A Conversation You’ve Been Putting Off?; The Fulcrum, April 14, 2026

 Joan Blades, Ken Futernick, The Fulcrum; A Conversation You’ve Been Putting Off?

What a divided congregation did together is something anyone can try.

"The Episcopal church in Placerville, California, is not an obvious candidate for political harmony. Its congregation is roughly half conservative and half progressive — a split that, over the past decade, has torn apart faith communities across the country. But this one held together through the pandemic. Through two bruising election cycles and everything else, the congregation’s priest, Debra Sabino, managed to keep their core values front and center. And recently, its members decided they wanted to do more.

Start With What Everyone Already Agrees On

Ken Futernick, co-lead of Bridging Divides El Dorado, was asked to facilitate an event after a recent Sunday service. He began with a simple exercise. He asked people to think about the most important things in their lives — and then to tell the person next to them where their relationships with friends and family ranked on that list.

Almost universally, relationships came out on top. Then Ken drew the obvious conclusion out loud: “If that’s true for all of us, then it would seem to follow that we would want to avoid doing anything that would harm those relationships – like painfully unpleasant conversations about politics that sometimes lead to estrangement.”

He acknowledged the most common solution: just avoid the hard topics entirely. “That’s a rational choice,” he said. “I’ve done it myself.” But he was there to offer something else: a way to have the conversation that actually strengthens the relationship, by approaching it through curiosity rather than argument.

Come to these conversations to understand, not to persuade. That’s the idea behind Living Room Conversations, a format that brings small groups of people together — four to six, typically — across lines of difference, and gives them a structure for actually hearing each other. It has been used in thousands of settings. Ken’s workshop went on to explore how the same approach could extend beyond a formal Living Room Conversation into the everyday conversations people have been putting off."