Group Think; Group Decisions: Put it to a vote?

 

I am involved with our local church.  In retirement I spend time doing odd jobs around the grounds and building.  I have done mostly gardening work in the summer.  During the winter I have been busy with drywall repairs.  In retirement the time spent there has been quite fulfilling.  However the church I belong to is part of the United Methodist Church.  The United Methodist Church is presently going through a debate resulting in many local churches deciding to disaffiliate from the world wide UMC.

Technically what the UMC is going through is called a schism .  I guess everything needs a fancy word.  It is no secret as to the major issue in the debate.  The issue is the acceptance or rejection of same sex marriages.  One side of the debate wants to accept same sex couples and one side wants to reject them.  To me this one way to make a decision, boil it down to its simplest terms.  From the simplest terms I can easily accept or reject a proposal.  I felt however that this issue was too important to leave it as a simple accept or reject proposal.  I began to educate myself on the issue and delve deeper into the debate.  After about 5 minutes I realized this to be a big mistake.  However it did start me thinking about how groups make decisions.  So here are some random thoughts on groups and decisions.

Some groups have a formalized or even a legally mandated process for making decisions.  The ultimate may be changes to the Constitution of the United States ( overview of constitutional amendment ).  Most of these formalized processes involve some kind of vote.  I will admit that I will never get the details of any one process 100% correct.  However they usually involve a balloting process and some predefined threshold.  That threshold may be a simple majority (50% + 1 vote) or higher.  In the case of a UMC church wishing to disaffiliate the threshold is a 2/3 majority.  In a constitutional amendment the threshold is 3/4's of the states.

Is a vote a good representations of a group's wishes?  One positive characteristic of a vote is that it is quite definitive.  If a proposal is put to a vote and it meets or exceeds the predefined threshold then there can be no disputing the results.  I am discussing this under the assumption that the logistics of the vote are fair and secure, and that all participants accept that it is fair and secure.  No "election steal" LOL.  Obviously if the proposed change does not meet the threshold the status quo is retained.

As I tried to inform myself as to the UMC split I came across some issues with the process.  The first one affects me probably more than most.  I find that all factions are over complicating the issue.  As I stated earlier I can over simplify an issue but, over complicating it is just as bad.  In the case of the UMC split each faction is trying to appear the more spiritual.  They all quote several bible verses and reference specific sections of the UMC Book of Discipline.  They never seem to directly state what their position is on the issue.  It is hard to vote on an issue if you do not understand the proposal offered.

A second more subtle issue is one I felt many years ago while living in Canada.  The sovereignty movement in Quebec had gone through many public wranglings (background Quebec sovereignty Charlottetown Accord Meech Lake Accord ).  I always had an uneasiness regarding this issue.  It seemed that none of the proposals fully addressed the issue.  It seemed to me that one side of the proposal was never addressed.  The best example of this was the 1980 Quebec Referendum .  In this vote the citizens of Quebec rejected the idea of negotiating a split from the rest of Canada.  You would have thought that this would end the issue of Quebec's sovereignty.  It did not.  The debate continued for several years after this.  This was because the proposal did not definitively address both sides of the debate.  The proposed question only addressed the sovereignty of the province.  The wording (the actual wording is in the article) did not address the steps to be taken if the sovereignty proposal was rejected.  So when the proposal was rejected there was no action taken other than continue debating the issue.

At the time I saw this as a process of simply kicking the can down the road.  It should have been a fish or cut bait proposal.  I see this happening in the UMC split as well.  Just because a local church votes to stay within the UMC what is to stop them from trying to disaffiliate next year or the year after.  I see some of the same "Wranglings" within the UMC debate that I saw in Canada.  Court cases, cries if disinformation and confusing proposals are common between both issues.  It seems to me that it is time for the UMC to fish or cut bait.