Thriving through Ministry Conflict

A Parable on How Resistance Can Be Your Ally

James P. Osterhaus, Joseph M. Jurkowski, Todd A. Hahn

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9780310864387
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Church conflict doesn't have to be an enemy that tears a congregation apart. By learning how to handle it wisely, pastors and church leaders can make resistance one of their most valuable allies. Far from fearing conflict, leaders can turn it into a catalyst for positive change and a stronger, more united church.Through the fictional story of a typical pastor embroiled in conflict, Thriving through Ministry Conflict shows how to handle and resolve conflict in a healthy way. By working through a series of response activities and discussion questions, the reader will gain powerful insights into the emotional dynamics of conflict. Here are the knowledge and tools that can help pastors and church leaders trade self-defeating responses to conflict for an empowering, constructive approach; gain a working command of key conflict survival principles; and cultivate the skills needed to effectively navigate the conflicts every ministry leader faces.

Introduction

A Dangerous and Difficult Path

The pathway of leadership is dangerous and difficult. This is doubly true for the man or woman in ministry. Take a look at this true story.

An Exhausted Pastor

Pastor Phil had good reason for his anxiety. His three-year ministry at a small midwestern church was shaping up to be a colossal failure. He had run up against a brick wall the likes of which few in ministry had experienced. A small but influential group in this aging, ingrown congregation of two hundred had early on tangled with Pastor Phil over the changes he was bringing to the church. Over time, he had become sensitive to their repeated criticisms and had finally worn to the breaking point.

In any organization, voices of dissent provide clues about unexpressed pain within the organization. However, these voices are often misinterpreted by the leaders of the organization because they are seen as oppositional. It is hard to hear the message when one feels personally attacked, when every action is questioned and every good idea is opposed.

Pastor Phil found himself in this very dilemma. He didn’t understand the resistance to his initiatives, since most of the parishioners apparently agreed with his values and vision. No matter what he had tried, no matter how he had handled conflicts, the situation had grown steadily worse, and he and his family had suffered. This suffering had created doubt in Pastor Phil, doubt about his ability to lead and doubt about his vocation. As he had grown more and more depressed, he had also struggled with growing bitterness and resentment.

The search committee which had called him knew they needed a leader who would challenge the church community. They knew Pastor Phil would confront contradictions in beliefs and behaviors; they knew he would never compromise his integrity. They wanted Pastor Phil to do what they could not do.

Pastor Phil’s great error was innocence. He never understood that integrity is not necessarily valued, or that it is not a formula for popularity. He naively thought that new ideas would be greeted with enthusiasm. He thought that the long-term interests of the many would always win over the short-term interests of the few. He thought that because the community needed and said they wanted change, they would embrace it, and that in appreciation for his efforts, they would embrace him and his family. Instead, as he confronted the contradictions he saw in the church, he was attacked. He felt betrayed and wounded, and he personalized the attacks, which not only confused him but created shame and guilt in the members of the parish.

The church had been doing things in certain ways for years and had never been confronted about their behavior by previous pastors. They in turn felt wounded, betrayed, and personally attacked by Pastor Phil. They didn’t understand what he was doing or why he was upset.

As time passed, Pastor Phil was worn down. He could not tone down the conflict, depersonalize the attacks coming at him, or rebuild relationships within the congregation. Finally, he left the church.

Faulty Expectations and Intense Personal Conflict

Between the three of us, we have over seventy years of experience working with pastors and churches, serving on church staffs, and fulfilling the role of pastor. We have found Pastor Phil’s story to be the rule and not the exception. Good men and women with a calling for the Lord’s work become exhausted, then defeated, and finally leave the ministry.

It is our observation that the average minister is

highly committed,

confused by the unrealistic expectations of others,

and overwhelmed and frightened by incomprehensible conflict.

What goes wrong for pastors everywhere, over and over again? Faulty expectations that lead to intense personal conflict.

Adjust Expectations,Don’t Satisfy Them

Here’s an interesting paradox. The more pastors care, the more they are set up to fail. The reason they fail is because they tend to make perhaps the most serious error a leader can make. They attempt to meet all of the expectations of their congregation.

This attempt has two consequences:

1. Leaders run themselves ragged and destroy their own lives and the lives of their family members.

2. Leaders send the wrong message to their congregations, and especially to those needy individuals who have a great deal of woundedness from the past. This message is, “Yes, I can do it all. I can heal those wounds. I’m the right person for you.” But sending this message is a recipe for disaster because leaders invariably are unable to meet all of their congregants’ expectations.

So what’s the answer to this dilemma? How can the pastor deal effectively with the congregation, and especially those deeply wounded people who want, who demand, that he or she heal all of their wounds, fix their defects, and compensate for their deficiencies?

It’s not that ministers necessarily need to care less. What we recommend is caring within legitimate expectations. Quite simply, the task is not to meet unrealistic expectations. And we’re not just talking about the unrealistic expectations of others. We’re also talking about the unrealistic expectations we have of ourselves, expectations that we are often unaware that we have. The task is to adjust those unrealistic expectations first in ourselves and then in others.

But it is here, in the area of meeting expectations, that we find ministers have the most difficulty, and the least amount of competence, handling relational situations within their parishes. And so unmet expectations inevitably lead to personal conflict.

Conflict: Friend or Foe?

Most ministers run from conflict. And yet they are constantly drawn into it, despite taking every possible measure to avoid it. Books written to assist ministers often paint the congregation and the ruling board as the enemy of the minister. But we have a different view. Consider these points:

Conflict is inescapable. Given differences in gender, background, cultural distinctiveness, and personality, it’s no wonder we disagree a lot.

The problem is not conflict, per se, but how people relate to one another when they’re in conflict.

Conflict is a good and necessary thing:

It elicits different points of view.

It clears the air.

It leads to the resolution of complex issues.

We know ministry is dangerous. Anyone who has been in it for more than a few months knows this. But we have also found that the hopeless patterns into which we fall can be understood and turned to redemptive purposes.

Thriving through Conflict

This book is about surviving and thriving in the places to which God has called you to minister. We’re going to take a look at the two greatest challenges facing ministry leaders—faulty expectations and personal conflict—and what links them. And we’re going to guide you through the three simple principles indispensable to any successful minister, whether ordained or lay. To accomplish these goals, we have chosen to tell a fictional story, a story similar to Pastor Phil’s. Through this story, you will learn the principles everyone who is in ministry needs to know to survive and thrive through conflict.

After you have finished chapters 1–9, we encourage you to spend time working through the response activities in the back of the book, either by yourself or in a group, to help you implement these principles in your ministry.

Hold on now! Get ready. This book is going to begin and end with you.

CHAPTER 1

Welcome to the Jungle

Barry Wolf was getting used to the headaches. They started in the back of his head and worked their way relentlessly to a point behind his eyes so that no amount of kneading his temples helped. When a headache hit, he had to accept the misery until sleep or half a bottle of ibuprofen kicked in. It was no way to live if one wanted to lead a church effectively. And Barry was all about effectiveness.

After a ten-year career in insurance sales, Barry had come to the conclusion that God wanted him to become a pastor. Packing up his family, including two kids, Barry moved across the country for ministerial studies. Putting his rare combination of people skills and organizational acumen to work, Barry finished school early and landed his first pastorate, leading the First Community Church of Elizabethton, Illinois.

Barry had moved into his first call with the conviction that churches in the twenty-first century should be more than traditional chaplaincies and social clubs for the spiritually minded. He believed that the church should have an impact in the community and should function as an effective, life-changing organization by leading people to follow Christ closely and to live that out in their day-to-day lives. Barry wasn’t sure how to make this happen, but he had both theological and commonsense business training and figured he could work it out in the field.

The call process had been a fairly straightforward one. Jim Grendell, the chairman of the search committee, combined the precision of a veteran CPA with the winsomeness of a gifted salesman. He was also refreshingly honest, even blunt, qualities that Barry admired, even if his own people-pleasing tendencies occasionally prevented him from practicing them.

“Look,” said Jim, “I believe that you are the man for this job. You are in your midthirties, so you are not wet behind the ears. At the same time, this is your first pastorate, so you are not coming in with a lot of preconceptions. You also have a background as a salesperson, which you are going to need to turn this church around.”

Jim described a church whose best days were behind it but which had potential for the future. First Community had been founded during the church boom years of the 1950s and had grown quickly. Located in a fairly affluent suburb of Chicago, the church attracted a wide spectrum of members, from young families to retirees. Its programs for children were known throughout the area, it boasted a series of gifted pastors, and the church made a significant contribution toward meeting the needs of the disadvantaged in the community.

The church’s growth stabilized in the mid-1960s and stayed level for about another decade. In the 1970s the demographics of the community began to change as many families moved a bit farther away from the Chicago center. Those left behind tended to be older folks who had no desire to move and those who could not afford to move. In time the ethnic composition of the area began to change as well, and First Community, which had been mostly white, did not reflect this change. By the early 1990s the sanctuary, which seated 700 and had been filled nearly to capacity for years, held about 225 worshipers on Sunday morning, and the median age of the congregation was spiking upward.

Driven in part by the economic boom of the mid- to late-1990s, young families began to repopulate Elizabethton, but again the church wasn’t able to attract this new population. By 2000, when Barry took the reins as pastor, the church’s beautiful structure and rich history belied its decline in members, finances, and energy.

Barry was not one to shy away from a challenge and so had had no difficulty deciding to come to First Community. With Jim’s stated support and the sense of the search committee that Barry was the one to lead the church in its efforts to reach young families and so revitalize itself, Barry and his family had moved to Elizabethton with high hopes and trust in God.

The next three years had been the longest of Barry’s life. The congregation’s worship seemed lifeless. There was a shortage of volunteers in every area. Offerings provided enough money to pay salaries and keep the building up, but there were few resources to expand ministry and create new programs, things Barry knew were essential to reach the changing community.

Worst of all, some of his early allies had become antagonists. The search committee had invited him specifically because he was young and creative and they knew the church needed to change. But when Barry began to implement changes—even minor ones to make the worship services livelier and to brighten the children’s ministry rooms—he met resistance that seemed wholly out of proportion to his decisions.

The great shock was that Jim Grendell had become his nemesis.

Five minutes into Barry’s first board meeting at First Community Church, it was clear who called the shots—Jim. Jim was not a physically imposing man, but he had a presence about him. He could talk to anyone about nearly everything and did so with charm. He was well spoken, was looked to as a mentor by many, and in spite of his apparent strength was given to emotion and even tears when discussing an issue important to him. And usually others followed him.

Jim was the kind of guy you wanted on your side and the exact person you hoped and prayed wasn’t aligned against you, because, Barry soon realized, Jim took no prisoners when something stood between him and his goals. And within a year Jim’s apparent goal was to ensure that anything Barry proposed was shot down in flames.

Barry and his wife, Sophia, sometimes sat up late at night as Barry tried to divine what could have caused the change in Jim, at least the change that Barry perceived. Was Jim threatened by Barry? Was he insecure? Was he manipulative? Had he lied when he recruited Barry by saying the church wanted change, and then did everything he could to block change? Had Barry missed something? And most often, what could Barry do to get around Jim’s obstructionism or to change the way Jim led in the church?

Now, Barry was ready to pack it in. The board was stalemated. Attend...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF RESPONSE ACTIVITIES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• RESPONSE ACTIVITIES
• DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
• SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS