Gossip and ownward spirals

“Ethno­graphic Study Looks at Gos­sip in the Work­place” in the NYTimes:

The ear­lier stud­ies found that once some­one made a neg­a­tive
com­ment about a per­son who wasn’t there, the con­ver­sa­tion would get
meaner unless some­one imme­di­ately defended the tar­get. Oth­er­wise, among
both adults and teenagers, the insults would keep com­ing because there
was so much social pres­sure to agree with the others.

Some inter­est­ing here. They say gos­sip usu­ally spi­rals down until
some­one inter­venes to defend or deflect. In one school, gos­sip set up
rival camps; teach­ers even­tu­ally left and stu­dent test scores fell.

Friends
(and Chris­tians more gen­er­ally) are offi­cially against gos­sip, though
of course we’re not immune and I’ve seen it act as almost a kind of
cur­rency in some set­tings. But what are the clas­sic Quaker tools for
deflect­ing this nat­ural human ten­dency and keep­ing our com­mu­ni­ties from
the down­ward spi­rals of camp building?

11/03/2009 – 9:46 am | By Martin Kelley | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (14)
  • 37stories

    Enjoyed your blog. You ref­er­ence Harold Behr as a Sim­ple Church Planter. Is he still plant­ing? Can I make con­tact with him. I am start­ing a new work called Fresh Con­nec­tions. I’d like to learn from his strug­gles. http://​freshc​.org archie

  • http://www.martinkelley.com Mar­tin Kelley

    Archie: glad you like the blog. I haven’t heard from Harold in a few years
    (and I never really knew him). Last I heard the church plant­ing project ran
    into inter­nal yearly meet­ing pol­i­tics and he moved on.

  • indy­beckih

    I think this should be a huge topic for Friends, espe­cially the Youth, who are by nature more dri­ven by peer pres­sure.
    Our Yearly Meeting’s Youth Direc­tor encour­aged the youth to gather to protest a local Friends pas­tor, whose own Monthly Meet­ing (as well as sev­eral oth­ers), sup­port his min­istry fully. The result of this encour­age­ment at the hands of the Youth Direc­tor was that remarks were made that were incen­di­ary, unQuak­erly, and unChris­t­ian.
    If any­one has any ideas, or tried and true strate­gies for build­ing up rather than tear­ing down, we’d be eager to hear them.

  • Raye

    Here is what I have tried, and it works to get my own behav­iors out of the down­ward spi­ral, and often seems to moti­vate oth­ers to do the same.

    As I offer this to you, it occurs to me that because it was writ­ten a long time ago, and because you may have heard it before, it may seem trite. But fol­low­ing this approach, which has an inward and an out­ward dimen­sion, works. It can be painful, it can stir up people’s opin­ions against you because it may step on some toes. (In my life, by the way, I can only do this with divine assis­tance through prayer, and res­olutely set­ting aside any­thing that inter­feres with fol­low­ing this way.) Here goes.

    I pre­fer to use The Mes­sage, because the lan­guage is more con­tem­po­rary and under­stand­able to me. Please use what makes sense to you.

    Gala­tians Chap­ter 5:16–23
    Matthew 18:21–22
    1 Corinthi­ans 13
    James 3:3–18

    Another I recall often, to keep myself in line, is Matthew 13:24–30. A few verses later, some­thing absolutely vital is explained in under­stand­ing the story. “The reapers are the angels.” Not peo­ple, not us. The angels do the sort­ing out. It is not my job.

  • indy­beckih

    The pas­sage in James is par­tic­u­larly a pro­pos here. I thank you for point­ing me in that direc­tion. Much of what we’re expe­ri­enc­ing here is tied up with the­ol­ogy and ide­ol­ogy and what we say vs our actions.

  • Raye

    Mar­tin, I posted a brief response else­where, but because I think it is impor­tant, here are some thoughts on clas­sic Quaker tools.

    Queries and advices, at least in my YM, cover this topic. So answer­ing queries indi­vid­u­ally and as a group, and tak­ing heed of the advices helps pre­vent this non­sense. Lis­ten­ing, in daily times of retire­ment, to what the Lord tells us will keep us far­ther away from self­ish­ness and closer to Him, short-circuiting the human fail­ing of tear­ing oth­ers down to build our­selves up. Whole­some reg­u­lar fel­low­ship, with the goal of build­ing one another, and thus the com­mu­nity, up, in our most holy faith, can squeeze out gos­sip and camp building.

  • http://www.martinkelley.com Mar­tin Kelley

    Wow, that’s a pretty bad sit­u­a­tion. For what it’s worth, Jesus is pretty clear that we will be both mis-understood and inten­tion­ally mis-characterized. Some­times the best we can do is to just hold as close as we can to char­ity and to do our best to keep our­selves (and our sup­port­ers) from get­ting caught up in the drama. Part of the spi­ral is react­ing to this kind of overt provo­ca­tion. We need to be brave enough to be meek.

  • Richquaker

    I think the arti­cle “Detrac­tion” by Seth Hin­shaw is immensely help­ful. It’s avail­able in printed form from the Friends Tract Asso­ci­a­tion and is also online at http://​www​.trac​tas​so​ci​a​tion​.org/​h​i​t​e​c​.​htm

    One prob­lem is that many of us don’t know when we’re gos­sip­ing. We may think we’re doing well by out­ing some­one else’s inap­pro­pri­ate behav­ior. That’s why Jesus’ instruc­tions on how to deal with each other in Matthew 18:15–17 are so impor­tant. I would add that I don’t think Jesus was say­ing we have to be con­stantly call­ing each other on our sup­posed sins, but that if we feel we need to do so we should do it face to face and not by spread­ing our tale among third parties.

  • Richquaker

    Dear Indy­beckih,
    Just to illus­trate how tricky this issue is, I find myself won­der­ing whether your com­ments aout your Meeting’s Youth Direc­tor aren’t also gos­sip. Most of us don’t know who you’re talk­ing about of course, but prob­a­bly some peo­ple do. The youth director’s actions, as described, seem very hurt­ful and uncalled-for. But of course we don’t know his or her side of the story, don’t know what form the “encour­age­ment” took, don’t know what the objec­tion to the local Friends pas­tor was, don’t know whether the local pas­tor had been approached directly first, etc. etc.

    I’m sen­si­tive to this issue because a mem­ber of my meet­ing has been broad­cast­ing on the inter­net his belief that other mem­bers of the meet­ing are back­bit­ing, gos­sip­ing, etc. He doesn’t name those mem­bers, but I know who he’s talk­ing about and I know there are other sides of the story. I’d imag­ine they feel very hurt and misunderstood.

    Of course, by telling you this I may myself be gos­sip­ing. You see how com­pli­cated it gets.
    - — Rich Accetta-Evans

  • indy­beckiH

    Rich — of course, you’re right. We weave a hugely tan­gled web. And it would be nice if we all sat down and talked with each other until we fig­ured it out. And it would also be won­der­ful if every­one could hear the Spirit in the same way, what­ever the message.

    How­ever — I think a point to con­sider is — for what rea­son are you speak­ing about the other per­son? We are not seek­ing to have the youth direc­tor removed. She is skilled at her job, and is a good orga­nizer. Her actions — using her great orga­ni­za­tional skills — were to encour­age the youth to come to Yearly Meet­ing in a large group and protest the pas­tor with whom the YM has issue.

    Since this con­flict within the YM has come to a head, there have been sev­eral face-to-face meet­ings (includ­ing talks with the youth direc­tor her­self), fol­low­ing the John Wool­man model, with no clar­ity reached. I think it’s less gos­sip than just try­ing to fig­ure out what to do next to see if we can work with unity in the face of diver­sity, and if unity can­not be reached, what do we do next? All actions have ram­i­fi­ca­tions, good and/or bad.

  • Richquaker

    indy­beckiH,
    I trust that you and oth­ers of like mind will find a clear way for­ward (or — if there is not clear way for­ward — will con­tinue to wait). It sounds like you are all try­ing hard to fol­low gospel order. I appre­ci­ate the fact that you don’t iden­tify the indi­vid­u­als or YM involved on this forum. I sup­posed that within your YM this is all stuff that’s out in the open already as it should be.
    I’m sorry if I seemed at all preachy or self-righteous in my orig­i­nal com­ment. God knows I have lit­tle stand­ing to try to be remov­ing grains of sand from anyone’s eye.
    - –Rich Accetta-Evans
    - — Rich

  • indy­beckih

    Not preachy at all, Rich — I appre­ci­ate hear­ing from some­one who is out of the vor­tex of the con­flict. All of us here are con­vinced that we are fol­low­ing the Spirit’s lead­ing, which con­fuses us since we’re get­ting such dis­parate mes­sages. It’s good to process obser­va­tions from some­one who has no prior bias (or to put it less Quak­erly — “no dog in the fight”).indybeckih

    Thanks!

  • http://www.obedienttothelight.blogspot.com/ Linda Wilk

    Mar­tin, I appre­ci­ate you post­ing about this, and I’ve responded in my own blog, obe​di​ent​tothe​light​.blogspot​.com. It’s a good sub­ject, and one that affects any close com­mu­nity.
    Bless­ings, Linda

  • Alice_Yaxley

    Not ancient wis­dom but here are a few other posts in this topic I’ve been read­ing up:

    This post describes a sit­u­a­tion in Meet­ing where gos­sip was acknowl­edged to be part of the prob­lem and Mar­shall Massey com­mented to it v infor­ma­tively with some older quotes as well: http://​friend​-in​-need​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​0​7​/​1​0​/​c​all…

    Your own tag about detrac­tion col­lects up some great posts imho
    http://​www​.quak​er​ran​ter​.org/​t​a​g​/​d​e​t​r​a​c​t​ion

    And there’s an inter­est­ing doc­u­ment from the Faith and Prac­tice of South­east­ern Yealry Meet­ing about the “Blessed com­mu­nity” here:
    http://www.seym.org/FP.pdf/BlessedCommun%200407…

    I’ve been work­ing on just try­ing to turn my thoughts and the con­ver­sa­tion back towards Jesus when I see neg­a­tiv­ity sur­fac­ing. LIke it’s not inter­est­ing, but sal­va­tion is really interesting!