Spittin' Out Peas: When the Question is Control

A child psychologist was on television talking about why little children spit out their peas or dump over their Cream of Wheat.

“Sometimes the issue is that they really don’t like the taste of peas,” she said, “and sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with peas at all. Sometimes it is a matter of the child asserting his or her independence. Children become frustrated with doing what mother tells them to do, and they want a way to express their autonomy. If mothers can understand that,” she said, “then they can respond to the real issue and better help their children.”

As I listened, I thought about our church’s struggle over whether to renovate the sanctuary, build a new one, or move to a new location, and I suddenly understood that some of the struggle wasn’t over building or location at all, but over the issue of control.

What a Control Issue Looks Like

One time I was introduced to a control issue after an excellent Christmas program by our children’s choir. An angry elder faced me. “It is terrible,” he said, “that we haven’t had a children’s Christmas program.”

That perplexed me. I thought we had just come from one.

As we talked further, I saw he was making a distinction between the choir program and the traditional Sunday school program. New leaders in the children’s area had replaced the traditional program with the choir performance. But this elder wanted the old-fashioned program with children saying memorized verses and everyone involved-not just those with musical talent.

We thought he had a valid point, so the next year we planned two children’s programs: the old-fashioned kind and a contemporary choral drama. Not until the two programs were being rehearsed did I find out the deeper issue in this dispute. The children’s choir program was led entirely by people who had come to the church within the last ten years. But all the leaders of the old-fashioned children’s program were adults who had been raised in the church. Underneath the issue of what kind of children’s program to have was the issue of who would lead it.

Just as with the baby’s peas, some disputes about new church directions are not so much over the specific program or relocation being proposed. They are more about who is going to make the decision and whose ideas will prevail.

Especially right now, as leadership in our churches passes from people born before 1940 to younger men and women, many congregations are feeling pressure for change and experiencing considerable conflict over who will control the direction of that change. To the older generation, some ideas of younger people represent a compromise with the ways of the world. To the younger generation, the older generation is content with ineffectiveness.

Control issues don’t have to be generational, however. Sometimes they occur between the longtime members, some of whom may be chronologically young, and people who have joined the church more recently. Change in human institutions, churches included, almost always comes from outside forces. The most potent force for change in churches is growth in attendance and membership. New people inevitably bring new ideas and represent a threat to the old leadership and the old way of doing things.

Getting the Full Picture

What happens when the new people encounter the old leaders?

I’ve detected a consistent pattern in churches trying to make a major change in direction-a building program, change in the structure of government, or a new program.

1. At the beginning, there is nearly unanimous support for change. Everyone can support “progress” and “growth” when stated in generalities.

2. As soon as the generalities become specific, opposition will begin to arise. Whatever the specifics, someone will feel his or her ideas were ignored. Sometimes the charge is that the committee was selected in a biased fashion. “We wanted to move forward,” someone will say, “but this is not what we intended.”

3. As the opposition forms, old wounds will surface of which many people in the church weren’t even aware. Statements may be heard such as, “John got us into trouble back in ’72 when he headed a committee, and here he goes again,” or “I’ve always said that this system of governance is flawed, and this just goes to prove it,” or “Many of the people on that committee are so new they don’t even know what this church is all about. They aren’t the kind of people to whom we should entrust this decision.”

4. Often one side or the other will spiritualize the conflict. “These people who want to build a new building are materialistic,” someone will claim. Those who balk at a fund drive will be labeled as “not having enough faith.” Both sides will claim that if the people on the other side “had their hearts right with the Lord,” this dispute wouldn’t be happening.

The difficulty for a pastor is trying to determine what is really going on. With the children’s Christmas program, I didn’t get the full picture until a year later. New pastors are particularly at a disadvantage.

Coffee-shop conversations with key lay people can uncover the issue. However, it usually doesn’t surface directly. Lay people are not comfortable in discussing church issues as issues of control. They will contend strongly that the substance of the matter is the issue, even when it clearly is not. So now I’ve learned to watch some other indicators:

Who votes with whom. Unanimous (or nearly unanimous) votes usually indicate that nothing great is at stake, even if there is disagreement on the issue. But when the discussion is extended and the vote is divided, I usually start looking to see who voted on which side.

Who is feeling anger and apathy. Those feelings usually are triggered by some sense of being personally hurt if the decision should go a certain way. Angry people and apathetic people feel they are losing control or losing face in the church community.

Why Conflict Management May Not Work

How do you stop the spittin’? Not necessarily through traditional techniques of conflict management.

I’ve been involved, as most pastors have, in seminars on conflict management. While the seminars have presented helpful information, I’ve heard pastors say afterward: “We already tried those ideas, and they just didn’t work” or “Conflict-management techniques require two cooperating parties, and if the parties had been willing to cooperate, there would not have been a conflict in the first place.” It is reasonable to expect cooperation and compromise over whether to paint the sanctuary light blue or eggshell white. But if the issue is one of control more than paint color, even a compromise can represent further loss of power for one side.

Sometimes the old guard doesn’t want to reconcile with the new group. It wishes the new group would go away so the church could return to the way it used to be. The unspoken hope may be: If we can stalemate things long enough, those who are pushing for change will get frustrated and leave. The number of churches with few younger people or newer members is eloquent testimony to how effective this strategy can be.

So if groups are struggling over an issue of control, I have not found it helpful to coerce them into a compromise.

I’ve come to recognize that even in the church there will be groups that gain power and groups that lose power as the congregation changes. As pastors, we cannot completely control that changing dynamic, but we may be able to guide it in a way that is helpful instead of harmful.

The Underlying Problem

A dispute over direction is often a signal that the church is facing the issue of leadership change. Essentially the church is being asked for a referendum: Either endorse new, emerging leaders and the ideas they bring, or reinstate the former leaders.

There will not be an unresolvable dispute about new directions in the church if the leadership of the church is undisputed. Established leaders have recognized authority, and often they can make major changes without being questioned.

As a young pastor, I became involved in an attempt to merge two districts within our denomination. Both districts were small and couldn’t generate funding for an effective program. So I and a seminary friend, who likewise had been in ministry and the district work for about three years, tried to convince our two districts to merge. We were defeated on the conference floor-6 percent below the needed two-thirds vote.

A year after our defeat, though, a banker with a reputation for lay leadership in the district became concerned about the deteriorating financial condition of the smaller district. He wrote to pastors and lay leaders suggesting we look again at merger. With strong support from a number of his friends who had originally opposed the merger, it was quickly achieved. Established leadership easily brought about what we novices could not.

The toughest situations, however, come when leadership is not firmly established. Stalemates on new directions occur when former leaders have lost power but still have significant influence, yet newer leaders have not been clearly acknowledged as the wave of the future.

How Pastors Can Guide the Referendum

On almost every church nominating committee I’ve seen, there has been a spokesman for the old guard saying, “Now, we don’t want to put people into leadership too soon. They need to prove themselves before becoming officers of the church.” The nominees may have been in their forties or have held offices in other churches, but if they were relatively new in this church, or if they represented a new group that threatened old-guard leadership, their nomination was resisted.

Usually on that same nominating committee was a representative of the newer element. That person pushed for new leadership. “Why do we always elect the same people? We need some new blood and new ideas. The people I know in the church have hardly any representation on our boards.”

It is a balancing act to respond to the sense of threat or desire in both comments. If a pastor sides publicly with either party, he or she risks alienating a significant segment of the congregation. Yet, these contests cannot be ignored. The future viability of the church depends on their outcome.

In one church I know, no representatives of the new groups were elected. The church lost some key couples after that ballot was announced.

In another I served, the new people swept the ballot, but the old guard reacted to it by pulling back their commitment to the church. Giving went down. People we had counted on became unreliable. Several said to me, “I’m tired, Pastor. I’ve put in a lot of years in this church. It’s time to let those new people do the work.” We did need some new leadership, but we didn’t need the old guard to bail out.

I’ve learned from experiences like these that there is an optimum time for a church to affirm new leadership, and a time for new leadership to be resisted. My role as a pastor is to determine what time it is and to respond accordingly.

Here are the three situations a church leader may encounter:

If the new generation is now strong enough to bring a stable future to the church, I want to assist former leaders in relinquishing control. I also want to help new leaders take a sense of ownership of the church’s future.

When a church has incorporated a sizable group of new people into its fellowship, or when a new generation in the church reaches the years when they might reasonably be expected to exercise leadership, then the former leaders need to yield power to those new groups if they want the vitality new leadership brings.

In my first church, the 70-year-old church moderator precipitated the change on his own. I had been pastor for only six months when he reported to me that he was resigning as church moderator. He had been moderator for so long that he knew people would continue to turn to him, even if he didn’t have the official title, and so he and his wife were moving up to a vacation home on Cape Cod. “It’s time these young people took over around here,” he said. “They might not do it if I’m still around.” A month later we elected his 35-year-old son-in-law as church moderator, and a new era began in that church.

(As a pastor, I would have liked it even better if he could have stayed in town to help support the change of leadership. But he may have been right. Old patterns die hard. Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to convince his friends to support new leadership if he had still been there.)

The most successful transitions I’ve been part of are these initiated by respected leaders. But that is not to say they can’t be assisted by wise younger leaders. One young layman I knew made a point of cultivating friendships with older leaders. He would meet them for coffee to consult on issues that were about to come up. This helped prevent either side from feeling left out of the decision process.

If the situation is stalemated, time is on the side of new leadership. The momentum for growth must continue but not be forced to the breaking point.

A pastor friend lives now with the aftermath of a church split. Things got so tense the church finally voted several people out of the membership. Others left with them. With a reduced budget, one of the pastors had to be laid off. Former members still spread their bitterness around town.

There are times when a serious doctrinal dispute or irresponsible behavior forces the issue. But in many churches, a little patience on the part of those pushing for change will keep the church together and avoid this kind of damage. My friend’s church was growing every year. New attenders were continuing to swell the ranks. Perhaps if he could have held back those who were eager for change, they could have avoided a great deal of grief and still achieved their objective in time.

If the new leadership is not yet strong enough to bring stable leadership to the church, I believe it is irresponsible for a pastor not to do what is possible to maintain traditional leadership, even if he prefers the ideas of the new group.

Traditions and a sense of continuity are essential for any organized group of people. If new ideas are adopted too quickly, instability results, and in a decade when church splits are frequent, our churches do not need more unproductive instability. It often takes years for a church to recover from a split, and I know people who have become permanently disabled Christians from them. Such trauma in the Christian body needs to be avoided whenever possible.

While I usually side with progress and with what enables the church to minister more effectively to our contemporary world, I’m not willing to sacrifice God’s people and the church’s reputation in the community too quickly for my vision of what is right. There are times when a church is ready for change and times when it is not. Wise pastors let a lot of good dreams die because the time is not right. It takes a lot of patience to wait for the right timing, when new leadership and the new ideas come about in a natural way.

In a former church, I came back from a vacation to find that a group of young couples had met together a number of times in my absence. Now they wanted to meet with me.

“Pastor,” they said at the meeting, “we’ve been supportive of your ministry here, but it seems to us that two groups have developed in our church. There is the old guard, which has been running the church for years, and there is our group, which is all the couples in their thirties and forties. As we see it, you’re trying to straddle the situation and keep a foot in both camps. We don’t think that is working very well. We want to know if you’re going to come down on our side or on theirs. If you are with us, let’s get moving. If you’re with them, let us know so we can decide what we have to do.”

Well, emotionally I was with them. They were clearly the future of the church. Financially, however, the church rested on the giving of the older group, and there was a lot of wise leadership in that older group as well, which we really couldn’t do without. I told them I wasn’t going to come down on anyone’s side. I tried to get them to see that we needed everybody and that if they were patient, they increasingly would see their ideas implemented without any trauma in the church.

That was one time it worked. Both groups stayed, and fifteen years later representatives of both groups still are involved in leadership of that church, although without question the younger group is dominant.

There may still be times when a congregation spits out the peas. But if the issues of control are being worked on, they go down smoother a lot more of the time.

Jim Spickelmier is pastor of Central Baptist Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.