Discerning the Causes

Church conflict doesn’t usually emerge from a single cause, and understanding the variety of causes is crucial to dealing with conflict.
—Speed Leas

One California pastor found himself at odds with two men in his congregation. The problem was, well, that was the problem—this pastor couldn’t figure out what exactly the problem was.

Certainly, a host of issues divided the pastor and the two men: They thought he preached too much on sin; he thought they lived by cheap grace. He thought clapping for the choir inappropriate in worship; they, as choir members, thought clapping a contemporary way of affirming the choir.

But some personal issues were involved as well: The pastor preached a sermon about homosexuality, only to discover later that one of these men, who had a homosexual son, was hurt by the pastor’s “insensitive” comments.

And then there was politics: These men had wielded a great deal of power in the church’s short history. For some twenty years they had set the tone for the church: it would be an urbane, liberal, theologically diverse church. The pastor, however, was calling people to a more personal and Bible-centered faith.

The differences erupted one evening in a personnel committee meeting, of which these two men were a part. They lambasted the pastor, and the pastor tried to defend himself. Neither side budged an inch.

For weeks afterwards, the pastor tried to repair these relationships, but he couldn’t figure out where the main problem lay, in theology, personalities, or politics.

What this pastor slowly realized was a basic truth of church conflict: conflict doesn’t usually emerge from a single cause, and understanding the variety of causes is crucial to dealing with conflict.

As I’ve worked with congregations over the years, I’ve found that conflict has its roots in four areas: poor relationships, personal shortcomings (of people and pastor), unsolved problems, and congregational patterns of behavior. The first cause is discussed elsewhere in this book; let’s examine the other three here.

Individual Shortcomings

We often assume that the church’s problems are caused by the shortcomings of certain people—and that’s all there is to it! That may not be all there is to it, but it’s certainly true as far as it goes: many times it is cantankerous or ornery folk who make church life miserable.

I’ve found three shortcomings in people that cause church conflict.

• Fear. Many church conflicts begin when people become anxious about what is happening (or not happening) in the church. When anxiety, a certain level of which is healthy in organizations, turns into worry and fear, people begin to lose perspechve about what is actually going on; then you get conflict.

In such cases, fear begins to act on the church as does pollen on a person who has hay fever. Hay fever sufferers have bodies that are hypersensitive to certain allergens. When those substances enter their bodies, their immune systems react so strongly that they become miserable. Their bodies’ devices set up to protect them end up harming them.

So it is with fear. Sometimes we become aware of a problem and then overreact, so that the problem becomes worse than what we feared in the first place. When afraid, we sometimes lose our ability to think clearly and understand circumstances accurately. We act or make decisions that we later regret.

I worked with one pastor who had gotten wind of dissatisfaction among some of the elected church leaders. He assumed they would try to remove him from his position.

His response was swift and massive: he talked to many in the congregation, organizing groups to support him; he spoke with his bishop; he did not reappoint perceived opponents to positions of influence.

His reaction, however, was overkill given the level of concern brought by the “dissenters,” and his response merely aggravated the dissatisfaction in the congregation.

Fortunately, two things happened that radically changed this pastor’s reaction.

First, his bishop assured him that he would not allow the church to fire him. The bishop said, “You are guaranteed this position; there is virtually nothing that they can do to remove you from the church. Don’t worry about it.”

Second, the pastor and the dissatisfied members sat down together, and under the guidance of a skilled denominational official, discussed their cold war. The pastor learned that these people did not want him to leave the church; they simply had concerns about worship and administration.

• Needs. Sometimes our needs conflict with the needs of others, and that’s when church conflict can begin.

Such conflict nettles all relationships. Recently, I was in the dumps because a church training program I had organized for a congregation had floundered. At the same time, my wife, a writer of computer manuals, had just been asked to write a sizable manual for a large computer company.

She was high and wanted to celebrate; I was low and wanted attention. Needless to say, we didn’t meet each other’s needs.

In a church setting, because of the variety of needs, such conflicts become complex. Some people are desperate for Christian education for their children. Others need the church to offer more recovery groups. Some people find themselves struggling to keep their marriages together; others can’t understand why the church isn’t doing more for blacks in South Africa. Some want more praise, others more silence, still others more sermon—all in the same worship service! And on it goes.

In most instances, if the church is large enough, people go off and “do their thing,” satisfying their needs in one segment of the church. But sometimes churches find themselves having to play one need off of another; they lack the money, people, or time to please everybody. In such cases, I suggest congregations ask themselves:

—Is it possible for one group to defer getting its needs met?

—Is it possible to compromise? Perhaps each group can get some or most of what it needs.

—Are relationships strong enough to weather the possibility of one group not getting their needs met?

In one Illinois church, some leaders felt the worshipers were suffering because of a deteriorating organ. Others felt children were suffering because of poor classroom facilities. In this case, the worshipers got their organ, and the others got the promise of new educational facilities in the future.

This situation also had political and theological dimensions, obviously, which needed to be addressed. But at the heart of the conflict also stood human needs: to worship, to learn. To ignore these legitimate and ongoing needs would have been to ignore one dimension of the problem.

• Sin. Although many books on the psychology of conflict omit this category, in my experience, it’s a principal cause of church dustups.

I don’t have to read the apostle Paul’s words on the sinful nature to know that from time to time a voice within me screams that my needs and values are the most important, no matter what! Others can fend for themselves! I readily see how others act selfishly, but I am oblivious to my own selfishness. That attitude only intensifies conflict.

In the case of the California pastor, he clearly saw the judgmental attitude and greed for power in the two men who opposed him. What he didn’t see for months, he admits, was his own arrogance and self-righteousness.

The only way to deal with sin, of course, is with repentance. Often that’s difficult to do in the middle of a conflict. But if each party can at least recognize the likelihood that their own sin is probably contributing to the conflict, it brings a measure of humility to the process, which helps keep conflict from mushrooming beyond control.

Problems to Solve

Individual shortcomings come from within people, but problems to solve come to the church from “out there.” Problems to solve include such things as how much money should be given to missions, whether to buy a photocopy machine, or what stand to take on abortion.

Such problems fall into various categories, each of which suggests a different approach to finding a solution.

• Issues. In your garden-variety problem to solve, the disputants have alternatives. They’re not stuck with an either/or dilemma but have a variety of choices.

For example, in answer to the question “What shall we do with the $10,000 donated to ‘upgrade the church office’?” there are many options: buy a new computer, buy a new photocopier, buy new office furniture for the pastor’s study, redo the reception area, and the like.

Further, each option has its own issues: What type of computer, and how large? Which style of furniture? What color paint for the walls?

Basic problem-solving techniques are usually the best way to deal with this form of conflict:

—Clearly define the problem.

—Agree on the problem’s definition.

—Explore alternative solutions.

—Develop criteria for selecting one of the alternatives.

—Choose one of the alternatives either by collaboration or by negotiation.

In a collaborative choice, both or all of the parties essentially agree. Each party’s needs are fully discussed, and solutions are sought that address each party’s concerns.

In the example above, $10,000 won’t go far enough to get the secretary a new photocopier and the pastor a new office and the church treasurer a new computer. So in a collaborative choice, the secretary gets the photocopier and the pastor new office furnishings. In addition, the pastor trades his new office computer for the treasurer’s (the pastor only uses the computer for word processing, and the old computer does that well enough for him).

This is often called a “win-win solution.” However, it may be that not all of the parties fully “win” but only that everything possible has been done to arrive at a mutually satisfactory solution.

In a negotiated choice, the parties agree on a solution, but there is less commitment to finding solutions that fully satisfy the needs of each party. In negotiation, parties assume they will have to give up one thing to get another.

In the Illinois church that decided for the new organ, the Christian education people were able to get the church board to see the gravity of their needs, but they had to delay for three or four years any improvements in the church school wing.

• Dichotomies. In a dichotomy, the possible solutions are limited to two. The choice facing the congregation absolutely excludes the possibility of satisfying both sides of a controversy.

Typical dichotomies churches face include: Should the church change locations? Should the church leave the denomination? Should the organist be replaced?

The answer in each case has to be yes or no. Sometimes it is possible to soften the decision by throwing in something of value to those who “lose,” but with truly dichotomous questions, there is a clear winner and loser.

In one church of about 1,800 members, the dichotomy centered around the work of the youth pastor, who was about to be tired. He had made a personal impact on a number of high school youth, but overall attendance was down. Naturally, those parents whose kids were being helped, although small in number, were happy with his work and were stunned to learn that his job was threatened. Other parents could see in the young man only a lack of organization and drive.

The personnel committee had tried to keep the problem from becoming a dichotomy: at first they had called in the youth pastor and told him the concerns most parents were expressing, encouraging him to make changes. But the youth pastor wouldn’t or couldn’t. He finally had to be let go (with three months severance pay to soften the blow to him and his supporters).

Dichotomies are much more difficult to deal with than issues. Losers can become angry, and they tend not to be committed to the decisions. Sometimes they sabotage agreements or leave a church when they don’t get their way.

Actually, anyone who is sensitive to relationships—that includes most people in a church—don’t like the tension dichotomies cause. We don’t like to see people alienated from one another.

There are two ways, though, to lessen the fallout.

1. You can convince. Leaders can make convincing arguments that cast a new vision of the problem and so entice the disputants along.

Or leaders can convince the opposing group to go along by taking seriously its objections and concerns. When there is a modicum of trust in a church, leaders can help people explore and discuss the issues, and sometimes this process unearths the specific needs of the opposition. Once these needs are expressed openly, the impact of the final decision may be muted: the group may disagree still, but it knows it has been heard.

2. Pay attention to jots and tittles. The pastor of one church was given informal authority to approve infant baptisms. He would interview the couple who wanted their infant baptized, determine if it was appropriate, and then set a date. Later he would get the board’s official permission, but that was a mere formality.

One time, however, a young couple who didn’t attend church and were merely living together asked him if he would baptize their child. The pastor balked, but the man was on the church rolls as a member; according to church law, he had the right to have his child baptized.

The pastor knew, however, that the final decision for baptisms rested in the hands of the board—only it could refuse the man his right. Rather than exerting his informal prerogatives, the pastor decided to do everything according to the church constitution.

He took the decision to the board, explained the facts, made no recommendation, and asked for the board’s decision. The board voted against the baptism, and the pastor relayed their decision to the man and his girl friend.

The couple was not pleased, but they couldn’t fault the pastor or church for anything other than disagreeing with them. If you have to make a decision and you can’t get full agreement, at least proceed according to civil and church law.

• Value Differences. Value differences are not seen as often in churches as are issues and dichotomies, because congregations are expert at making sure that these types of problems do not come to the fore. Congregations instinctively know that a values conflict is tortuous to work through and the likelihood of finding agreement low.

A few church members, for example, might object to any divorced person being in leadership positions; others believe that forgiveness of divorce extends to letting people lead the congregation. Or some members might believe that a minimum of 10 percent of the church’s budget should be designated for overseas missions; others believe local missions should be the first priority.

It’s not easy for people to dispute about values. First, people’s identities rest on their deeply held values; so they do not change easily.

Also, in churches especially, people are admonished to maintain their values, to refuse to compromise what they hold dear; we regularly hold up for admiration the great martyrs of the faith who remained true to the faith.

So with values, a great deal is at stake. If values come up, people arc not inclined to say, “I am open to listen to your argument; I am ready to change my mind if necessary.” People are more interested in getting their way because their way is “right.”

When faced with value differences, the church has a few options:

1. Reframe the problem. One church was struggling to decide whether people should be allowed to speak in tongues in worship. The issue distressed the church’s leaders because the choices were virtually dichotomous, and they didn’t want to split the church over the issue.

A third party, however, tried to help the situation by pointing out that people in the church had become alienated from one another; they were no longer communicating as they had in the past. This group managed to change the issue from speaking in tongues to how people should communicate better.

You can also reframe the issue by helping people explore their areas of agreement: their common commitment to Jesus as Lord, their love for the church, their deep respect for the contributions made by their opponents. Then, looking at what holds them together, they can work more ironically on the disagreement.

Frankly, refraining the issue doesn’t really deal with the issue. If the issue is not that important, reframing works. But if the issue is a major concern to people, reframing can be short-lived strategy. The problem will present itself again, perhaps in a more vehement form, because the problem has lingered, perhaps festered, without resolution.

2. Partition. To partition means to ensure that the disputing parties do not share the same space at the same time (at least at certain critical times). In the case of the controversy over appropriate behavior in worship, those more charismatic in worship would meet at one hour and those less demonstrative would meet at another.

I have used this technique with budgets as well as programs. A congregation in Iowa had a dispute over how to spend their missions money. One group felt all the church’s mission money should go to the denomination’s missions, mostly hospitals, self-help projects, and education. Another group felt strongly that this money should be used primarily for evangelism.

Since they couldn’t come to agreement, we decided that the church should have two missions committees, each with an equal share of the outreach monies of the church, each deciding how it would spend its share of the money. Neither party, however, was fully happy with this “solution,” but it was better than any other alternative they could think of at the time.

3. Agree not to deal with the issue. Sometimes not making any decision is actually the best decision. As long as the church acknowledges this openly, it’s an honest way to deal with values differences.

One church had for fifteen years shared the facilities of another congregation. In that time, about half the congregation became convinced that this was the church’s unique identity: a congregation that was a good steward of its resources, a church that was people, not buildings.

The other half of the congregation pined away for a building. They believed the church would go nowhere unless it had its own physical identity.

When a new pastor came to the church, he kept getting different messages about which way to lead the church. He finally organized a goal-setting process in which this issue was discussed—and then dropped. People realized that there was no consensus on the issue, and so they thought it best to leave things the way they were for the time being.

4. Get a “divorce.” If all of your efforts to come to agreement have failed, and the issue is deeply held values, then one group may simply have to leave. It’s a solution that is terribly costly, but sometimes it’s better for everyone concerned.

The two men who disputed with the California pastor eventually left the church. When they did, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The issues between them and the pastor were never solved, but the church was able to get back to ministry, and the two men and their families were able to find a church home where they could better serve.

Behavioral Patterns

Students of family life have noted that behaviors of family members are often practiced apart from the conscious decisions of individuals themselves. Divorce, substance abuse, and suicide are notable examples of repetitive patterns that move in families from one generation to the next.

Social behavioral patterns are often subtle. For example, when I was on the debate team in high school, there was an unwritten rule in our debating dub, and certainly in formal debates themselves, that personal attack and rigorous challenge of everything the other said and did was fair game. So I found myself often, in the context of the debate team, challenging, attacking, putting others down with relish and abandon. But I certainly never acted that way at home or in other social contexts.

Likewise, each church has unwritten rules about how it goes about disagreeing. In one church, every squabble is immediately taken to the pastor for his adjudication. In another church, disputes are publicly avoided and handled by gossip. But however the dispute is handled, it is not necessarily handled consciously. People have learned over the years how to handle congregational conflict, and they may not even be able to articulate exactly what they do.

But often, especially when the pattern of behavior remains unexamined, it damages terribly a church’s life.

I worked with a congregation that called itself a “Matthew 18 church.” They said they managed conflict by following the guidelines of Jesus as laid out in Matthew 18. Those guidelines spell out a process whereby a person who has sinned is confronted first by an individual, and if the “sinner” remains unconvinced, then by individuals not involved in the dispute, and if still not convinced, then by the entire congregation.

Unfortunately, this “Matthew 18 church” simply used this method to vent anger at one another. An angry member would seek out a person who annoyed him, berate the person for his rude and thoughtless conduct, and then escape from further conversation. People didn’t seek to understand one another, let alone compromise. It was simply hit and run.

This behavior didn’t result merely from people’s anger or frustration or personality conflicts. A large part of the problem was “institutional”—this was the way the church had handled conflict for years. No one knew how to do it any differently.

Helping a congregation move beyond their usual patterns is difficult at best. It calls for two courses of action.

1. Notice the behavior. The people need to see what they’re doing and how it’s destructive to the church.

Usually groups need help from someone outside their institution to figure out what’s going on. The outsider will notice patterns to which an insider is blind.

2. Learn new behaviors. Once a congregation is aware of how it normally handles conflict, it’s less likely to continue the pattern. The game is up; people know what’s coming next; they also know that it’s an unproductive way to proceed.

Still, learning new behaviors is not easy. I remember when I first learned about active listening (responding to people with words and posture to assure them of my interest), I was thrilled. Immediately, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, but actually doing it was terribly awkward at first. I needed a good deal of practice, with feedback from a person with a practiced eye, to develop sufficient skill.

If a congregation has learned to deal with disagreement by gossip or attack or whatever, it’s going to take some preaching, teaching, and perhaps seminars by outsiders to show people new ways of relating. And sometimes it takes a gentle but direct confrontation of people who continue the old ways.

One pastor was becoming frustrated with the way his congregation dealt with him about disagreements’ people would talk behind his back, and he would have to fish and fish to discover the substance of people’s concerns.

So he diplomatically pointed out this behavior in newsletters and in sermons, explaining how much energy and time this behavior wasted, and how many hurt feelings it could engender. He also told his people that if they had a problem with the church, rather than gossiping about it, they should simply write him a note or tell him directly. He admitted that he might not be able to deal with their complaint satisfactorily, but at least he would be aware of what people were thinking, and that would help him be a more sensitive pastor overall.

Well, the pattern continued, especially by three or four key men in the church. Then one day, the pastor happened to run into one of these men while making a hospital call. He asked the man, thirty years his senior, to have a cup of coffee with him.

After a few pleasant amenities, the pastor came to the point, “Stan, I understand you’ve not been happy with the change in the order of worship.”

Stan was silent.

“And I know you’ve been talking to John and Jack about your complaints.”

Stan squirmed.

“I’m going to be straight with you, Stan.” The pastor leaned forward and looked Stan directly in the eye. “I would be helped and the church would be helped if, when you’ve got a problem with the way I’m doing something, you come to me directly. Complaining to others about my decisions has got to stop. It undermines my ministry and demoralizes the church.”

Stan mumbled a weak agreement, and soon after he became a strong, albeit not uncritical, supporter of the pastor. The habit of congregational gossip had been dealt a severe blow.

Church conflict makes a church feel as if it’s being swept along by a raging flood. And often it is that way. But if the church can discover the various and sundry tributaries that feed into the conflict, they can turn flood waters that destroy into a river that gently but powerfully moves them downstream.