Hey, everybody! I've devised a game for all of us to play at the Thanksgiving dinner table. It's called the Respectful Conversations Game.
Wait, where did everybody go?
Allow me to explain.
You might have heard about the Respectful Conversations Project, an admirable outreach effort sponsored by the Minnesota Council of Churches. The MCC this year hosted statewide dialogues around what was certain to be a contentious topic: the marriage amendment.
The MCC trained 300 facilitators, then brought more than 1,550 people together for 54 conversations across the state, from Moorhead to Rochester to Duluth to Walker to the Twin Cities.
Results were heartening, but more on that in a minute.
Church leaders drew guidance from similar projects, primarily the Boston-based Public Conversations Project of the 1980s. With that effort, participants managed to find common ground, or at least a willingness to soften their rhetoric, on the equally visceral topic of abortion.
The objective of both efforts was not to change minds. In fact, with the Public Conversations model, "some participants dug in more deeply," said Jerad Morey, MCC program organizer.