"Appreciative inquiry" is a cutting-edge technique in the world of organizational development. Many parishes have successfully adapted the technique for pastoral planning and adult faith formation. What makes it so successful is its use of personal stories to cause powerful transformation.
What is appreciative inquiry?
The essence of appreciative inquiry is in the name itself.
- To "appreciate" means to value, recognize, or affirm the strengths, successes, and potentials of a person or thing.
- To "inquire" is to explore or discover.
"Appreciative inquiry" is thus the process of asking questions. It is a process of exploring life, health, vitality, excellence, and success in your parish. "Success" is measured by those moments when individuals of the parish have been faithful to God’s call. The process explores when they have most noticed God working actively in their lives. At the heart of appreciative inquiry is the art of asking questions. The right questions strengthen an individual’s or faith community’s capacity to respond to God’s vision. The questioning takes place in the context of one-on-one personal interviews.
Preparation
The first step in appreciative inquiry is creating the "interview protocol"--the set of questions that you will ask. I normally use a variation of
five basic questions. I tailor them to fit the desired pastoral context. I am careful to preserve the order of the questions because they follow an intentional flow. The questions start with the parishioner’s initial experience with the parish and end with their hopes and dreams for the future.
When using appreciative inquiry in the context of a parish pastoral council retreat, for example, I begin by reading all the questions aloud to the group. That way, they know what’s coming before the actual interviews. Next, I ask members to pair off and interview each other. Each interview takes about 45 minutes. So plan for 90 minutes to complete both interviews. The following are ground rules for the interviews:
- Ask the questions as they are written, in order. Use the interview protocol as your script. Do not paraphrase or restate the question. You can inadvertently change the nature of the question by doing so.
- Refrain from “cross-talk.” Listen and let the person being interviewed tell his or her story. Don’t interrupt with your own opinions or experiences.
- Ask probing follow-up questions. Help the person being interviewed unpack the meaning behind their responses. Use follow-ups like:
-Tell me more.
-Why do you feel that way?
-Why was that important to you?
-How did that affect you?
-Change you?
- Be genuinely curious about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings.
- Allow for silence. Some people take longer to think about their answers. If somebody doesn’t want to or can’t answer one of the questions, that’s okay. Move on.
- Take good notes. You don’t need to transcribe the interview. Write down quotes and stories that you find compelling or inspiring.
The experience of the interview
Listening to someone’s experiences, feelings, hopes, and dreams in an active, uninterrupted, non-judgmental manner is a gift both for the interviewer and the interviewee. Faith formation takes place on both sides in the context of the interview.
For the person being interviewed, the interviewer serves almost like a spiritual guide. The interviewer helps the interviewee reflect on how the parish has contributed to his or her spiritual formation. Some describe being interviewed as a powerful mini-retreat.
Conversely, the interviewer is evangelized by the personal witness of how God has actively worked through the parish’s ministries and members. The personal witness leads to conversion and the deepening of faith in much the same way it does in a renewal program like Cursillo or Christ Renews His Parish.
Unique to appreciative inquiry is that each person experiences the spiritual benefits of both sides of the interview process. Each person’s faith is deepened through personal reflection and evangelized through personal testimony.
Bringing it back to the group
After the interviews, I reassemble the pairs into small groups of four or six to share highlights from their interviews: a quotable quote, a compelling story, or an image or theme that struck them. If you want to, you can move the process beyond faith formation into visioning and planning. To do that, I have the small groups record on a flip chart the topics or themes that reflect what was most compelling and inspiring in their discussion,
reflect things genuinely desired that people want to study and see grow.
I then have each group place an asterisk next to the five topics they value most. We then discuss everyone’s top five in the large group (the reassembled council). That discussion helps us form planning priorities for the future.
A final thought
Let me leave you with a reflection from someone who participated in an appreciative inquiry interview session with parish leaders at her parish as part of a parish planning process:
I have been an active leader here for years, but I didn’t have a clue about what goes on in people’s lives here. They come and go, and we make assumptions about what is happening with them. But people said such powerful things (in the appreciative interviews) about what this parish means to them, things that we never knew. If we never did anything more with the interviews--no summary, no strategic plan--the whole process would still have been worthwhile. People are calling and asking us to interview them, and when we finish they ask if they can interview other people.
That’s the power of the story.
TP