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While many of the findings from our first two years centered on specific polarizing issues, others are more comprehensive, getting to the heart of how pastors experience polarization as a phenomenon. Two of these findings are so important that they have helped to shape our future research agenda and informed the nature of our written analysis.

First, we learned that pastors believe loss of dialogue is an underlying problem that drives polarization no matter what the specific topic might be. Pastors named many social problems as important to society and to their congregations: racism, immigration, LGBTQ+ issues, and inequality were high on the list. But when discussing these, most pastors cited the same underlying condition: Their members, like society more generally, have lost the ability or desire to discuss controversial and difficult topics in hopes of finding common solutions.

We heard this concern expressed in different ways. Social media is often identified as the culprit, as is cable news. When we asked pastors what they would do if they could wave a magic wand, they said they would cause their members to devote much less time to either. They worry that their members spend 20 hours in a one-sided echo chamber all week and then spend 20 minutes hearing a universal Gospel on Sunday morning.

This finding makes us want to study this “loss of dialogue” more intently, but this is very difficult to do in the abstract. It is hard to know when we are observing the absence of something. All we can see are the presumed effects of that absence and, perhaps, to note places where productive dialogue is occurring.

Therefore, we have committed ourselves to look for places where dialogue is working and to highlight these examples. Moreover, we want the analysis we produce to provide an occasion for dialogue among pastors or between pastors and their congregations. We want to frame questions in ways that get them talking.

For instance, we are working on a set of questions pastoral search committees might want to ask when seeking to hire new leadership. While some pastors note dissonance between their own social views and those of their members, we think it is possible that the fundamental problem is not so much this difference by itself, but the difference in expectations about how these views are expressed. Put another way, perhaps the bigger problem is the understanding of a pastor’s role in the community than any specific conservative or liberal opinions.

The second formative thing we learned is that, as a matter of practice, pastors are eager to learn how other congregations discern their mission in polarizing times. They want to hear and see other examples because they hope this will help them and their congregations in their own discernment. When it comes to complex, difficult, matters, how do congregations make decisions? When do they speak out? When do they make formal statements? How do they know when is the right time? How does a pastor lead them through this?

It seems clear to us that this second finding about discernment is directly related the first about loss of dialogue. Maintaining a community with a shared vision is hard enough when a congregation’s members communicate well and agree frequently. When dialogue is thin, or absent, it is nearly impossible to maintain that vision.

Fortunately, the practice of discernment is easier to study because it is more concrete. We can observe the choices congregations make and, in some instances, we can analyze and understand the process they go through to make those choices. We can literally see them putting their shared vision into practice.

We have decided the best way to observe this discernment in action is to look at specific issues and see how congregations determine their responses. We intend to cover a range of issues to make sure our analysis has depth, but we are going to approach them one at a time. By doing this, we can see, directly and concretely, how congregations find their shared voice and what role the “loss of dialogue” plays in making this more difficult.

By looking at examples of congregations making choices that confirm and sustain their identities in a polarized environment, we can get at the heart of what discernment really means. We hope to be able to see and to share how congregations deal with, and ideally overcome, the malaise sometimes created by loss of dialogue.

Once again, though, we hope our analysis, whether written or in video, also provides an occasion for both intra- and inter-congregational conversation. We want to be a place where pastors talk about the problem of maintaining a shared vision, and about their discernment strategies, in a way that addresses the problem in practice even as we talk about it in theory. By offering examples, we want to “do” dialogue even as we look for ways to help “fix” dialogue in congregations.

The polarizing issues we observe—immigration, racism, economic inequality, gender identity—are very important, but it cannot be our goal to solve those problems directly. Our goal is much more modest: To make a useful contribution to congregational life by looking at the ways congregations shape and nurture their shared identities by the way they seek answers to difficult, controversial, issues they encounter on their path.

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