I might not like you, but I hadn’t noticed.

Sarah Drummond
Nov 1 · 3 min read

The first Colloquium built into Andover Newton’s diploma program at Yale Divinity School includes six units of three weeks each that span one academic year. The units reflect the six ministry competencies foundational to the program’s design: integration, building community, compassion and justice, emotional intelligence, leadership, and spirituality.

One week ago, the 20+ students in Colloquium One wrote their reflections on building community. They had explored the topic through reading, discussions, and a guest speaker out serving in ministry. They wrote about what they’d learned and where their growing edges lay. A theme emerged from their reflections that reminded me of feelings particular to my early ministry: the students were concerned about the difficulties involved in building community with people they don’t like.

The pattern brought me back to one of the first things I learned about any divinity school back in the early 1990s when I was a student at Yale College. I wasn’t sure what a “divinity school” was, except upon hearing the term, on some level I knew I’d go to one. Spend my life in one? Not sure I knew that. The first Yale Divinity School course of which I heard from one of my chaplains, who taught it, was on the topic of how to minister to those you don’t want to. Back then, when I was in my late teens, ministering to people I didn’t like sounded difficult. Now, the question hardly computes.

Over the course of moving from early- to middle-adulthood, I have lost track of whether I actually like people. I’m not sure when that happened, but I just kind of stopped thinking about it somewhere along the line. I can tell you whether working with a person is easy or hard, or if spending time with the person is energizing or draining. The ability to assess my feelings about a person without putting them in a category of “like” or “dislike” has improved the quality of my life.

It’s easier to disagree with a person’s opinion or actions when doing so doesn’t require us to move them from category to category, which is awfully heavy lifting when you work with as many people as I do. I probably have bona fide friendships with several people I, on some level, don’t like, but I couldn’t tell you which friendships I mean. To have lost the chance at that relationship over such a petty thing as not liking someone would seem a terrible waste.

The transition away from caring about whether I liked a person or not makes sense from an adult developmental psychology perspective. Bob Kegan of Harvard Graduate School of Education teaches that in adolescence, we are defined by our relationships. In early adulthood, we push away from those relationships, sometimes in extreme ways, rupturing bonds rather than pulling back gently. At some point, if we’re growing, we get to a place where we have relationships, but they no longer define us.

What’s liberating about the phase of adulthood where I find myself now is that the less I think about whether I like people, the less I care about whether people like me. I’d like to think that another person could agree or disagree with me; enjoy time with me a lot, or a little, or not at all; without condemnation. In our Colloquium’s unit on community, I — as usual — learned a lot from the students. As the course moves on, I am coming to see students whole. I know not just their names but something about how they think and what’s important to them. Whether I like them, or they me, is already becoming irrelevant as we form a beloved community.

I’ve heard it said, and shared once in this ‘blog before, “It’s impossible to hate a person whose story we know.” The purpose of building community is to practice loving whole people on a small scale, so when we get out into the wider community, we think first about a person’s humanity. By the time we get to the point where we might consider whether or not we like the person, we know more than what could fit in any one, tiny category.

Sarah Drummond

Written by

Sarah Birmingham Drummond is Founding Dean of Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School and teaches and writes on the topic of ministerial leadership.

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