("Duty Calls" by Randall Munroe is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5)

One of Community of Christ’s Enduring Principles is Unity in Diversity—we do our best to be a shared community that creates space for many different perspectives. That can be a hard balance to strike, and that’s especially true on the internet, where it’s easy to forget that the other username in a conversation is actually another person. It takes all of us to make sure that Someday School is a place where everyone feels free to engage honestly with the study material.

Someday School is a place where everyone should feel free to share their perspective on what we’re discussing during a given week. It’s okay if you don’t see things the same way as someone else, but think carefully before responding to a perspective that you disagree with. Maybe it’s best to just offer your own perspective in a different comment rather than push back against someone else’s thoughts in a reply. If you do feel the need to critique someone else’s response, please be considerate in how you do so.

However, Someday School is also a place where everyone should feel welcome—especially people from races, gender identities, sexual orientations, and other identities that are often made to feel unwelcome in many online and offline places. Personal attacks and discriminatory statements are just not okay here.

If you feel that someone else has crossed a line in one of their comments, the best response is to click the “flag” button below that comment. That will bring the comment to the attention of the Someday School admin, who can remove the comment if needed. Echoing the guidelines above, his priority will be removing personal attacks and discriminatory statements; he will not remove comments simply for being different than others’ perspectives (or even the World Church’s perspective). If needed, he can also remove people from the private group after repeated offenses.

These “rules” are loose guidelines because we hopefully won’t need anything more specific than that to practice Unity in Diversity in Someday School. However, Internet researcher Tarleton Gillespie writes in his 2018 book Custodians of the Internet that most online communities wind up having to develop more specific rules over time as people test the limits of loose guidelines. Please help us not need more specific rules by not testing those limits… but Someday School will also develop new rules as needed to make sure that this is a place where everyone is welcome.