Evaluation time.
With a week gone by and several other perspectives in I thought I’d lob out my thoughts on how well emergent worked as a convention. The big hope of the convention was the “learning communities”. Designed as a smaller alternative to four large plenary sessions, they were indeed an improvement on that. But how much better depended strongly on which group you were in, apparently. The group you were in was determined by a careful selection process. Just as the Stonecutters assigned Homer Simpson's membership number:
Homer: These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined. [sniffs tearily]
...so were the groups assigned. Well, more alphabetical by organization than numerical, but you get the idea. In other words, it was random, except that people from the same organization were kept together.
The additional effort required to have four communities of 150 each rather than one large one of 600 was that the presenters (McLaren, Grenz, Pagitt, Roxburgh, Franke, Hunter, Shults and Powell) had to give their material four times. Major kudos to them for taking on that burden. I’d like to know what they thought the value was in doing it that way rather than as one big session.
That said, I’d give my learning community time only maybe a 2 out of 10 score for achieving what was desired or what could have happened, certainly relative to an open space arrangement. (I'll note here that the official YS feedback indicated that feedback on the learning communities was very polarized. I'd love to know if a couple of the groups worked really well, while a couple fell flat - one of which would have been mine.)
Even within the confines of the format that we used it could have been much better organized. The time allotted for person to person interaction (typically in twos or threes) was woefully inadequate and cut off abruptly most of the time - even when the room had a very strong buzz going. Ten minute chunks should have been an absolute minimum and for the first session it should have been more for people to get to know each other. As it was, in the minimal time we had we were constantly just getting through the introductory phase when it was time to shut up and start listening to the talking heads again. I actually formed an informal small group with a couple of other people that worked for us for the last couple of sessions, but we had to work against the grain a bit.
Instead, taking the time to form stable small groups of five to eight people for the duration of the four learning community times would have created some sense of viable community for the sessions. Believe it or not we use this sort of technique in the corporate world and it works out famously. I know church people have a hard time using ideas from the business world, but this is stuff the business world does every day and does well, and it isn't frickin' rocket science.
Of course, some of the resistance to spending time with neighbors came from the participants themselves. Many of them came to listen to the big names, not Joe Schmoe from Podunk, Illinois sitting next to them. I honestly felt that the overall vibe of the attendees was that they were here to listen to the talking heads rather than learn from each other, and that in some cases there was a strong desire not to engage with others in the audience. But really, if we, as church leaders, can’t form a small group of people we don’t know and create some kind of personal bond over the course of three days how are we going to do it in the big bad world? Add to that that some of the talking heads really like being talking heads and it the learning community ideal was headed for the rocks.
Feedback alluded to by Marko indicates that the learning communities were scored radically differently by attendees. This could, of course, be because some people’s expectations were low and were wildly exceeded, while others, like mine, were high and fell far short. The art projects were given short shrift too - introduced quickly at the beginning and then mentioned again just as people were leaving, it didn't really give the feeling that they were well integrated with the subject matter or the conversations we had amongst ourselves.
Contrast that experience with Steve Taylor’s seminar Saturday morning. In 90 minutes he talked a bit, gave small groups about ten to fifteen minutes to process a couple of questions he gave us, debriefed those and went on to the next segment where the cycle was repeated. This was very engaging and created much more interaction than in the learning communities. Note that I think this isn’t necessarily the model for all the seminars – some work just fine as lecture, notably Tony Campolo’s seminar on homosexuality.
So what's to be learned? I hope those of you attending Nashville will make every attempt to have the learning communities be more interactive, and that the "tour guides" for them be more consistent in their guiding, allowing more time and space for actual community development.