This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Building an Open & Collaborative Environment – Rev. Darrell Jones
DESCRIPTION
What does it mean to stay open in a time of intensity? This week we bring the month’s themes together, exploring how cultivating vulnerability and collaboration can lead to greater strength and connection. How can we stay open to others while navigating fear and conflict?
The summary and transcription were auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
SUMMARY
In this talk given by Rev. Darrell Jones, the central question posed is whether individuals can remain open and collaborative while navigating fear, anger, and conflict. Drawing on Brene Brown’s book *Strong Ground*, Reverend Jones argues that fear and anger are not experiences to avoid but potential catalysts for personal and communal growth. The book’s core thesis holds that strong ground is built upon personal values, and that when people who live by values come together, they create even greater shared ground.
A key framework introduced is the contrast between four mindsets: the scientist, the preacher, the prosecutor, and the politician. While the preacher defends sacred beliefs, the prosecutor seeks fault, and the politician pursues approval at any cost, the scientist remains curious, admits uncertainty, and updates views based on new information. Rev. Jones argues that adopting the scientist mindset is essential for building open, collaborative communities, and that shifting into blame rather than accountability is a common obstacle.
Central to the sermon is the concept of psychological safety, defined as the shared belief that one can express their true self, ask questions, and make mistakes without fear of humiliation or rejection [0-ts1005.76-31.36]. This safety enables people to inhabit the learning zone, a space of constructive discomfort where genuine growth occurs, rather than defaulting to the danger zone when challenged. Rev. Darrell also introduces the concept of “negative capability,” drawn from poet John Keats and cited by Brene Brown, as the ability to accept doubt, uncertainty, and mystery without immediately seeking hard facts or logical explanations. Sitting in contemplation with uncomfortable truths builds the inner capacity to engage with community without treating disagreement as threat. The talk closes with an affirmation that all of life’s experiences, however difficult, are key ingredients toward a greater good, and that love remains available beneath fear and uncertainty when people choose to pause and allow it.
TRANSCRIPTION
Rev. Darrell Jones:
Little Carol King. So is this thing on? Is this thing on? Yes, it is. Good morning, everyone. My name is Reverend Darrell Jones. My pronouns are he and him, and I’m glad that you’re here today. Those of you online, welcome. As always, I will invite you to pause multitasking. You’ve got the rest of your life to do that. Take a moment and get present as we focus on this book, Strong Ground, and some of the lessons in it on this month of the fear and the furious. So Reverend Judy was like, okay. I mean, you kind of put some pressure on me to come up with some answers here, but I think it’s pretty simple. How do we build open and collaborative environments? How can we stay open to others while navigating fear and conflict? And I’m going to go to Carol King’s chorus. Don’t tell me about the things you’ve heard.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I want to believe in humanity.
What we’re talking about today is simply making a choice. Do you believe in humanity or not? Regardless of what people say, regardless of what the government does or doesn’t do, regardless of what the news is screaming at you and trying to convince you otherwise, do you choose to believe in humanity? Let’s get into it. I’m going to set a timer so that we can all have lunch. Okay. So over the past few weeks, Reverends Jackie, Amy, Linda, Judy, and Rabbi Steven, they all challenged us to really explore our personal spiritual journey. And in particular, as it relates to fear, as it relates to anger and compassion. And the biggest takeaway from this book and from all the talks this month, and I think you can catch up quick, you can catch up quick, just making sure you’re awake in case you haven’t had your coffee yet.
I think you can catch up quick even if you weren’t here for the services and don’t know exactly what was said. The basic premise is that anger and fear are expressions of emotional experience no different than love or joy.
Can you track that? Love and joy are emotions, emotional expressions that generally we want to experience. Yes? And we spend much of our lives attempting to sustain experiences, to sustain relationships and jobs that offer us the experience of love and joy. Anger and fear are two expressions that I think most of us don’t really enjoy experiencing. And just as we spend a lot of time, money, and effort to embrace and sustain love and joy, we spend a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of effort avoiding anger and fear. The big question this month is what if fear and anger weren’t things to avoid, but rather things to embrace? What if these two experiences that we avoid so much became catalysts? What if they were door openers, way showers even, revealers of our growth individually, but especially in community? What does it mean to stay open in a time of intensity, intense anger, intense fear or intense sadness?
Well, today we bring this month’s theme together, exploring how cultivating vulnerability and collaboration can lead to greater strength and connection. How can we stay open to others while we are navigating our own fear, our own anger, our own sadness and conflict? And this enters us into the conversation with Brene Brown in the book Strong Ground. The basis of the book, the main central thesis is that strong ground is composed of your own values, that which you hold most dear and true for you, that is the ground that you make your strong ground. And then when you come into connection with others that also have strong values, you actually build greater ground together. But here’s a key thing to realize. We often say we want to be around like-minded people. That’s just comfortable and convenient. You don’t have to necessarily have the same values as someone, but someone that respects values, that lives by values.
If we’re all really living by values, that’s strong ground. I may value connection and you value peace.
Those don’t combat against one another. They’re just values that we hold to be true. And Brene Brown really challenges us to be inquisitive about when we’re slipping away from our values and what can we do to get back on track. In particular, she draws on psychological safety research to show that openness in the presence of fear is not naive. It is the most powerful organizational and communal stance available. When people feel felt, seen, heard, and that they belong, they don’t just conform to the culture of what’s happening. They actually evolve into and creating a fuller potential for the community. And that’s what Cityside is envisioning. That’s what Cityside is all about, a community that stands on strong ground, growing into our fullest potential together. Yeah? So this brings me to our focus today, building an open and collaborative environment. Now, I think everyone ideologically wants that.
Yes? We want to have an open and collaborative environment. That sounds good, but I don’t know if everyone really has thought about what it takes to make that so.
To stay open to others while navigating fear, anger, conflict, and more, we must embrace our inner Dolly Parton. If you haven’t seen the overwhelming love that has been expressed for that woman in her life and who she was, this is a good time to go onto social media and just type in Dolly Parton praise and see what’s there. So it’s not so much our inner Dolly Parton, but she is a beacon of what Brene Brown invites us to embrace our inner scientist, our inner scientist. And this is where my nerd gets really activated in an awesome way, because whether you are 100% affiliated with the teachings of Ernest Holmes, you are a religious scientist or you wouldn’t be in the room or you wouldn’t be listening to this.
Ernest Holmes said that we are chemists in the laboratory of consciousness. What then shall we produce? And Brene Brown says, we must be scientists in order to stay in the room together and be collaborative. We must bring on this mindset. So let’s go back to our reading, our first slide here. Brene says, good scientists are aware of the. They are expected to doubt whatever they know, be curious about what they don’t know and update their views based on new data. But being a scientist is not just a profession, it’s a frame of mind. We move into scientist mode when we are searching for the truth. Are you not searching for the truth? Okay. So we are scientists. We are searching for the truth. And I think this is why Dolly Parton was so beloved because she was in the mindset of a scientist as much as she could be.
If she got feedback and data that something that she did or said or a way that she was being somehow caused friction that wasn’t good, she would just change. She would just change.
No big show about it. Didn’t have to tell everyone. When we are in community, we are constantly bumping up against someone, literally, right? When you walk down the hallway, you got to move out of the way or you bump into them. This is the natural part of being in communion with other people. The challenge is, is that we oftentimes find ourselves moving into a mental state that is not scientific. We aren’t holding onto the space of the scientist. And there’s three other mind modes or mindsets that Brene highlights that we often go into. The first is the preacher, the second is the prosecutor, and the third is the politician. So the preacher, like me up here, I’m not screaming at you telling you that you’re condemned, but if you think about the archetype of the preacher, the preacher is giving a sermon to protect, to promote and defend a core sacred belief.
So they’re almost in a fighting stance, if you will. “You must do this. You must do that. We must do this.” The prosecutor, on the other hand, doesn’t really say a lot. They’re listening, not actively. They’re listening for flaws. They’re looking for where they can prosecute and say, “You’re wrong, find fault in you.” And then there’s the politician who doesn’t care really about what’s right or wrong. They don’t care about authenticity. They just want to win your vote. So the political mind of the politician, that mindset is all about winning approval. That’s it, by any means necessary. So just reflect for a moment. When you are in community, whether it’s your family community, whether it’s a work community, whether it’s your spiritual community, whether it’s your neighborhood, whether you’re watching the news and all of a sudden you hear something that kind of goes against the grain of your belief, do you go into the mode of the preacher and start telling people what they should and shouldn’t think?
Or are you looking to prosecute, condemn and find the flaw? Or do you kind of just go, “Oh, it’s all good.” And you just kind of politic around to make sure that you stay in everyone’s good graces. Now, there’s nothing wrong with these. I’m not stating these to judge because I am a preacher, not in just profession, but I’m a human. So I go into the preacher mode. I go into the prosecutor mode and I go into the politician mode. This is natural. Our nervous system promotes it. It’s called protection. However, shifting into the scientist, this is the practice. This is the mindset that we can return to. When we get stuck preaching, prosecuting or politicking, our ideas, our thoughts become our identity. And we say over and over and over again that our thoughts create our experience, that they’re powerful, but your identity is not your thought.
Your identity is a living spirit of God, an expression of the universe. That’s your identity, period. But when we get caught politicking, preaching and prosecuting, we start to identify ourselves with having to fight for those one single thoughts or beliefs, yes? And we stop listening to one another. The scientists, when we are scientists, it breaks this rigidity, the rigid mind of the preacher, the rigid mind of the prosecutor, the rigid mind of the politician, and it opens us up. We search for truth. We admit that we don’t know and we update our views when we get new information.
This is not easy to do by yourself. So imagine eight billion plus people trying to make sense of one another on the planet. It ain’t easy, folks. To shift into the mindset of the scientist, it requires accountability to ourselves and others. But Brene Brown goes on to say, if we could have our second slide, we’re not good at accountability because it requires vulnerability and discipline. We’re much better at blame, which is simply the discharging of anger and pain. In community, blame is so attractive. It’s seductive, and it’s easy for that matter. I never have to go, “I don’t know if I can do it, but I’m going to try to blame someone today.” I don’t have to think about it. It’s pretty damn easy to do.
This is where we get caught up. Without any effort, we just default into blame to discharge this feeling that we don’t want to experience. We don’t want to really be like, “Oh yeah, let me be in anger today.” No, as soon as it starts to well up, we’re like, it’s like a spider, get it off of me. And so we do something to discharge it. But when we do that, we aren’t taking responsibility. We aren’t being accountable to ourselves and to one another. So then this brings me into kind of the core of the lesson today. If we could have our next slide. This is something that I recently was reminded of during a sacred activism meeting that I had last weekend with a bunch of other folks from communities around the country. It was kind of a community of practice and we were talking about some of the best practices.
And when you’re doing activism work, it’s this weird, interesting thing where you kind of are in that fight or flight mode, especially if you’re out in the world in front of people, like marching, you don’t know who’s in alignment with you, who’s an ally, who’s not. And so you can easily slip into the space of the danger zone. And we must realize that in community, when we are challenging either ourselves or someone else, that we are actually in a learning space. But this is where we get a little confused today. If you’re thinking about psychological safety, I want to read this definition of psychological safety to you because this is the research that Brene Brown uses in her teachings in this book. As I read this definition, really take in these different zones. Psychological safety in life is the shared or personal belief that you can express your true self, share ideas, ask questions, and make mistakes without fear of humiliation, punishment, or rejection.
That’s psychological safety.
It requires an agreement on everyone’s part that we’re going to F up. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re not here to be perfect. We’re here to actually live in the learning zone. In the learning zone, the first thing it says is it’s uncomfortable at first, but it’s where growth exists. We today fight so hard to stay comfortable and think that that is where we should live most of the time. But if you look at the blue zone here, it’s comfortable and safe, but we’re only within the abilities that we already have. We’re not learning new skills in the comfort zone and we’re just doing routine and familiar things and there’s very limited growth. But when we’re learning, when we stretch just outside of that comfort zone, we actually expand our comfort zone.
It requires effort. It requires courage. It requires risk. It is challenging, but it can be very satisfying. And this is where we learn new skills. This is where we experience and adapt to new things. We must realize and remember that we are here to learn and grow and not perpetually be comfortable. Comfort is great. It is necessary. I’m not making it wrong. It’s essential for healing and digestion, emotional regulation, nervous system balancing and restoration. However, I feel like we’ve lost sight of the truth that learning doesn’t actually happen powerfully when we’re comfortable. It actually happens during constructive discomfort in the learning zone. This is where the scientist spends most of their time in this space, but we have lost acceptance and excitement for the learning zone. We have forgotten that actually deep learning happens in an environment that usually doesn’t initially feel psychologically safe until we can kind of check ourselves.
What happens, especially in communities today, is when any discomfort begins, we often bypass the learning that could happen and we jump into the danger zone.
We make an assumption that the discomfort means threat. I see this happen all the time in families, in neighborhoods, in work environments, in certain industries, in our country. Something that we believe, that we think is absolute, it gets questioned and whomever is the person who questions or entertains the question is seen and labeled as a threat. We go immediately to danger and we villainize the person and label that dissenting voice as conspiracy, making any belief, person, group or entity that calls into question what we think, what we know we think is absolute and true, we make them a threat. And so we get ready to fight.
We think because someone doesn’t think exactly as we do that it’s grounds for dismissal and in the worst case, it’s grounds for death and killing. The scientist doesn’t do this. The scientist goes, “Hmm, isn’t that interesting? Let me see if what I think is absolute, maybe it’s not.” Is there another possibility here? When was the last time something pushed up against your belief system and you said, “Is there another possibility?” Or did you try to kick somebody in the teeth? The scientist is actually a visionary. And many people don’t think of scientists as visionaries, but think about this, the practice of visioning, right? We do this all the time in community here. We tap into the possibility of what life could be and regardless of whether or not life expresses that way, the visioner is invited to stay in the flow.
We stay curious and open to possibility. This is the mindset of a scientist. The scientist has a vision of where they want to go. They have a hypothesis. They do tests and experiments, but they don’t slam their hands down on the ground when something goes wrong. They go, “What’s going on here? What’s the possibility? What can we discover? How many things, how many inventions do we have on this planet that came out of total screw-ups, most of them?” People were throwing wet noodles against the wall, seeing what sticks, and because it didn’t stick the way they intended to, they don’t turn into a five-year-old and stomp their feet and go, “This sucks. Nothing works right.” They stay curious. To build an open and collaborative environment, we must stay curious. And I’m not saying that there aren’t actual threats against us as individuals and there’s communities where people are threatening lives, but most of the time in the circles that I travel in, whether it is a corporate space, whether it is an educational system in schools, whether it’s working with a family, people make threats out of not threatening things.
And if we can just pull ourselves out of that space of overwhelm and panic, if we can pull ourselves out of that space of being in survival mode and realize that we are okay, what might be possible? This isn’t easy work. We must stay awake to it and we must practice it all the time. This isn’t something you decide once. This is something that you decide every single day. So I recently came across a very interesting phrase that I want to introduce here to all of you today. It is called new thought arrogance. There’s this idea that because we have this amazing belief system, that we have this amazing spirituality, that we don’t have to do any work, that we don’t have to somehow work it. We get arrogant and think, “Oh, well, I know what’s right. I believe in this thing, therefore everything’s okay.
No worries. It’s all good.” Brene Brown goes on to say, if we could have our next slide, “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.” Stay hopeful. You know that things are going to be great in the end, but we must stay awake and aware and present to what’s actually happening and let that inform our systems.
She goes on, if we could have the next slide, thinking about our future, that the future can’t be predicted as much as we try, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us and discover. The system of our planet right now is inviting us to discover something new.
We are in an intense place of discomfort. Would you not agree? Are you under attack right now in this room or wherever you’re watching this? Can you pull yourself into the learning zone and remind, I know that I’m safe and that there is something, something in the weirdness of life right now that is actually a key ingredient to greater good? Say this after me. I know I’m safe. I know I’m safe. Everything in my life. Everything in my life. Is a key ingredient – Is a key ingredient. Towards greater good. Towards greater good. Everything in your life is a key ingredient towards greater good. What if you walk forward into this week saying that? Not to deny that there aren’t threats out there, but to maybe check a little bit and go, okay, I don’t like this, but can it be an ingredient for the greater good?
Can it somehow work into this mixture?
One of the concepts that I wish that we had more time to get into, but it’s just an important thing to hold. The key to building collaborative spaces is to let go of absolute, to let go of right and wrong, and to embrace negative capability. Does anyone know that phrase? Anyone reading the book, heard of it? It’s something that Brene Brown attributes to the poet John Keats who used the phrase for the first time, “But negative capability is the ability to accept doubt, uncertainty and mystery without impatiently searching for hard facts or logical reasons.” I’m going to read that again. Negative capability is the ability to accept doubt, uncertainty and mystery without searching for hard facts right away and to explain it away.
The other person that Brene Brown brings into the conversation is Richard Rohr, if you’re familiar with him, the priest who’s very, very, very left in the Catholic tradition and mystic, if you will, and his whole thing is contemplation. The more and more we sit in contemplation and in particular welcome a thought or an idea that maybe pushes us into the learning zone, something that’s a little uncomfortable to be with, a truth that we’re not quite certain how that works, when we can sit in contemplation and hold that paradox, we go into that negative capability. And when we practice doing that, then when we step out into community, we actually have a muscle to use. We don’t immediately make something that we don’t like a threat and we feel like we have to fight it away. We can actually sit in the midst of the mystery of life.
This is the artistry of our spirituality, sitting in the mystery and in the midst of the mystery to Declaring a truth that we are here, we are safe, and that we have all the ingredients we need for greater good. Let’s take this into prayer. Take a nice deep breath in.
And as you exhale, let your attention drop down beneath the neckline to the heart space where you experience joy, where you experience love, and where you experience anger and fear. Say quietly to yourself, “I know I’m safe. I know I’m safe. Everything in my life is a key ingredient towards greater good.” And the reason that we state this is that we declare, we affirm that there’s only one thing happening, and that is the life of the divine, that nothing falls outside of that circle. We may not understand it all. We may not like it all, but all of the ingredients known as our lives individually and collectively, we’re cooking up something good, people.
We are making this world a better place. So may we use what we have, may we be creative with what we have, and get curious instead of furious. What I affirm for all of us this week is that we step into our circles of living. We step into the places of employment. We step into our families. We step into the conversations, whether they be easy conversations or hard conversations as scientists. May we be willing to explore and to positively doubt and hold the paradox of not knowing it all, but thinking we do. Because all of it is centered in the bottom line. If we allow it, love will prevail. Love will win. Love is just behind the fear and the sadness and the anger and the uncertainty if we can pause and allow it to be. And what I affirm and know is that we can pause.
We can allow it to be. We can let the light, we can let the light shine through. And so may the light shine through for all of us this week and forevermore. And so it is. And now it is.