Keeping Conflict Healthy

Daffy Duck rehearses his fencing moves in a classic Warner Brothers cartoon: “Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!” His forward thrust is followed by a “thwack!” as the foil bounces back in his face and bends his beak upward. Daffy folds his beak back into place and tries again. “Dodge! Spin! Thrust!” Thwack!

Every time, thwack!

Why is it that in ministry, as with Daffy, many a forward thrust snaps back and something, or somebody, gets bent out of shape? And if conflict is to be expected, how can we reconcile ruptured relationships, restore a Christ-like ethic, and recover our forward momentum?

Peacemaking is not “peace faking.” Often the peacemaker is the one who says, “Let’s stop covering up. Let’s deal with it.”—Ken Sande

The participants in this forum have seen the worst of the worst, and they have fenced in some challenging matches themselves—but amazingly, with grace.

They shared some of their stories on Leadership’s recent TV seminar, one of a series produced by Church Communication Network for satellite downlink at local church sites (http://ccn.tv). In this roundtable discussion prior to our broadcast, these experts reflected deep love for the church and respect for each person in the body. Church conflicts have not defeated them or scarred them or bent their beaks back.

We wanted to know how they managed that. At the table:

Ken Sande

Peacemaker Ministries, Billings, Montana

(www.hispeace.org) Trained as an engineer and lawyer, Ken puts those skills to work in reconciling relationships in churches and families. For 23 years, he has mediated lawsuits and church splits, and helped to reconcile hundreds of couples headed for divorce.

Rene Schlaepfer

Twin Lakes Church, Aptos, California

(www.tlc.org) First a Top-40 radio DJ, Rene has served as senior pastor of Twin Lakes Church for 11 years. In that time, Rene navigated turbulent change as the church transitioned from a traditional Baptist style to a contemporary congregation effectively reaching people in the Monterey Bay area of California.

Jim Van Yperen

Metanoia Ministries, Washington, New Hampshire

(www.changeyourmind.net) Over a span of ten years, Jim and his organization have aided almost 60 deeply divided churches in conflict resolution. He serves as interim pastor, conference speaker, and is author of Making Peace: A Guide to Overcoming Church Conflict (Moody Press, 2002).

A healthy church has learned a way of thinking and seeing and behaving that’s redemptive, so that when real conflict comes, they’re able to handle it.—Jim Van Yperen

All churches have conflict. No one really wants it. Is it possible for churches to be in conflict and to be healthy?

Van Yperen: Health is not the absence of conflict. A healthy church has learned a way of thinking and seeing and behaving that’s redemptive, so that when the inevitable conflict comes, they’re able to handle it. They’ve learned that God is sovereign over all things, so that conflict is not necessarily a threat.

Sande: Conflict is actually an opportunity. First Corinthians is a long conflict resolution letter. At the end of chapter 10, Paul sums up by saying, “… whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God, not for your own good but for others. Follow my example.”

Paul says to look at conflict as God looks at it. In every conflict, he has given you an opportunity to exalt him. He wants you to behave so differently that people take notice and are impressed. It’s an opportunity to grow in Christ-likeness. If we embrace conflict as a primary means of sanctification—it’s not something we go looking for, but when it comes—we slow down and say, “Lord, if nothing else in this situation, refine me.”

A sure sign you’re using weapons of the flesh instead of weapons of the Spirit is that you’re getting short-term gains, but long-term losses.—Rene Schlaepfer

Schlaepfer: I saw this in the first church I served as youth pastor. The board had fired a beloved staff member. At the next congregational meeting, a shouting match erupted—and it was suddenly all about the senior pastor. “You’re boring!” they shouted. Totally out of control.

The pastor and his wife took it. They never stopped being calm and Christlike through the whole thing. The church split in half in that one meeting. I eventually decided I’d rather follow a godly, serene man than a livewire who doesn’t display the fruit of the Spirit.

How do you recognize healthy conflict?

Schlaepfer: One key is asking, “Are you as pastor staying on message?” I think Satan tries to destroy the church by getting us off the message of the gospel and onto other things—politics, hot potato issues, and whatever the conflict is about. The message is the gospel of grace.

Look at what Paul does. Every time there’s a conflict, he ties it back to the gospel.

Van Yperen: One test for me is to ask, “Who are we talking about? Who is the primary subject and object of this conversation?” If it is something other than what Jesus wants, we aren’t having a redemptive conversation. We are controlled by selfish ambition; we assert our rights. We pursue our own desires.

Sande: The apostle James asks, “What causes strife and conflict among you? Don’t they come from your desires and battles within you?” The word desires here is neutral. They could be good desires. The vast majority of conflicts I have seen in church have been when good desires have been elevated to consuming demands, which the Bible calls “idols.”

Often I find this happening when I hear the phrase All is want is … “All I want is to reach the lost.” “All I want is godly worship.” When I hear those words, I often find people have elevated a good desire to a controlling idol. That’s when we need to help each other, to ask the X-ray questions—”What are you preoccupied with? What do you want so much that you are willing to hurt others to get?” We need to help each other see that we have taken good desires and made them into bad gods.

I worked with an elder group and pastor who’d had a falling out. They had been at odds for a year. They sent me a thick file of their e-mails and letters to each other. Something struck me as I read them. There wasn’t the slightest reference to the gospel of Jesus Christ. There were accusations—what you should do, what you failed to do—and copious biblical references. But it was all human focused and human failure.

When I met with them, I said, “There are real issues here, but how does God factor into this conversation? How has the fact that Christ died for your sins affected the way you are relating to one another?”

There was silence in the room.

After a couple minutes, one of these elders nodded. “We’ve completely lost sight of Christ in our argument.”

What’s deceiving here is that we can be throwing out Bible verses left and right and confuse that with spirituality. All we’re doing is attacking each other. We’re not behaving like Christ or living out his love with others.

Schlaepfer: Evangelist Steve Pettit says a sure sign you’re using weapons of the flesh instead of weapons of the Spirit is that you’re getting short-term gains, but long-term losses. And that’s what happens when we react to people in ways that are manipulative and angry. When we are angry, they become angry.

From what we’ve heard of your story, Rene, the conflict you found at Twin Lakes was not healthy conflict for you or for the church.

Schlaepfer: I came to Twin Lakes following a devastating split, not just a split, an explosion. I followed a beloved, godly man who had led the church for 50 years. The church had not really experienced much conflict in that time. But in the three years they were without a pastor, tensions were so high the board resigned, the search committee resigned, the church went $2 million in debt, and some staff were fired or quit.

Everybody I knew said, “Don’t go there.”

My wife said, “You’ve got to be willing not to survive. Go in and do the right thing, and if they boot you, so what? I’ll still love you, our kids will be too young to remember, and maybe God wants you back in radio” (laughter).

Some people were glad to have a leader after three years, but once I started to lead, my ideas were met with extreme resistance in some quarters. When we made changes, I started getting nasty anonymous letters. I discovered a group was calling my former employers to see if they had anything against me. They called higher-ups in our denomination to get me fired.

After six months, I ended up in the hospital emergency room with severe anxiety attacks.

“Well, Rene,” the doctor said, “I’ve been attending your church, and I like what you’re doing. I also know what you’re going through. Physically and psychologically, you’re not handling the conflict very well. I’m giving you doctors orders to stay away from the office for the next week, and let’s work on ways to handle the stress you’re experiencing.

The root issue for me was my response to the conflict. I was seeing these people as antagonists and myself as the protagonist. Since I was framing the situation as a drama, I was making it more dramatic that it needed to be. I had to learn that our battle is not against flesh and blood.

By the way, we did eventually resolve the conflict, and the church is thriving beyond my expectations.

Rene’s actions seemed to make the situation worse, at first. Are there times you need to create conflict in order to make peace?

Sande: You’re not creating conflict in that situation, you’re surfacing it. It’s already there. I use the distinction peacemaking versus “peace faking.” And churches love to fake peace.

Quite often the peacemaker is the one who says, “Let’s stop covering up. Let’s deal with it.”

Van Yperen: We’re called to speak the truth in love, which means you balance those two things. There is another danger when, in the name of grace, you never want to confront anything.

When we do that, we create an environment where people think something but don’t say it, and that’s deceptive.

I would say you must surface the issue. If the church is the body of Christ, then there is no such thing as a secret conflict. It always has to be brought to the surface. So the question to me is not if it should be surfaced, but how.

Schlaepfer: One reason our church got hammered by the giant conflict was they didn’t know how to handle this kind of conflict. The downside of the blessing of 50 years of great leadership is the vacuum created when it’s gone. Some staff told me the church had an “all for one, one for all,” Three Musketeers view of themselves, where unanimity was expected.

We have since built a culture of critique at Twin Lakes, where people are encouraged to give feedback and analysis, so the church can learn to love without unanimity.

Critique can come out in ways other than arguments. We have encouraged critique through weekly reviews of our services, including the sermon. We also have these sessions with the whole congregation, where they write out questions, and we answer them.

In a creative atmosphere, you have people butting their heads a little bit, and that’s good.

Sande: Someone once said, “If you want to prevent destructive conflict; encourage respectful disagreements.” That’s wise. Like a pressure release valve, we need to deal with differences before they become destructive.

What is the downside to “leaving well enough alone”? Aren’t there some issues we will always have with us?

Van Yperen: The big downside is that we’re not being the church. We need to have a means to disagree and to work things out—through the blood of Jesus Christ, through prayer, through the Holy Spirit. You can’t agree to disagree over major issues in the church.

Such as?

Van Yperen: Foundational issues, doctrinal issues, for a start. But also philosophical issues about who we are called to be in Christ—whether it’s to grow in size or to plant another church, those are major things. It takes a lot of wisdom to decide which are major issues and which are minor. The church needs to be talking about these things in calm moments and not wait ’til a crisis.

Schlaepfer: Sometimes it seems church leaders demand more unanimity than there really has to be—but you should choose your issues. Over starting a postmodern service, our congregation worked through the process and agreed to disagree. The service was begun, though not everyone was on exactly the same page.

One of my wife’s favorite lines is “Do you believe in the ministry of the Holy Spirit or not?!” But sometimes somebody has to make the final call on the way the Holy Spirit seems to be leading the organization. You want consensus and to include as many people as possible in the process, but ultimately, someone must make the decision.

Van Yperen: This is the core issue—the role of leadership. First, hear what God is saying to the church, not yourself only but through the wisdom of others, through his Word, through his Holy Spirit, through the affirmation of other believers. Hear that, then describe it. Then invite people into it.

That last part is where most leaders get themselves into trouble. There’s a thin line between inviting people into the journey and coercing them.

To say, “We believe God is leading us. I know this is going to be hard for some of you. In fact, some of you won’t like it. Will you walk with us as we test God’s will here? Will you step out in faith?”—that’s leadership. What’s not leadership is to say, “Hey, look, this is the way it is. If you don’t like it, leave.”

Sande: I think God is more interested in our attitudes about resolving our differences on some of these issues, than he is in the positions we take.

Van Yperen: I agree. Philippians 2 is the test here, if we say that we must do a certain thing, despite the interest and needs of others, then we have something less than a redemptive process.

Can you show us what that process looks like in real life?

Sande: Here’s an example. When our present pastor arrived, there were strong differences over what kind of Sunday school program to have. Some wanted the traditional age-segregated program; others wanted to have families together to study the same subjects.

There are no specific passages in the Bible I’m aware of about Sunday school, and yet people were acting as if there were, making arguments about fathers being spiritual leaders and all.

Our pastor, first of all, taught the broad relevant principles dealing with this issue—education, family, and church. Then he backed it up with specific teaching on the kind of attitude Christians should have in conflict, playing heavily on Philippians 2, looking out for each other’s interests.

As he preached this for a month, the attitude of the congregation changed. In one meeting, a man who had favored one type of program started speaking on behalf of the other side’s position, and a man from the other side responded in the same way, arguing for the position he had opposed. Each man began to care more about the interests of fellow believers than his own.

When I saw that, I said, “This is positive conflict.” The epitome of healthy conflict is when Christians are falling over each other looking out for the other person.

Resolution apparently takes time, but in our recent survey on conflict, many pastors told us they wish they had acted more quickly.

Sande: That’s often the case. People want to be gracious and not forceful. At times, that’s just being timid. They let things go on too long. I see it particularly in issues of church discipline. What could have been a minor admonishment becomes full-scale excommunication because they waited too long.

Van Yperen: I wouldn’t want to be heard saying simply, “Take your time.” Scripture is clear. Matthew 5 and Matthew 18 are two passages to follow if you know of sin or conflict. In both cases, whether you’re the sinner or the victim, go! Make things right. There’s an immediacy. You have to respond to conflict immediately, but you may have to resolve it patiently. It may take a work of heart, and you’ll need to give the Holy Spirit time for that to happen.

Sande: You’re active, but not forcing a conclusion prematurely. Paul says to make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Eph. 4:3). He’s not talking about contriving something that’s not there, but finding something that’s already there. The unity of the Spirit is there. We need to seek it until we find it.

Much of the conflict in churches is between individuals. How do we teach people to resolve personal conflict well?

Van Yperen: It starts with the leadership—praying for one another and confessing their sins to one another. The pastor is responsible for building redemptive community within the fellowship of leaders. The most powerful kind of learning in church is when the pastor gets up with an elder and says, “I want you to know we haven’t seen eye-to-eye. I’ve done something untoward to my brother, and I’ve asked his forgiveness.” You embody this kind of message.

Schlaepfer: Confessional preaching is important in this—telling about the time you were an idiot. I told the congregation how I almost got into a fight at a San Francisco 49-ers game. Even when the church is not in conflict, preach the hard lessons you’ve learned about living in a graceful way.

Van Yperen: You’re in good company with Moses and David.

Sande: The piece Rene talked about is important—ongoing and repeated. We can have it down pat today and in six months have forgotten it. Create a reconciliation culture and reinforce it repeatedly. There should be deliberate teaching up front. Give people a simple, clear, systematic theology in conflict resolution. Lay out the Scriptures about confrontation and forgiveness and restoration.

Van Yperen: Our story has to be that when we were still in sin, Christ died for us; he has provided the means by which we can become new creatures, the righteousness of God, reconciled to him and to each other.

How Can You Satisfy Everyone?

We teach church leaders to lead their congregations to change using a technique we use when mediating a dispute in a lawsuit. It’s called the “Three P’s of Satisfaction.” When you’re working through a controversy, you want to make sure at the end of the process you’ve done your best to cover all three levels.

• Process satisfaction. Everyone wants to know it’s a fair and just process, that they have opportunity to express their views. They want to know what’s coming up and that it’s reasonably paced. At the end, as with the justice system, you don’t want people objecting because they think the process was unfair.
• Personal satisfaction. People want to feel that they’ve been treated equally and respectfully. We have to be careful how we address people. You don’t call one by a first name and another “doctor.” I mediated a dispute once with three people seated at a table. I was sitting at the end. About a half-hour into the discussion, I shifted my position, which turned me away from one of the people. It was unintentional body language, but the party that was over my shoulder got colder and colder. He felt disrespected.
• Product satisfaction. This is the actual result. When people come to a leader, they want you to facilitate some kind of problem solving process. They want a product-a new pastor, or building, or worship style. They’re not thinking about the process as being personal, but it is. All the while you’re talking with them, they’re monitoring it for fairness. Am I being treated equally? In many cases leaders have little latitude in the final product or outcome of the dispute. But they always have enormous latitude over personal and process satisfaction. Even if people don’t like the final solution, they are more likely to accept it and walk away relatively content if their leaders have given them personal and process satisfaction along the way.

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