Civil Discourse about Controversy in Christian Community: The Video

Fifteen days, seventeen interviews, twenty-four interviewees, one question:
different struggles, questions, answers, experiences. How do we talk about that?

"Regardless of the topic, if there's any kind of tension attached to it, usually people avoid that conversation. And when that conversation begins, it's a source of relief, and that someone has just been waiting to go into that conversation."

"People being aware is really good. And have a support system. You have to have a support system. To share that is something huge, because that means you trust the people around you, that you trust that they're going to care enough."

"To truly love someone means to listen to them with the purpose of understanding and hearing from their experience. Suspending your own views and your own judgments."

"How can I approach the person who is most different from me, the most opposed to what I value, in a way that has hospitality, in a way that has grace and some hope for movement?"

"God's big enough not to be threatened by our questions."

"I never consider myself fully educated. I feel like I'm always learning. I have a postgraduate degree, but I never feel like I know what I'm doing."

"I'm a better person for the debate, frankly. I'm still growing."

"For a lot of people, their first reading of the Bible, or their first encounter with a set of ideas, is the ultimate truth. I think truth stands up to further scrutiny."

"Once you think you have it figured out, you stop being curious, you stop being open-minded, you stop learning. And unless you're God, we just don't know."

"We don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but we want to be honest. So if there's a difference in opinion, let's make it about biblical interpretation and not personal feelings. Accepting that we have presuppositions and putting them on the table is the only way we can then really look at the Bible and say, 'Okay, this is what my presuppositions would have me to believe, but if I set those aside, how do I look at this devoid of those?'"

"There's a lovely tool called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. For me, as a person of faith, I start with Scripture. But then you hold the other three parts of it so that you're living in that tension, between scripture, reason, tradition, and experience, and believing God speaks through all those ways."

"I'm old enough to know that it's very difficult to change people's minds. But I tell my story - the mother of a gay son, see. She's not so crazy! - you know? And she loves - she loved him. And honored him, and tried to help him, and all that sort of thing. So why can't I?"

"If you come at it saying, 'I have the truth and I'm going to prove it to you,' psychologically, that doesn't seem to work. We need dialogue. If you come in saying, 'I don't know for sure what the truth is, but I have a lot of humility,' being inquisitive and being humble, not coming in claiming you have truth, but coming in admitting that you're on a journey towards truth, that usually comes across much better."