Last night we hosted another Deep Dive Conversation Dinner, this time at someone else’s house.

This was a dinner that has been in the planning for months and one that i’ve been super excited and anticipationary about. Getting some leaders from St Johns Anglican church [where i currently hang out and am preaching on Sunday in the am actually if you want to come and hear!] to meet around food and conversations about race, with the hope of extending these into the whole church body, feels like a great thing.

But as the time drew near, i was a little bit nervous as the dynamic was very different to the 6 or 7 of these that tbV and i have hosted in our own home. We didn’t choose the people that were coming and didn’t know many of them really well and some not at all.

But, worst case scanario, we have a good meal together and an awkward conversation and then all head home.

Four and a bit hours later and i needn’t have worried… last night was a really excellent conversation and the start of something and renewed hope that people should be hosting these kinds of things all around the country [if not the world].

START WITH A BASKET

Forget ‘Snakes on a Plane’ [that delightfully cheesy Samuel L. Jackson 2006 movie], i get way more excited about ‘Phones in a Basket’.

Phone basket

One of the highlights for me of a Deep Dive is having some sort of receptacle that people are invited to leave their cellphones during our conversation. Possibly more symbolic than relevant [although with some people], it helps signal the intent that we have made a commitment to be fully engaged with each other for the next few hours.

HOW THIS PARTICULAR DINNER WENT DOWN

So one thing we’ve experienced with the Deep Dives that we’ve run is that there is not a particularly structured format that we draw on every time. It often depends on the theme [we have done dinners on Race, Living Simply, Church, Money] and the people there and then we come up with a plan and see how it goes. The freedom to improvise along the way and let the conversation form itself is a key element.

But typically with the dinners we have hosted, we have not had more than two questions an evening, and sometimes only one. Last night we had a couple of mini type questions that helped shape the evening around the bigger ones we had.

The family hosting us had made a braai so we started off by grabbing our food and eating most of it and then, as people were finishing off we began with the eveening’s activities.

There were ten of us at the dinner. So we started by breaking up into pairs of people who knew each other the least or hadn’t spoken to each other for a bit. Then each person got a chance to share a response to the statement: Share a story of one time that you experienced either privilege or prejudice in South Africa. 

Then we joined two pairs and three pairs [if we had had 12 people we would have simply joined each pair with another pair] and each person was invited to share the story they had heard [This shows us how well we listen to stories people have told us and also what parts we choose to highlight when we retell the story].

When we came back together as a big group, i asked ‘How did people do at telling your story?’ We have hosted Deep Dives where after sitting and listening to someone’s story, we had some people who couldn’t remember the person’s name who had told them the story. That feels like a good first step. But last night the amount of detail that came out in our small group was phenomenal – people really were listening well. And felt listened to. Which is huge.

We also had a bit of time to hear from a few people who had ‘a response or comment from a story that you heard or told’. Which was also hugely meaningful.

Then we broke for dessert. One thing we have found in many of the dinners we have hosted is that creating spaces for natural breaks during the evening is really helpful. So pudding or coffee break gives people a chance to reflect on what has happened already, regroup and then return for another round.

QUESTIONS TWO

When we gathered again for the second part of the evening, we decided to move it from conversation that had been good but in a sense held a little bit away from the body, to something a lot more personal.

i had two questions and wasn’t sure which one to go with so ended up sharing both of them and inviting each person to answer whichever one they chose. We decided to go around the circle to give it some kind of structure and expectation. And we invited people to say what they wanted to say as long or short as they needed to and then once they were finished for everyone to be quiet for a minute to just sit with what we’d just heard and have a moment to reflect or replay.

So no one was allowed to comment on what someone had said or ask questions, until everyone had had their turn, if the conversation continued after that.

The two questions i posed were:

# How are you feeling about South Africa right now?

# Share a time when you felt unwelcome in South Africa in some way.

That’s when things really went to another level.

i described the dinner we were going to have [just before we left to go have it] on Facebook yesterday as something like 60% intentionality, 30% Improv and 10% having a fresh pair of pants you can change into when you get home. And i think that’s true.

Whatever the theme is, there are not many occasions when you are going to accidentally launch into a four to six hour conversation on that thing unless you’re really committed. Social media arguments get out of control quickly because you’re not facing the person and you’re not sitting eating a meal with them or sharing a drink.

So really it’s about inviting a group of people together [preferably with some element of not everyone knows everyone as that sometimes encourages people to speak a little more freely] around a meal with a conversation theme in mind. A Deep Dive Dinner is about posing one to two questions that people can reflect on and preferably finding a way to make it personal with stories and responses to other people’s stories. It’s about sitting with moments of tension and awkwardness [we had a big one that snuck up on us last night] and not trying immediately to fix them, explain them, justify them or hope they will simply go away. It is sometimes about naming the awkwardness.

It really is about creating a safe space, but not a comfortable space – there is room for awkward and uncomfortable and weird and tense and angry and desperate and confusing… but safe.

So, all that remains is to ask you when you are going to be hosting yours? i would LOVE to hear if you are going to give it a go and how it went afterwards and also am more then keen to listen to your ideas, help you with your question and answer any questions you might have. But we have to be doing this. In whatever ways. Finding ways to sit with people who have different stories, experiences, opinions than ours and to really listen deeply and have something to think about later.

Is this something you could see yourself hosting? Or attending?