Managing Church Conflict

Preface

In his author’s note for his book I Love You, Let’s Work It Out, David Viscott writes, There are some books that can be written only at a certain time in life. This is one of them…. I knew the principles for living together, but I’d had an unhappy marriage.¹

This is also a book that could be written only at a certain time in my life. I worked to write it earlier, but could not. I knew the principles of managing conflict, but I often still behaved reactively in conflicts. The core of this book comes from what I have learned in twenty-three years of coaching church leaders’ hands-on efforts to manage church conflicts. I am deeply in their debt for my own growth and learnings of ministry in conflictive situations.

The concepts and prescriptions of this book’s model are still evolving in this school of church experience. I expect readers to use this book’s model as a starting place for their ministries in conflicts, building on it as part of an ongoing inquiry into a Christian management of conflicts in church and society.

Although this book’s model focuses on conflict in church systems, it is also applicable to managing conflicts in other nonprofit, voluntary systems. Based on students’ experiences with this model in philanthropic and community organizations, the model’s values and ethical understandings of conflict have been found to apply even when parties do not necessarily subscribe to the Christian beliefs underlying these values.

CHAPTER 1

Can Church Conflict Be Christian?

The minister was leaning on the door frame of her church office, pain and anger written large across her face. It just kills me when people are this ugly in any community, especially the church. What happened in the nominating committee last night was bald-faced character assassination. Nobody stopped it until I finally stepped in. Even then, they just sat there. Today Joan is still at it, spreading her poisonous lies about Sheila all over the congregation. What hurts so is how the people of this congregation play dead and let her keep on. I can’t believe it. At times like this, it makes me sick to be the pastor of this church.

Christians fight. Conflicts erupt between a minister and an enclave of church officers, between the first family of the congregation and a pastor, between the associate pastor and the head of staff. Rival congregational factions feud over church officer nominations or lock horns over giving communal funds to an in-house nursing service for people with AIDS. A church board polarizes over providing a meeting room for a twelve-step group on sex addiction. A church educator and a pastor clash over each other’s ministries until the educator abruptly submits a resignation. A group of church officers organizes a campaign against national church staff because of a denominational position on abortion or on homosexuality.

Christians not only fight, they also often fight dirty. Issues are personalized. Gossip and hearsay fog up reason and common sense. Enemy-making wounds parties’ spirits and shreds long-standing friendships. Moralistic judgments vaporize trust. Labeling parties suppresses openness and candor. Roberts’ Rules are misused to polarize members of governing bodies, making political alliances more influential than reason or spirituality in determining leaders’ votes.

It is no wonder that so many thoughtful Christians avoid church conflicts like the plagues of Egypt. The question is not whether Christians fight or even whether Christians fight dirty. The question is whether church conflicts can ever be Christian.

Christian Sources of Church Conflict

Why are church fights so often so devastating? To be sure, early in his public ministry Jesus observed, I have come to call not the righteous but sinners (Mark 2:17b). Are Christians, however, more sinful or crazier than non-Christians? Are church staff more destructive than secular employees? Indeed, why do church folk who may fight fair at work often fight dirty at church? Apparently, certain forces shape the feelings and behaviors of parties in church conflicts.

For one thing, parties’ core identities are at risk in church conflicts. Spiritual commitments and faith understandings are highly inflammable because they are central to one’s psychological identity. When Christians differ over beliefs or commitments, they may question or even condemn one another’s spirituality or character. Their self-esteem is on the line. That is why parties slip so easily into taking differences personally, even launching personal attacks. When church folk feel that their worldview or personal integrity is being questioned or condemned, they often become emotionally violent and violating. Any means are used to justify their goal of emotional self-protection.

For another thing, parties to church fights profess a gospel that is volatile. I came to bring fire to the earth, said Jesus. Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! (Luke 12:49a, 51). Jesus Christ is in the business of social and personal change. He calls us to turn away from sin to salvation; from meaningless religious rituals to meaning-filled action; from indifference to the earth’s ecology to stewardship of all creation; from social violence to social justice; from human isolation to human community; from personal despair and compulsion to personal hope and responsibility; from serving the idols of national culture to serving the transcending Rule of God. Church conflicts are often generated by acting on such faith agendas for cultural or social change. While Christian religiosity often operates to preserve the status quo, Christian faithfulness operates to challenge and change the status quo. In itself, such inner conflict between religious security and spiritual risk taking generates emotional conflict between believers.

Finally, church conflicts occur in voluntary institutions whose structures and processes permit and even entice unaccountable uses of power. In the name of individual conscience or vision, church members may embark on ministries without going through institutional channels. Neither authorization nor coordination is secured. When the word gets out or when the ministry involves controversy, others may feel used, misrepresented, or betrayed. Indeed, vague job descriptions for staff and unstated role expectations for members leave all church parties vulnerable to conflicting assumptions about one another’s callings. Moreover, an imbalance of economic dependence between church employees and church volunteers further confounds church conflicts. Those whose incomes depend on church offerings have more to win or lose than those who make their livelihoods elsewhere. This imbalance of financial dependence sets up manipulative exercises of power between them. Church systems are particularly vulnerable to abusive uses of power in conflicts between staff and volunteers.

In summary, threats to self-esteem, pressures for and against personal and social change, and vulnerability to power plays in voluntary systems all combine to exacerbate the sinful humanness of parties to church conflicts. Indeed, one marvels that any church conflicts are ever Christian or constructive.

And yet, there are church fights that are. For example, church officers with strongly differing convictions control their emotions and begin listening respectfully to one another. As they do, they come to understand and appreciate their differing interests. They acquire new perspectives from which they create genuinely workable win/win solutions. And again, church staff, without blaming or patronizing one another, level with one another over their competing professional commitments. The focus of their exchanges shifts from defending differing professional commitments to exploring ways of pursuing their differing professional commitments collaboratively. Rather than abandoning their differences, they learn to benefit from their differences. Yet again, a church governing body adopts a process of fact-finding that puts a stop to distorting gossip and character defamation. Creative problem solving replaces self-serving rhetoric. Over a three-month period of dialogue and reflection, a consensus emerges about the wise thing to do.

What can make church fights Christian? To begin with, a constructive process is vital. What can start differing Christians on a path of Christian conflict is a way of interacting that elicits and utilizes more godly traits and gifts in them and in the larger faith community around them. The purpose of this book is to prescribe such a process, a process for ethical responses to church conflicts.

Making Church Conflicts Begin to Be Christian

The Chinese characters for crisis mean both danger and opportunity. One character is wei (danger), a face-to-face encounter with a powerful animal. The other character is chi (opportunity), the blueprint of an open universe. In the same way, church conflicts present us simultaneously with a danger of divisiveness/disintegration and an opportunity for wholeness/reconciliation.

Conflicts are power struggles over differences: differing information or differing beliefs; differing interests, desires, or values; differing abilities to secure needed resources.¹ As Jay Hall puts it, Thus, conflict is defined here as essentially the circumstances—both emotional and substantive—which can be brought about by the presence of differences between parties who are, for whatever reason, in forced contact with one another.²

Power is to the social process of conflicts what oxygen is to the biological process of our physical bodies. However different parties’ issues or feelings may be, they all use power. They will exercise their power either to overcome one another (dirty fighting) or to collaborate with one another (fair fighting). In virtually every case, parties will use power both ways in church fights. But the critical ethical question is which way of using power predominates.

The fundamental axiom of this book is that the key to making church conflicts Christian may be found in fashioning a faith-based process for differing parties to use. How Christians behave in conflicts is of critical moral and spiritual consequence for what they seek. As John observed, Whoever says, ‘I am in the light,’ while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness (1 John 2:9). A process that Christians use to deal with their conflicting differences will need to be an ethical process that is consistent with standards of Christian morality. Ethically constructive behavior does not make a conflict Christian. But without such behavior, the substance of a conflict’s resolution will surely be sub-Christian, if not actually un-Christian. This book prescribes an ethical process—a model—by which a Christian works with conflicting parties for constructive constraint or creative resolution of their differences.

In this regard, one faith understanding underlying this book’s model is that the constructive management of a conflict cannot rely only on the individual righteousness or virtue of the parties in conflict. This model sways parties’ personal moral ambivalences with a covenant-making process that establishes agreements between them that elicit their human goodness while restraining their human sinfulness. These process agreements between parties open the door for constructive treatment of their differences. How parties agree to fight becomes as much a matter of their faith’s expression as the conflicting convictions over which they are struggling. In fact, parties’ destructive behaviors in conflicts often speak so loudly that they will not hear whatever is constructive in the positions being advocated.

The viewpoint that ethical process is a critical means for making church fights Christian begs the question. What is a Christian definition of constructiveness in conflicts? What is a Christian vision for managing conflicts? What ultimate Christian definition informs a penultimate ethical process of managing conflicts? Is this ultimate Christian vision a matter of reconciliation? redemption? justice? forgiveness? liberation? compassion? kindness? or what?

The view taken in this book is that a Christian vision of shalom is the most fitting goal for an ethical process of conflict management. This is because shalom incorporates all of the values named above for a Christian standard of good and evil in a church conflict. The vision of God’s peace portrays a wholeness that incorporates God’s reconciling love, justice, redemption, liberation, truthfulness, and compassion. As Jack Stotts explains,

A persistent and pervasive symbol in the Old Testament materials for indicating the relationship that God establishes and intends of humans … and nature is shalom. We ordinarily translate that word as peace. It represents in the biblical texts, however, a broad range of meanings. The core meaning is that of wholeness, health, and security. Wholeness, health, and security do not mean individual tranquillity in the midst of external turbulence. Shalom is not peace of mind, escape from the frustrations and care of the surrounding environment. Rather, shalom is a particular state of social existence. It is a state of existence where the claims and needs of all that is are satisfied; where there is a relationship of communion between God and humans and nature, where there is fulfillment for all creation.³

God’s peace provides the ultimate Christian vision for what makes a church fight Christian. The approximation of shalom is what an ethical process of management aims to realize.

God’s peace is an ultimate but not a humanly achievable property of church conflicts. God’s peace is a divine gift, not a human capability. Although Christians often unthinkingly assume that being Christian means being godly, that is not the case on this side of the grave. Human beings are not godly. Human beings only approximate God’s life-style. Shalom is a north star for making conflicts Christian—a transcending orientation toward which to steer an ethical process of conflict management.

Christian ethicists have consistently urged that Christians not separate their ultimate values and beliefs from their penultimate ones. Just because we are not capable of shalom does not mean that we do not aim for shalom. In the case of church conflicts, we can make connections between the ultimate vision and the penultimate responsibilities of dealing with conflict situations. We make connections between

the vision of God’s love of the parties and a process that requires respectfulness between parties;

the requirements of God’s justice for parties and a process that requires assertiveness between parties;

the realization of God’s truth among parties and a process that requires accountability between parties; and

the healing of God’s reconciliation for parties and a process that incorporates their differences within the framework of a larger good affecting all.⁴

These connections generate for us a Christian ethic of conflict management that constitutes the core of this book’s prescribed process.

Christian understandings of God’s love mean much more than interpersonal respectfulness, but parties’ respectful behavior in a conflict is a necessary way of approximating God’s love. Christian understandings of God’s justice are much greater than the meanings of human fairness, but parties’ assertiveness in a conflict begins to reflect God’s unconditional love for all parties. Christian understandings of God’s truth recognize that Ultimate Truth far exceeds human comprehension, but precisely for that reason, human accountability that checks for parties’ distortions and self-deceptions in conflicts is required in approximating God’s truthfulness. These middle axioms for behavioral respectfulness, fairness, and accountability do not incorporate all there is to making a conflict Christian. However, without such middle axioms for parties’ behavior, there is little chance of making a conflict Christian. Middle axioms for moral behavior bridge the space between ultimate and penultimate values, connecting behavioral prescriptions with the directives of ultimate values and putting the meanings of ultimate values to work in approximate human activities.

In summary, no conflicts are purely or perfectly Christian. But a conflict can be judged to be more or less Christian by how parties exercise power in dealing with their differences. Behaviors of respectfulness, assertiveness, and accountability and the inclusion of a larger common good serve as standards of behavior in a Christian’s calling in conflictive situations. Together these behavioral standards define what this book’s model means by fair and dirty fighting.

A Fair Church Fight

Consider a case in point. An angry church member was circularizing a petition in the fellowship hall of Good Shepherd Church during the coffee break before morning worship. Two days earlier the woman who was the church secretary had been frightened by encountering a male stranger in the church kitchen. The petition demanded that the governing body immediately install locks on all outside doors of the church facility so as to prevent any further surprise encounters with street people.

By the end of that Sunday morning’s worship service, the emotional climate among members was bristling with distrust, confusion, anxiety, and hostility. Enclaves of partisan groups were clustering in the halls and in the parking lot. The traditionalist party and the modernist party in the congregation were rapidly coalescing into their accustomed formations for war. That afternoon the phones of the pastor and church officers buzzed with escalating rumors and accusations. By the time the governing body convened the next evening for its regular monthly meeting, church officers were in highly emotional and polarized states. A battle line had been drawn between faith issues of ministry to the homeless and faith issues of ministry to the congregation’s own staff and members.

As soon as the petition had been read to the board, an effort was made to jump start the board by using the parliamentary procedure of calling for the question without debate. At this point, the pastor advocated that the governing body vote to reject the motion and move out of the polarizing dynamics of parliamentary rules of debate into an exploratory discussion as a committee of the whole. A power struggle ensued between those on both sides of the issue who wanted a quick win/lose resolution of the conflict and those who wanted an open exploration of the issues for possible win/win resolution.

At that point, what would make the conflict Christian depended on which process for resolution was chosen, rather than the resolution of the issues. By a narrow vote, the board adopted the process of becoming a committee of the whole, thus beginning a two-month dialogue, the outcome of which will be described later in chapter 11. The point here is that a change in the process of the conflict transformed it from being a win/lose power play to a win/win process of power sharing. A polarizing congregation was changed into a unifying congregation with a new sense of hope and trust among all parties.

Managing as Intervening to Cut the Costs or Reap the Benefits of Church Conflict

An ethical process of dealing with church conflict is concerned both to constrain human sinfulness and to realize human goodness. This book’s model offers ways of intervening to constrain a malevolent cycle of conflict and ways of intervening to empower a benevolent cycle of conflict. A malevolent cycle of conflict is entropie, a mindless, escalating pattern of power struggling for a win/lose outcome (see fig. 1.1).

Without reasoned intervention, a malevolent cycle of conflict moves toward an all-or-nothing outcome. All natural conflicts evidence this process. Many social conflicts do too. Some behavioral scientists like Lorenz have considered this natural pattern of violence both necessary and desirable in social conflicts because it provides the mechanism for the survival of the fittest.⁵ Others, including those holding the perspective of a Christian ethic, hold that one can intervene with a rational, creative, problem-solving process that is both feasible and preferable to letting things simply run their instinctive course.⁶ Indeed, interrupting the malevolent cycles of a conflict has become essential for human and ecological survival in a nuclear, technological age.

Fig. 1.1: The Malevolent Cycle (Dirty Fighting)

Such intervening is also needed as part of the church’s survival in our age. In the case of the church conflict over locking the doors, just such a malevolent cycle had begun to play out, devastating a congregation that was already cratered from previous malevolent rounds. Years of accumulation of unresolved emotional and substantive differences between factions in the congregation lay behind the eruption over the kitchen incident. That incident triggered these issues and feelings out into the open. Fighting habits from previous malevolent rounds began scripting the behaviors of all parties. The kitchen incident did not create this malevolent round of conflict; it only triggered it.

Once in the open, the conflict escalated with the polarizing effects of the circularizing of a petition—a petition advocating a solution rather than the exploration of concerns. A parliamentary motion to prevent debate threatened to reduce the situation to nothing more than a political contest between competing factions for control of the congregation. The outcome would have been one faction’s winning at the expense of the other. A damaging residue of distrust, cynicism, and disaffection would have been left for members on the losing side. Malevolent cycles are destructive not only to the principals but also to the larger communities that host them.

Fortunately, a constructive process for this church conflict was initiated. A reactive, mindless pattern of increasing irrationality was interrupted by the proposal and adoption of a benevolent process (see fig. 1.2).

The pastor/manager changed the power struggle from one over solutions to one over the process for dealing with differences. The pastor/manager moved to abort the win/lose outcome of a malevolent cycle by mobilizing the common sense and good faith of the governing body for a benevolent cycle. By removing the threat of having to vote the petition up or down, parties could begin to explore the information, views, and values underlying their differences. What had been a power contest over locking doors became an exploration of a congregation’s changing identity in a changing neighborhood.

In this case, management of the conflict resulted in a resolution of differences. This is not always the case in church conflicts. There are times when differences between parties constitute genuine dilemmas, as when there are not enough resources to maintain equally valued programs of service.

There are also cases when one or more of the parties to a church conflict refuse to follow a benevolent process, as when a governing body refuses constructive debate as a basis on which to find a creative solution.⁷ When win/win solutions are neither possible nor sought, a Christian ethic of conflict management prescribes ways of blocking or minimizing the costs of win/lose outcomes. A Christian vision of shalom for conflict management pursues the resolution of differences. A Christian realism for conflict management also prescribes alternatives when resolution is not apparent.⁸

In this regard, the very term management may suggest manipulation of or control over parties in a conflict. Managing may sound like moving parties or their circumstances around as if one were moving pawns on a chess board. In this book the term managing signifies coping with rather than controlling conflictive situations. Dealing with conflicts is called managing rather than resolving conflicts precisely because managers cannot force unwilling parties to make peace. If an Almighty God stands at the doors of human hearts knocking (Rev. 3:20), how should Christians presume to do otherwise? In this book, managing conflicts means coping constructively with parties by constraining those who fight dirty and/or assisting those who fight fair.

Fig. 1.2: The Benevolent Cycle

(Fair Fighting)

Managing conflicts signifies both constraining win/lose resolutions and obtaining win/win resolutions. A Christian ethic for managing conflicts requires trust of God because one recognizes one cannot control the parties. A Christian ethic, however, undertakes the risks of managing conflicts because one recognizes that unmanaged conflicts do not go away. They just increasingly yield evil.

In summary, managing conflicts is a process of intentionally intervening by proposing constructive processes by which to deal with differences. Rather than reacting emotionally to the issues and mobilizing politically to overcome others as enemies, a Christian ethic prescribes how parties may adopt a process of shared control for respective self-control. Parties are helped to move from