The Art of Gathering
Book Review (Priya Parker)
This book was recommended to me by a friend in ministry, and it really is great. It's by Priya Parker, who is basically a consultant for how to have great gatherings, and this book is her distilled wisdom.
The book is fascinating in and of itself, but let me walk through the contents a little. Firstly, Parker asks us to really examine and drill down on the purpose of gatherings, and the purpose of this gathering in particular. What's unique about it, and what is it really meant to achieve. You need a clear, bold purpose, and then you need to shape (all) your decisions around this purpose. For example, Parker writes, the purpose of your church small group cannot simply be “to allow church members to meet in smaller groups” nor a birthday party “to celebrate a birthday”. Instead, you should “ask[…] yourself what the purpose of your birthday party is in this specific year, for where you are at this present moment in your life” (p.10). Specificity, uniqueness, and disputability are key ingredients here.1
When you have a clear, specific, drilled down purpose, then you can start to tackle other questions. Like, who should be there. And who shouldn't. Exclusion is as important as inclusion. We exclude well when we exclude people who don't fit the purpose. This includes size dynamics, individual persons. We also exclude well when we identify people who threaten the purpose of the group. And, if we are thoughtful, we identify people we feel obliged to invite, who fail the first two tests (contributing to the purpose, not threatening it), and we decide what to do about that. If we must include them, how do we cater for that. And if we don’t truly need to, we can work out ways to not-invite them.2
Parker also talks through the role of the host. This was great. She talks about the authority a host has, and how they should wield this generously, for the benefit of their guests. In contrast, the tendency to be a "chill host" and surrender one's power usually leads to someone else controlling things, and you are off track. You need to guard the gathering and protect the guests.
In this chapter, I want to convince you to assume your proper powers as a host. That doesn’t mean that there’s one way to host or one kind of power to exert over your gathering. But I do believe that hosting is inevitably an exercise of power. The hosts I guide often feel tempted to abdicate that power, and feel that by doing so they are letting their guests be free. But this abdication often fails their guests rather than serves them. The chill approach to hosting is all too often about hosts attempting to wriggle out of the burden of hosting. In gatherings, once your guests have chosen to come into your kingdom, they want to be governed—gently, respectfully, and well. When you fail to govern, you may be elevating how you want them to perceive you over how you want the gathering to go for them.3
The next chapter talks about rules. Rules aren't etiquette, they are gathering specific. And they create buy-in, and culture-shape the gathering. So think about them carefully, craft them for effect, and don't be scared to give your gatherings rules to follow that serve their purpose.
On the issue of phones:
etiquette is not succeeding against technology in an age of distraction. And if etiquette fails with large, plural groups because it is internalized and implicit, it fails against technology for an even simpler reason. An army of some of the smartest people alive are working feverishly to ensure that etiquette stands no chance against our addictive new technologies.4
By the way, all these chapters are filled with stories - good gatherings which illustrate these points, and gatherings gone awry where these principles have not been kept.
Then Parker talks through timeline. How to prime participants well before the gathering. Ushering - the bringing your guests across the threshold, physically and metaphorically. The pre-game - when there's "time" before your event starts. You're still in control of that and should direct it. How to open - the importance of starting the gathering well, in line with its purpose.
There’s also a chapter that talks about ways to keep people ‘real’. The constant problem that people bring their “best self” out, that is to perform, be on display, talk up their achievements, present themselves as all-put-together, and how basically this gets in the way of the genuineness and sharing that we really want and appreciate in gatherings. Essentially Parker says that realness can be designed - it’s not a spontaneous product or by-product, you can work in ways of making this happen to better effect, and if you do so you end up with a better gathering.
Then follows a chapter that talks about controversy and conflict: when it's good to have, when it's necessary to engineer, and when it's best avoided. What is good conflict and how do you assess whether the benefit outweighs the risk.
The final chapter, naturally, turns to the question of ending well. How to close out a gathering in a fitting way. It got me thinking about all sorts of events and how they closed and how they could have closed.
If you are in ministry, you should 100% read this book. My friend who recommended it was right. I, for my part, have already been thinking through how to apply it in various contexts:
Planning my next birthday
Thinking through the weekly gathering of Jesus' followers in my home
How it applies to Sunday church gatherings
How it applies to pretty much any other gathering I attend.
I’ll keep you posted!
And so, some better alternatives for a church small group she suggests are “To have a group that keeps us doing what we say we want to do”, or “to have a trusted circle to share struggles without worrying about appearances”.
Not inviting is easier than un-inviting!
pp. 75-76.
p. 134.