A tool for mapping congregational conversations
Where are church members' thoughts focused?
As a coach credentialed with the International Coaching Federation, I am required to do an extensive amount of continuing education to stay in good standing. (My Enneagram 5-ness has no quarrels with this.) In a recent webinar to earn some of these credits, I was introduced to the dialogic orientation quadrant, a model developed by Master Certified Coach Haesun Moon to break down sessions in order to assess coaches’ effectiveness.
The idea behind the model is that coaches do not ask strictly objective questions. Instead, there are pre-suppositions beneath the questions, and coaches want to utilize the most helpful assumptions to craft their queries. The dialogic orientation quadrant allows coach supervisors to code coachee replies to assess whether this is happening. Coachee responses to the pre-supposition-loaded questions will be either past- or present-oriented as well as positive or negative. “Preferred future” responses indicate hope. In “resourceful past” statements the coachee names learnings or experiences that can be built upon. “Troubled past” surfaces a pattern that a coachee does not want to repeat. “Dreaded future” is the quadrant of anxiety about what might happen.
I was watching and listening to this information with my coaching hat on, but the implications for ministry immediately jumped out to me. How do the questions that pastors ask the people in their care invite responses that fall into the four quadrants?
I think there's good reason to visit each quadrant in conversation. It's essential to acknowledge the hard things a congregation has gone through (troubled past) and to be clear about the future a church wants to avoid (dreaded future). That allows for lament and healing and for getting clearer about what the vision for ministry actually is. We can also mine the past for identity and legacy pieces that can support planning for the future (resourceful past). And having a picture in mind of the future God is inviting us toward is important for encouragement and focus of efforts (preferred future).
At the same time, there’s danger in getting bogged down in any of the four quadrants. It's possible to linger so long in a positive sense of the past that nostalgia kicks in and in a desired future so much that we don't focus on the micro steps needed to move toward it. We can be ruled by grief about the past or by worry about what is coming down the road.
If you are a pastor whose congregants are stuck in any one of the quadrants, consider how you might structure conversations among lay leaders or the congregation as a whole that tap into a different quadrant or a more useful slant on the same quadrant. For example:
“Our church has never been the same since [conflict]” (troubled past). What specifically do we need to lament? How do we do that well so that we can truly turn our hurt over to God? What can we learn from what happened so that unhelpful patterns don't repeat? Movement is from troubled past to resourceful past.
“I'm afraid our church will close" (dreaded future). What does this church mean to us? To our community? What would it look like to be as faithful as possible to who we are, whom we love, and what we've been given? Movement is from dreaded future to preferred future.
“I want things to be like they were back when our Sunday School rooms were bursting at the seams” (less helpful version of resourceful past). What is the legacy we can celebrate and carry forward from that time, whether we are bursting at the seams or not? How does that inform who we are and what we do now? Movement is from nostalgia-based version of resourceful past to preferred future.
“I think we need to do things like [church name] does” (less helpful version of preferred future). What is the desire that your admiration for [church name] speaks to? What is unique about who we are and what we do/can do? Who in our larger community is overlooked that we are set up well to minister to or partner with? Movement is from preferred but unrealistic future to preferred, discerned, and realistic future.
Mapping dialogue with lay leaders and the congregation as a whole could be very revealing about where the church is, how ready it is to name and move into a preferred future, and what questions to ask to nudge thoughts, feelings, and actions in that forward-looking direction.