Jesus said, “Where two are three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Such a beautiful sentiment: when people gather together in groups, in the Lord’s name, he is automatically in the middle of that group. I have seen it with my own eyes many times, in many different kinds of groups, and groups have been a key component of my spiritual growth for as long as I can remember. That was one of the things that led me to study group communication for six years in graduate school. The first course I ever taught was small group communication, and I’ve taught it more than 30 times now.
Groups can be loving and wise and wonderful. The academic study of groups was begun by a Harvard sociologists named Robert Bales in the 1940s, and one of the things that inspired him to study groups was the fact that he was an alcoholic. He discovered Alcoholics Anonymous (founded by Bill W, whose wife was a Swedenborgian). AA worked for him, as it has for many people, and Bales realized that one of the key components was the group dynamics. To put it another way, his own experience taught him that groups can do something an individual can’t: get an alcoholic to stop drinking. So, groups can have a tremendous power.
At the same time, groups are intangible and ethereal – hard to pin down. Is a group more than just the sum of the individuals in it? Most people agree that it is, yet it’s so hard to see the bond between people, instead of just the people themselves. When I was a counselor for Maple church camp for teenagers, we would assign the campers to “family” groups. As an analytical person, I would ponder the philosophical question: when exactly did that Maple family begin to exist? Was it the moment I made my decision about who would be assigned to which family, days before any of them had even met each other? Was it the moment when they first sat in a circle and looked at each other? Was it some time later, when they started to feel like a group? And when did that group cease to exist? The end of the camp? Or does it continue to exist even when you can’t see each other in person anymore?
So, groups are powerful yet invisible. I bring this up because I have a name for things that are powerful but cannot be seen or pinned down precisely: that word is “spiritual.” A group is a spiritual entity.
At this point, I’d like to acknowledge that it was my co-pastor Eric who suggested the topic for this sermon. Specifically, he thought it would be good for me to talk about group decision-making. Groups perform many functions—they can fulfill our needs for belonging and support, they can guide our behavior, provide a collective memory and diverse viewpoints, and very often, we use groups to make decisions. And as a Swedenborgian, if you look closely enough at what it means to be human, what is the essence of humans, the answer is “choice.” In other words, making decisions is a spiritual function too, and we frequently do that in groups.
I grew up in another branch of the Swedenborgian religion – known as the General Church -- and one of the ways it differs from this branch, the Convention, is in the style of governance. The General Church tradition has been one of authoritarian leadership: the minister is in charge of everything, and as a result, if there was a school connected to a particular church, the principal had to be a minister. If there was a publication, the editor was a minister. I much prefer to congregational style of the Convention branch: it takes all of us together to make it work, and that means it takes all of us together to make decisions. And we begin board meetings and committee meetings with prayers, and those prayers often include Jesus’ promise: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
But you may notice that there is a condition in that phrase. It does not just say “Where any two or three are gathered together, there am I” – it says “in my name.” And if you know anything about history, you know that many cruel and terrible decisions have been made by people claiming to be gathered together in Jesus’ name. But if a religious group gathers together and decides, “We should kill all non-believers,” then I would say they are not truly gathered together in God’s name. “In my name” means in the spirit and will of God, or within the sphere of God’s wisdom and love. Many people who claim to be acting in the name of God are not in that sphere.
Even if it does not involve anything violent, everyone should recognize that sometimes groups make very bad decisions. Our Old Testament reading was an example: in Exodus 20, God orders the children of Israel not to make any gold idols. Twelve chapters later, Moses has been up on Mt. Sinai too long, and it simply says “When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron” and suggested he make a golden calf. How did Aaron respond? The way it is represented in Exodus 32, his only response is to immediately start providing details about how they could do it: take off your earrings and bring them to me. No one said, “Wait a minute! Doesn’t anyone remember that God explicitly command us not to do that?”
A modern scholar might say that the Children of Israel were experiencing “Groupthink.” That was the term first devised by Irving Janis in the early 1970s to describe how it is that groups of intelligent people end up making very unintelligent decisions. Fifty years later, examples of Groupthink are easy to find, and scholars have learned a lot about why groups sometimes make wise decisions and sometimes very unwise ones. So that this will not turn into a college lecture, I will just touch on a few. Curiously, although the Bible talks a great deal about tribes and smaller groups like the disciples, there are very few stories of groups debating a decision and then reaching a consensus. If there is a dispute, it was usually brought to a judge or a king, who would resolve it alone instead of putting it to a council or committee or jury. Even in Swedenborg’s work Heaven and Hell, he talks about government in heaven, but that doesn’t appear to involve city councils or senates or boards. That seems a little sad to me, since I myself always feel better about a decision if there is group consensus behind it.
However, sometimes group consensus can be a bad thing, as I said. Let’s delve a little more into that term I just used: Groupthink. Professor Janis described that as an overconcern with group cohesiveness. Cohesiveness—the feeling of closeness and a harmony of minds—is a wonderful feeling, but he pointed out that it is harmful if it is not balanced by other factors. One factor is the individual conscience of people in a group: if an individual feels that the group is going in a direction that violates that person’s conscience, the question comes up, “Which is more important, your own conscience, or loyalty and group harmony?” In many situations that Janis analyzed, he found cases where many group members felt qualms about the direction a group was going, but did not say anything. Why not? Janis outlined many groupthink symptoms, and he of course gave them academic names, but we can recognize some spiritual principles behind them.
One was a tendency for groups to think of themselves as being morally superior to others, and sometimes part of that is demonizing an enemy. If you find yourself spending too much time belittling an opposing group, that is a red flag warning. Countries do it, corporations do it, political parties do it, legal teams do it, sports teams do it, religions do it. Last week I discussed the mindset “What’s wrong with those people over there?” and why that is an unhealthy question to ask. If it’s a rhetorical question--you already know what’s wrong with those people, and it’s that they are unquestionably dumber than you are, or are just evil–well, then you’ve slipped into groupthink mode. But this is a difficult one for religions, because it is so natural to think that other religious beliefs are wrong.
Another symptom has to do with people who do speak up and voice concerns. How does the group respond to them? If the answer is, they try to shut them down, that’s another warning sign. If you’ve ever seen the Henry Fonda movie 12 Angry Men, about a jury deliberating, the Henry Fonda character is at first the only juror who does not vote guilty. How do the other jurors respond? One suggests that Fonda should “Let us know what you’re thinking, and we might be able to show you where you’re mixed up.” Another says, “It’s up to the group of us to convince this gentleman that he’s wrong and we’re right.” They see him as a problem, and their job is to fix the problem, instead of reaching a rational decision based on the evidence.
Some groups will attack the Henry Fonda member with everything they’ve got—and yet it may be that he is not the only one who feels the way he does. If one group member thinks “I have some hesitations too…but look what they did to that member!” they won’t dare open their mouth. It may be that the majority actually feels that way – but none of them speak up, so the group ends up reaching a decision that most of them are against! There is an “illusion of unanimity.” Sometimes it’s not fear that keeps them from speaking up – sometimes it’s just a desire to be nice and supportive.
Let me describe a hypothetical: a husband has worked a long hard week and when Friday night finally arrives, all he wants to do is put on his pajamas and go to bed early. But his wife has also worked a long hard week, and is looking stressed out. And he knows that she likes to relieve stress by going out dancing. He wants to be a supportive husband, so he says to her, “You look like you’ve had a hard week; do you want to go out dancing?” He doesn’t want to, but he’ll do it for her. Meanwhile, she is thinking “That was an exhausting week, and all I want to do it put on pajamas and go to bed early … but my sweet husband wants to go out dancing, so I’ll do it for his sake.” So they both get dressed up and go dancing, and it’s not until later that they figure out that neither of them wanted to go. How did they make a decision that neither of them wanted?
The problem is: both were acting out of what they thought the other person wanted, but they were both wrong – and neither one of them said what they wanted.
But Be Flexible
The lesson seems to be: you must speak your mind, and don’t just go along with others for the sake of going along. But you can probably recognize the issue right away. If everyone thought of “going along” as a bad thing, few decisions would ever get made. Did you know that fewer than 5% of juries are “hung juries”? When a jury can’t reach a decision, they have to start the trial all over again with a new jury, at great expense, so I’m glad to hear that it’s rare.
I also think it is unfortunate that “compromise” has come to be a “dirty word” for some people. If you take pride in being rigid and unbending, I think that also represents a spiritual issue, perhaps one you don’t recognize. It may mean that pride is clouding your decision-making, making you unwilling to listen to reason. It may mean that you are not listening to other viewpoints. It may mean that you are driven by an underlying fear – for instance, a fear that you will go to hell if you are not morally pure enough. As Gordon pointed out in a sermon last year, some people who are absolutely certain about things are also absolutely wrong. There is arrogance in that stance, so it goes against that direction from Micah to “walk humbly.”
So, the willingness to listen to others is a crucial part of good decision-making. But it is not easy, and it still leaves open the question: what do you do with differences of opinion? How do you go from that step of hearing everyone’e opinions to actually reaching a decision? If a group wants to go out to dinner, each person can name their favorite restaurant, but unless everyone happens to mention exactly the same place, you are no closer to deciding.
There are numerous ways to get to that decision-step. One is to take a majority vote; one is to let a vocal minority decide (the person with the strongest opinion gets to rule the day); one is let the person with the most expertise decide (someone inside the group, or an outside expert); one is to decide by random chance. One I’ve seen many times is “decision by fatigue” – go through a deliberate decision-making process until people are just tired of working on it, and whatever the last option that was being discussed before people got tired ends up being the decision.
Then there is consensus. What is the difference between majority vote and consensus? The answer is: how do people who are not in the majority feel about the decision? If it’s majority, then it doesn’t matter – they lost. If it’s consensus, they are okay with it. You may notice that although we live in a democracy, we do not use the consensus method in our political system.
But in heaven, I imagine they do use the consensus method. They can do that, because they have the angelic qualities that it requires: openness and honesty, love and respect for others, humility and awareness that you are not the source of wisdom, and underneath it all are a set of shared loves. Love of truth, desire to do good. And when a group can do that while making a decision about anything, at any level, that is what I think it means by the Lord being “in the midst of them.” Amen