I'm comfortable with their discomfort.

A few weeks ago, I was at a workshop about interacting with people with differing values than your own, an interesting five-staged approach that I found quite insightful — lots of good stuff.

One tangential idea that jumped out at me was this: “It's time to start choosing who you want to make uncomfortable.”

Context: our church recently became an “open and welcoming congregation.” That’s code for going overt on the “gays are indeed real-and-alright people and welcome here” thing. It was sort of a big deal, not because we had a lot of people upset with that decision, rather because we had a few of them. And there is an imbedded value at church that says, “We don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”

Interestingly, in the five-stages system at the workshop, both my church and I fell right where I expected us to be. Without getting into the system, we’re there with most wishy washy liberals — we love everyone in theory, but do very little about it in practice except give money.

The workshop leader pointed out that this don’t-want-to-make-anyone-uncomfortable thing is typical of our stage. The problem is this: the people we don’t want to make uncomfortable are the people in our circle. We’re ignoring the fact that, in making that decision we’ve also decided it’s ok with us that people outside our circle, in this case gay and lesbian people, stay uncomfortable.

To put it another way, every decision we make makes someone uncomfortable. Maybe it’s time to have an overt discussion about that rather than make a covert decision for “my group.”

In the case of the gay-support decision at church then, I’ve decided that I’d rather make those people who are uncomfortable with homosexuals uncomfortable than make homosexuals uncomfortable.

Make sense to me.