The Epic, Pt. 32

At this point in the meeting negotiations with the conference Brother H became ill. It wasn’t serious, but it was enough of a distraction that he asked Sister L, another member of the spokesgroup, to take over for him. She responded to Elder Ramirez’s email with a list of reasons why the Group did not wish to alter the agreement regarding the meeting. (We should note here that this was the beginning of a month and a half long email exchange on this subject, a full transcript of which would be too mind-numbingly long to include. For the sake of brevity, we will be quoting only portions of the exchange relevant to the larger issue and summarizing entire messages when possible.)

Sent Aug. 14, 2008, 12:56pm: “In the matter of meeting with you to discuss the crisis at the Takoma Park Church, I'm afraid that we must insist on having our entire designated spokesgroup present. We are familiar with the portion of Elder Miller's letter to which you refer, but we do not consider his letter to be a binding contract. Our large group intentionally decided on a spokesgroup rather than an individual spokesperson for the following reasons:

“1) To comply with the biblical directive of Deut 19:15, "One witness is not enough... A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses."

“2) Different individuals have different experiences, perspectives, and recollections, and hearing from several different people would give you a more rounded view of the matter.

“3) One of the things we have found so disturbing throughout this situation is the consistent manipulation of facts by authority figures. In Elder Miller's own letters he has twice accused us of misunderstandings, inaccuracies, and misleading information. While he has yet to offer any substantiation of those accusations we nonetheless find it alarming to have been thus judged without having been fairly heard. We are unwilling to put any single member of our group in the unenviable position of potentially coming away with a different understanding of the discussion than you might take away and have it be their word alone against the word of the conference official.

“4) If there were to be a meeting between yourself and a single representative of our group that representative would most likely be me, and to have a single female meeting a conference official alone, in the evening, would look incredibly bad, no matter how innocent the intent. Good reputations being one of those things that once lost can never be gotten back I'm sure you'll understand why I'm not willing to risk mine on such a situation.”

This was received in reply on Aug. 18, 2008, 9:57am: “I have carefully read your email in regards to the proposed meeting. I believe there is some confusion as to the purpose of such meeting. When I first talked to [Brother H], yes, we talked about the need to have a meeting to address all the issues that are before us. This meeting of course will involved the appropriate individuals from both sides, however, before we do that, as I have tried to explain in my last two emails, I need to have a meeting with one representative of your group to discuss process.

“I believe this step is very important as we outline the process that we must follow in order to resolve these issues. Please work with me on this. I am willing to meet with you in the Washington area. As to the issue of meeting with you as a female, I believe it would be appropriate to meet in a public place such as a restaurant.”

The Group, and particularly Sister L, were not amused by the proposal of a meeting in a restaurant, which would inevitably carry the same sort of negative connotations in the minds of any witnesses as would be suggested by a meeting alone in any other sort of venue. The Group was also puzzled as to what sort of “process” required discussion. The sorts of things our minds went to were rules of order, meeting duration, order of speaking, etc. It did not seem to us that deciding on such things should require an in-person meeting, but if that was all Elder Ramirez had in mind to talk about we concluded that we could offer a compromise on the matter of attendees, which Sister L communicated in the next message.

Aug. 18, 2008, 10:27pm: “I have taken your request for a one-on-one meeting about procedure to our large group. The consensus was that in the interest of finding a swift resolution we could accept an initial one-on-one meeting on the following conditions:

“1) that the meeting be exclusively about process and procedure,
“2) that an audio recording be made of the meeting, and
“3) that it take place at my parents' home with them in the building.”

Elder Ramirez was delighted with this proposal, except for the condition of the recording, “I do not have a problem with most of your conditions. However, I am not in favor of recording the meeting since I feel our goal is simple: to discuss process and procedure. Our notes should be sufficient” (Aug. 19, 2008, 10:23am).

The Group was not impressed with the rejection of their olive branch. Sister L’s next message declared the Group consensus that it must be either three people or a recording. That message also asked whether we couldn’t just have the entire “process” discussion via email and save the bother of arranging an in-person meeting. This question went unanswered. Faced with the choice of three people or a recording, Elder Ramirez elected instead to walk away, “Under the apparent unwillingness to have an unrecorded meeting, it appears to me that it will not be possible for us to meet since I am not open to the idea of having a meeting with a group of three” (Aug. 19, 2008, 9:51pm). By the next morning he had cooled off and come back to the table, but he still refused to budge on the matter of attendees, “As stated before, this initial meeting in my view, does not require the presence of lots of people nor does it merit that we record it” (Aug. 20, 2008, 8:44am).

Next: Matthew 18, Again

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