Where y’at?/ Right Here!

Dear Christophany Group facilitators,

It was such a joy to be with you on September 12! Thank you to all who were able to come. I look forward to being with you again sometime in mid-December. I will poll you to determine a date and time that accommodates the largest number of people.

“Where y’at?”  is a common greeting in the New Orleans area, where I lived for almost three decades.  At first, I did not know how to respond. My initial impulse was to say, “right here!” But I quickly learned that “where y’at” meant “how are you?”  It was so good to hear from you all about where you are on the journey and also your concern for how your group members are doing. I look forward to accompanying you through the questions that arise and exploring them together as we continue to grow in communion with each other and our Christophany Group members.

Barbara Fleischer, in her book Facilitating for Growth, tells us that communication forms the basis for community-building: “At the most basic level, community and communion are the fruit of healthy and respectful communications” (p. 39). Fleischer writes that “as the people of God we are called to form relationships that reveal the reign of God” (p. 39). Using the language of Teilhard, we might think of this in terms of relationships that reveal the whole. She stresses the need for facilitators to listen on two levels to what is happening to a group, attending to both the topic at hand and how ideas and feelings are being communicated. And she urges facilitators to assist group members to communicate more clearly and constructively, when needed, since, if left unchecked, incongruent messages can cause confusion and affect the level of trust in a group.
Community forms when members feel a sense of oneness and connection on some central values or beliefs. It also involves a sense of being present to one another as we build bridges of understanding.  

Thus, it is important that members of a group develop skills in both expressing ideas and feelings and in listening to others. According to Fleischer, these skills hinge upon a basic level of self-awareness in terms of verbal and non-verbal signals. And while some participants do not choose to share until the end of the meeting, if at all, time should be distributed so that all members are invited to speak, if they wish. Fleischer explains:

A well-functioning group generally develops a norm of appropriate levels of self-disclosure among members in their discussions period. While it may not be explicitly stated, the norm guides members to share details only to the extent that they are pertinent to the discussion at hand. When a story or statement becomes so laden with particulars that the threads of the story get lost, this norm has been breached and other members of the group may start squirming. If over-sharing of details seems to be a possible problem in the group, the facilitator might suggest an explicit norm asking that members help ensure that everyone has a chance to participate in the discussion (p. 45).

Fleischer’s thoughts on community building provide a springboard for assessing what is going well in our Christophany groups as well as identifying where there is a need for further growth, keeping in mind that we are in an evolutionary process of becoming. As always, I invite you to continue to share how your groups are evolving – your joys, sorrows and challenges – in our private Facebook Group. 

Peace and blessings,

Emily