management consultant workshops and didn’t want to hear about another program of the month.  First we listed several positive reasons for having such a covenant.  Next, in order to figure out how to address possible concerns which might be raised at the Cottage Meetings, we named a potential concern and then Asked Why 5 Times, to get at the root cause of that concern.  One concern the committee thought might come up was:
We fear change.
Why do we fear change?
Hidden issues may come to light
Why do we fear hidden issues coming to light?
We don’t want to rehash old conflicts.
Why don’t we want to rehash old conflicts?
It could lead to rejection and hurt.
Why do we fear rejection and hurt?
We are afraid it could make us change our church culture.
Why do we fear changing our church culture?
My beliefs might be challenged – I might be rejected.

And so on.  We could keep on asking why – like a 5 year old, but you get the picture.  Did you notice how many times “fear” came out in this line of questioning?  It is not unusual for fears to be at the bottom of resistance to change, and fear is usually not far beneath the surface in any human endeavor.

The Committee on Ministry found “Asking Why 5 Times” to be a pretty good tool for preparing to address fears people might have.  Actually, the first question many people asked about our working on a Covenant of Beloved Community was, “Why are we doing this, is there a problem?”  The answer is, “No, there is no current conflict or even an old one needing to be resolved that we are specifically trying to address with this work.”  The covenant is to help us envision and bring about the kind of loving and respectful church community we would like to be part of.  So, we knew we needed to be ready for the fearful questions, but we wanted to take the discussions in a positive direction and not set them up for failure with a poorly designed process.  “Asking Why 5 Times” wasn’t the tool we needed for our Cottage Meetings.
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We wanted people to have a positive feeling about participating in the process and to use the process to begin to model the kind of communications we hoped to see more of at Northern Hills.  When an organization focuses on “problem solving,” even in organizations that are good at it, often the feeling is, “There’s always something wrong here.”  If we frequently ask, “What is wrong and who is to blame?” we can easily send the organization on a downward spiral.  While that kind of problem solving might sometimes be called for, we wanted to propose a more welcoming and supportive style for relating to each other in our church community.  As we began to feel our way toward such a process, two people who are familiar with Appreciative Inquiry suggested that might be just what we were looking for.

The creator of Appreciative Inquiry, David Cooperrider, after many years of observing organizations, stated “The most important lesson from Appreciative Inquiry is People grow in the direction of the questions they ask.”   He recommends we ask questions which invite people to explore the possibilities of what they want to see.  We used this concept in creating the process for our Cottage Meetings.  Today we cannot go into a full-scale description of the Appreciative Inquiry process, but our Board is investigating using it again in the future.  Several of us have explored it in more depth, and we feel it resonates pretty strongly with UU principles and with our vision of a Beloved Community.

Cooperrider says, “Appreciative Inquiry is based on a reverence for life… the appreciative mode of inquiry is a means of living with and directly participating in the life of a human system in a way that compels one to inquire into the deeper life-generating essentials and potentials of organizational existence.”   That sounds pretty UU doesn’t it?  And something that “compels one to inquire into the deeper life-generating essentials,” goes well beyond the claims of your average management plan of the month.  So what is it about a process of framing questions positively that helps to create a more “life-generating” community?

There is a spiritual assumption under the appreciative inquiry approach.  It is that deep down, people long for acceptance.  We want to know we are important to someone, that what we say and do matters.  Modern society often keeps us alienated from our neighbors, and from our true human potentials.  People, who come to Northern Hills looking for a church home, are often suffering from a sense of alienation from something – from their former church, from part of their families, you name it, and they always want to feel accepted.  Therefore, if we relate to each other in our church in ways that convey the message that you are OK with us, people will experience acceptance.  In fact, that is the only way we can build and sustain a loving community.
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Creating a loving community begins inside each one of us. I did not bring any magic to Northern Hills that will change it for the better.  Neither can the Trustees, the Committee on Ministry or our other leaders impose change, even positive change, on the congregation.  We all have to enter each other’s worlds and create change from the inside out.  We have to start with acknowledging and accepting where we and other people are, and assume people are doing the best they can under the circumstances.  There is another spiritual assumption which will enable this process.  The Hindu expression, “Namaste,” expresses it best: “In each of us is a place where Divinity can dwell.  I will look for the divinity in you and try to show you the divinity in me.”
Because the questions we ask and the way we ask them are so important before the Cottage Meetings we held last month we spent a lot of time coming up with the question, “What are the healthiest, most life-giving and love giving qualities of relationships in a beloved community?”  The Meetings generated many wonderful ideas for creating a compassionate and respectful community which nurtures human potential and sustains us through good times and bad.  I cannot summarize all the 20 pages of comments today; our Committee plans to have something to show the congregation soon, but the process is already teaching us some valuable lessons about how appreciative dialog can build relationships.  Starting now we invite everyone to place some emphasis on the way we talk with each other in all venues of our organization.

As we plan in committees, question in classes, and dialog in small groups, here are some questions I would like you to consider about the questions you ask:

1. Is this a genuine question? – A question to which I/we really don’t have the answer?  (or am I using this question to manipulate?)
2. What work do I want this question to do?  That is, what kind of conversation, meaning and feelings do I imagine the question will evoke in those who will be exploring it?
3. Does this question leave room for new and different questions to be raised as the initial question is explored?
4. What assumptions or beliefs are embedded in the way this question is constructed?
5. Is this question relevant to the real lives of the people who will be exploring it? (People engage deeply when they feel they are contributing their thinking to questions that are important to them.)
6. Is this question likely to generate hope, imagination, engagement, new thinking, and creative action, or is it likely to focus on past problems and obstacles? And,
7. What question, if explored thoroughly, could provide the breakthrough possibilities we are seeking?

These kinds of questions invite the exploration of possibilities and connect people with why they care.  You can read more about positive questioning techniques on the World Café website.  The World Café is an intriguing application of Appreciative Inquiry that we might like to use.

We can’t properly explore appreciative questioning without mentioning a corresponding skill set – Listening.  It would seem obvious that in order to appreciate someone, we have to at least listen to their answers to our questions.  If appreciative inquiry is to have any real impact, we’ll need to look at the quality of our listening.  When we give a good listening to someone, it can make them feel appreciated.  When someone asks us to talk, and really listens to us tell our stories, we are allowed to feel our lives are important.  Sometimes people want feedback on a problem, and other times they don’t, but what’s really nurturing is simply being there for them, listening to what is important to them.  In Practicing the Sacred Art of Listening, Kay Lindahl says, “Each time we tell a story, we learn something new, or we get closer to healing a wound, or we remember another piece of it, or we gain a new insight, or we have a good laugh.  A good listener encourages us and appreciates hearing our tales; we recall more and grow in our knowledge of who we are and what we are here to do.” 
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So let us be about building a Beloved Community, and let us know it will be an ongoing, never-ending process wherein we ask each other where we want to go and listen to each others stories.  It begins with respectful behaviors, but it goes beyond respect to appreciation.  Appreciation for the divine potential of each person, for the importance of each of our unique life stories, and for the nurturing our loving community provides our spirits.  As we connect to each other in new and diverse ways I predict we will be delighted by the cooperative spirit which emerges. Unitarian Universalism honors the spiritual quest which keeps an open mind and which uses questions to explore the depths and heights of any and all spiritual resources.  Let us not forget the purpose of this questioning – which is to bring out the good, the true, and the nurturing messages for our lives.  Let us remember to both question and listen in love.
Namaste