At a meeting a month or so again I mentioned how my church had made a difficult decision without rancor or ill will despite the fact that not everyone was in agreement on what the outcome should be. Several people asked “how did you do that?” as if it sounded quite miraculous. Indeed, in some sense it did seem like a miracle, especially considering we have, at times in our history, sometimes made easy decisions seem difficult and difficult decisions seem almost impossible. But this is not unique to our church either. Any group of human beings, all of whom have unique opinions, passions, and perspectives, can struggle with group decision making.
This led me to think about how did we take a difficult decision and make a pleasant process out of it? Here are some of my thoughts and some of the principles that we followed: