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Jim Van Yperen says that church conflict is normal. The problem, he says, is the way leadership respond to conflicts.

Van Yperen is founder and director of Metanoya Ministries, a nonprofit Christian ministry that serves churches in conflict resolution and in leadership formation. He is also the author of Making Peace: A Guide to Overcoming Church Conflict (Moody).

How common is church conflict?

Almost everywhere you go, you find churches that are struggling with conflicts either great or small. All churches face conflict. It's how we deal with conflict that's the problem.

Are sick churches in conflict aware that there is a problem?

We have this notion of Christianity in which we think there should be no problems—that we go to church, we put on our masks, and we do our nice happy smiles to each other.

That's not the church of Scripture. The church of Scripture was full of problems. They were always dealing with conflicts. The Apostle Paul spends a good amount of his writing talking to churches that were in deep conflicts, sometimes out of sin and sometimes out of disagreement.

Conflict is actually an opportunity to change. So it's important to have an understanding of what the church is and what God wants to do with it through conflict, not in spite of it.

Is there one thing often at the root of most church conflicts?

We say that all church conflict is ultimately about leadership. I don't believe that leaders are the cause of the problem all the time. Conflicts that turn into big fires are often started by small things.

It can be anything, from style of worship, moral failure, politics, decision-making, or even seemingly positive things like rapid growth. All of those things have the seeds of conflict in them. We should expect it. That's part of living in a world that's unredeemed.

However, the way the leader, the pastor, or the spiritual leadership of the church responded to the conflict is what determined whether it would be reconciled or get worse. Most of the churches [our ministry is called into] do not have problems necessarily with the leader, but with the leader's response to the conflict that made it far worse.

What is the problem with the way churches try to reconcile these problems?

Most evangelical churches ascribe to the idea that we need to be reconciling and redemptive, but they don't always live that out. The big problem is a lack of a foundation of biblical community—living in community with one another so that there's fellowship to be restored if someone falls away. [There's also a lack of] loving one another, serving one another, forgiving one another, forbearing one another. We're not doing that. And because we're not doing that we find in times of crisis that we have no means to reconcile it.

So why would we not want to commit to community?

We're too committed to our individualism and to privacy. From early on you're taught that individualism and reaching your own self-actualized position is what you're all about. You're taught to think about yourself first. You think of others as a kind of commodity that will serve your purpose. When we go to church, a lot of people go to church to get their needs met.

What are the classic responses to conflict in a church setting?

A passive responder is one who is really committed to seeing the love and mercy of God, but they do so at the expense of truth. They are typically those who don't want to deal with conflict in any way, shape, or form. They will keep silent about it. They will deny it. They end up surrendering their relationships with others and really with God.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47