An Ethos of Diverse Listening

February 12, 2010

Sometimes I feel like the luckiest person on the planet. I get to spend my days meeting and talking with such an interesting array of people, usually about how God is working in their lives through good times and painful times.

This week I had the privilege to spend an entire day with a remarkable group of religious leaders in Los Angeles. The meeting was organized by a young lady who is currently living and doing research in China, but calls Los Angeles her home. She was profoundly troubled by the kind of rhetoric she witnessed over a year ago during the Proposition 8 campaign in California. (In case you forgot or weren’t aware, Proposition 8 was a California State ballot initiative that removed the right of same-sex couples to marry).

The purpose of this interfaith gathering was to “build respect and trust between religious leaders in Southern California on both sides of Prop 8 in order for them to influence their communities to engage with integrity in difficult conflicts of public life showing respect and good will for trustworthy opponents.”

In our circle of eight there was an Orthodox Rabbi, a Reformed Rabbi, an Eastern Catholic priest, two Mormon leaders, a Metropolitan Community Church pastor, an African Methodist-Episcopal pastor, and a Seventh-day Adventist pastor (yours truly). Four of us voted yes on Prop 8. Four of us voted no. Three of the eight were women. Two of the eight were gay.

It was a remarkable day of intense, sometimes difficult, conversation. I was physically and emotionally exhausted at the end of the day. But I am so grateful to have been a part of it and now have several new friends in the community that I didn’t have before. What’s more, this model of respectful conversion on difficult topics is a model that I think fits very well into the ethos of listening and conversation that already exists here in the Hollywood Adventist Church and would stretch us if we applied it to the difficult decisions that are in our future.

Grace and peace,

Ryan

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