Perry L. Gardner: Private Journal #7
Wednesday, March 9, 1988
I went to Randy’s “Life Issues for Adults” Workshop last night, where we talked about life’s stress-full times. The summary was about isolation and alienation. Just being able to talk made it feel like a good evening. The Spiritual Directions meeting of the night before was also a more relaxed meeting where we could talk. We went around the room, and everyone had a chance at the Board meeting. I’ve forgotten the question, but that’s not important—it was the good feeling that resulted.
This brings back all that stuff we learned about in Small Group Process training, that it was the intimate sharing that built the group good feelings. We seem to have gotten away from that with all our task-oriented meetings, and I, for one, miss it. Randy suggested this is a reason we could use an Assistant Minister, to help run more workshops and retreats, however, I think that lay leadership could be trained to do it, too.
The method as I recall it: First we sat in a circle and were asked to give our name and one-sentence statement of the most stressful event in our lives. Then we broke up into pairs to share five each of adult stressful types of problems, such as loss of a loved one, separation or divorce, loneliness, decision-making, time management, security. I forget the exact question. Then each pair shared their keywords with the whole group, looking for a common thread. From this Randy summarized and talked about the isolation/alienation theme and took others’ topics for the following sessions.
Evelyn pointed out it was not true intimate sharing because we weren’t an ongoing group, and Emily felt real strongly about the whole country being an alienating environment—a topic for a social action sharing. We know about this methodology and have preached it in the past, but it isn’t really happening in the Fellowship at present, in my opinion. It is something to work on. Maybe the networking workshop will give something in this direction.
An intimate sharing brings people closer together.