You can’t rock the boat if you are rowing.
—Ben Patterson
Oakland A’s manager Billy Martin had a formula for managerial success, which he expressed in Sports Illustrated. “You’ll have fifteen guys who will run through a wall for you, five who hate you, and five who are undecided. The trick is keeping the five who hate you away from the five who are undecided.”
There have been times in the past four years, four months, and twenty-two days—precisely the period of time that I have been a pastor—that I have felt like a graduate of the Billy Martin School of Church Management. To be honest, trying to write this article on conflict has been a bit like not having enough time to read the marvelous book on time management I bought six years ago. I feel that I must know a lot about conflict because I have been so involved in it. But I can’t seem to get out of it long enough to reflect on what I think I must be learning. As the saying goes, “When you’re up to your posterior in alligators, you don’t think about draining the swamp.”
This may be more true of a small church than a large church. Large churches may have all kinds of different groups and individuals in conflict with one another, but they often have a way of absorbing it all; so as some would say, they can co-opt conflict. Like old man river, they just keep rolling along. Small churches, on the other hand, have too many opportunities for the conflicting parties to keep meeting one another, or colliding, as the case may be. And their conflict has much greater potential to rend the tender fabric of the body. For the small church, it is much harder to keep the five who hate you, or the church, away from those who are undecided.
How then is the small church to regard conflict?
Protracted theology
My Old Testament seminary professor once suggested that someone should attempt to write a theology of conflict. At the time his suggestion sounded foolish and superfluous to me. But not now. What follows will hardly qualify as a theology of conflict—it’s those alligators again—but perhaps it will serve as a little pump at the edge of the swamp.
First, what do I mean when I use the word conflict? I mean a protracted struggle, clash, fight, or opposition between personalities, ideas, and interests. Key here is the word “protracted.” Differences, even clashes, between parties in a church do not in themselves constitute conflict of a destructive kind. They can be signs of vitality in a congregation. It is when they defy peaceful resolution and become protracted and entrenched in the life of a church that they become sinful and destructive. It is in this latter sense that I use the word conflict.
Second, why is there church conflict in the first place? It’s because we church people are sinners. “What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you?” asks James. “Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and do not obtain; so you fight and wage war” (James 4:1, RSV). Church conflict will always find its roots in our passion to make ourselves—our needs, our opinions, our group, our goals, our theology—the center of the universe.
Clarence Jones, a basketball player for Tulane, recalled a high school basketball game against Darryl Dawkins of the Philadelphia 76ers. “We were lined up for a free throw and Darryl turned to me and said, ‘If you get the ball I’m going to smash your head against the backboard.’ I didn’t get the ball,” said Jones. There’s a childlike simplicity in Dawkins’ straightforward statement. It gets right down to theological basics. We have all approached God and other people in the same way Dawkins went for the ball; some of us perhaps more subtly and symbolically, but nevertheless in ultimately the same way. The wages for that style of play may be high in the NBA, but they mean conflict and possible spiritual death in the church.
The roots of conflict are also planted in our cultural soil. A significant part of that soil is our demand for instant gratification and the immediate solution of problems. As we American Christians have been reminded ad nauseum, we live in the “now” generation. At McDonald’s we buy fast foods and at Sears we buy microwave ovens, or television sets whose weekly programs pose great human dilemmas and mysteries, all to be solved in sixty to ninety minutes, excluding commercial breaks.
All of our buying can be done on little plastic cards that promise instant credit, instant gratification, the satisfaction of all needs, the killing of all boredom. And lest we feel a little tongue-tied in the face of all this, there are signs telling us “Just say, ‘Charge it.'” To all this the media adds its weekly opinion polls and 45-second “in-depth” analyses designed to evoke instant responses and quick decisions.
Behold now the local church with its garden-variety mixture of sinners saved by grace, all representing various needs and points of view that must be brought into the harmony of the Spirit and the unity of the body of Christ through committees, commissions, boards, and sessions. Real-life conflicts here, as elsewhere, are not solved by just saying “Charge it,” nor will they be solved in ninety minutes. On the contrary, such a mentality ensures that the conflicts will not be solved but will be exacerbated. The perseverance and tenacity required to resolve differences will be just another irritant in the already irritating situation.
As American as apple pie
Many American Christians respond to this situation by loving it or leaving it, shutting up or going to another church, or better yet, starting up their own church. “We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations,” said comedian Rodney Dangerfield. “We’re doing everything to keep our marriage together.”
That seems more and more to be love, American style; and it certainly characterizes Christian unity, American style. As loyalties narrow and our capacity to tolerate pluralism diminishes, new Christian groups proliferate. Ours is the age of single-issue politics and single-issue churches. Here in Southern California, it is a buyers’ market in churches. What are you “into”? Look long enough and you’ll find a congregation “into” it too. If your tastes are extremely discriminating you can start a house-church in an 800-square foot condominium. It’s sure to be big enough. Conflict? Who needs it? Just move out West, young man.
In the space of one week last fall, I met with one person who was leaving the church because I was too liberal, and another who was leaving because I was too conservative. I suggested that both start carrying shopping lists in their Bibles when they go church hunting. While I am convinced that I’m doing something “radical” by staying in a so-called mainline denomination, splitting off and forming another group when differences arise would be as American as apple pie.
Servant’s posture
What we need is a new mindset toward conflict. Paul calls it the mind of Christ. What he is referring to is not so much an intellectual system on how to deal with conflict or a manual for church fights; he exhorts the church to look at what Christ did when he laid aside his rights as God’s equal, emptied himself, and lived the life of a servant in our midst. Paul writes, “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any incentive of love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy …” (Phil. 2:1, RSV).
What the apostle is saying to these people is that the next time they find themselves squaring off in a fighter’s stance they should switch to a servant’s posture. For that is what the mind of Christ is more than anything else—a posture, kneeling and washing one another’s feet. It’s loving and giving as we have been loved and given to.
Paul clearly thinks that this will do wonders for dealing with conflict in the church. For if they are trying to outdo one another in servant love, they won’t be doing one another in over differences of opinion or lifestyle.
We American Christians need to hear this at least as much as did the Philippians. But since we are so suspicious of anything that smacks of kow-towing or slavery, perhaps the best way to approach the subject is by way of negation.
There are at least three things this attitude of a servant does not mean. It does not mean that conflict is resolved in a Christ-like manner by one party becoming the doormat for the other. To be a servant like Christ presupposes that you have a high view of yourself. He was by nature God. He knew it, but did not regard equality with God a thing to be clung to. Instead, he let go and poured himself out and became a servant, even to the extent of dying. It was because of this, not in spite of this, that God so highly exalted him. The resurrection and ascension of Christ were not simply God’s reward for a dirty job well done, but were his supreme vindication of the things that Christ did. God gave his stamp of approval. He said, in effect, “This is the way I get my work done!”
Christ’s ministry was a living demonstration of his teaching that the man who loses his life is the one who finds it. The point here for us is that in a conflict situation we need not fear that we will be swallowed up if we adopt a servant’s posture, and perhaps relax our grip on our point of view. In this we may achieve the larger end of preserving the unity of the church or to encourage a brother or sister to love Christ more deeply. We serve as Christ served from a position of strength, not weakness. “We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak,” says the apostle Paul. “Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to edify him” (Rom. 15:1-2, RSV). I wonder how many conflicts in churches are never peacefully resolved due simply to the basic insecurity of the parties involved?
Ego set-aside
The attitude of a servant also does not mean that the truth of the gospel be compromised. Paul, after having urged the Philippians toward the unity of mutual servanthood, speaks of the Judaizers and says, “Look out for the dogs, look out for the evil-workers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh” (Phil. 3:2, RSV). Those are hardly kind words, but they are the words of a servant; for to be a servant of Christ and his church must mean to preserve the integrity of the gospel. The trick for us is to know when to cry “Look out for the dogs” and when to keep our mouths shut and let sleeping dogs lie, so to speak. I am afraid we have historically been paranoid about dogs. “Unity in essentials, liberty in nonessentials, love in all things,” reads the dictum. Could it be that our list of essentials is longer than the New Testament’s?
To have the attitude of a servant is not to be afraid of differences of opinion. Indeed, it is servants who can most tolerate differences because their potential for conflict has been diffused. To adapt a phrase by Henry Steele Commager: Churches, like democracies, must have criticism to flourish. To function, they must have dissent. The alternative is cultism. For many Christians “one mind” has been the group-think of Orwell’s 1984. The one mind Paul speaks of is the mind of Christ, who laid aside his prerogatives in order to be a servant. You can’t rock the boat if you are rowing. But you can speak out in dissent as one wholeheartedly committed to the boat and to the integrity of its course, and stop rowing only as a last resort.
I think it’s significant that one symbol for the church is that of a ship. It is a ship much bigger than its individual passengers, bigger even than the sum total of them. It belongs to its captain, and it is ultimately his responsibility to bring it safely into port. That ought to help us all relax a bit and stop thinking that our opinions and determinations are all that important. It’s presumption to do otherwise. It’s hubris of the first magnitude to take our response to the gospel and begin to confuse it with the gospel itself.
Well, can this be done? Is it possible to “be angry but not sin” (Eph. 4:26)?
Last year I sat across the room from one of the elders of the church I pastor. We were glaring at one another, and I was trembling with rage. We had disagreed and disagreed. During the session meetings we slipped automatically into adversary positions toward one another. That evening I had gone to his house to try to improve the situation. But our talk quickly degenerated into another verbal sparring match, and I was ready to turn it into a physical one.
What could be done? There seemed no place to go but to start the First Church of Ben Patterson, corner of Sectarianism and Schism. I don’t remember which one of us asked the question, but it was like a shaft of light in a dark cave. “Can we set aside our egos in order to serve the Kingdom?” The tension began to drain out of my body. Bruce Larson is right. He says we people in the church are like porcupines in a snowstorm. We need each other to keep warm, but we prick each other if we get too close. But there is One who can stand between us. Bonhoeffer is also right. He said Christ is the mediator between not only God and man, but between man and man; and, I would add, man and his opinions. He has taken upon his own body the wounds we would deliver to one another. In Christ I no longer have immediacy with anything or anyone, not even myself. The blows and hostility I deliver must pass through his heart before they reach my brother. The opinions I cling to so tenaciously must be in him, through him. Is anything worth rending the body of Christ, his church?
Unity call
Were it not for his presence in our midst, the call to peace and unity, to “do nothing from selfishness or conceit,” would be an intolerable burden to bear. In the musical The Sound of Music, Maria teaches the children how to overcome their fears in the midst of a violent thunderstorm. She tells them to remember their favorite things, things like “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens.” When she does this, she loses her fear and her sorrow. It works for the children too. Later on, Maria leaves them because she is frightened and confused over her love for their father. The children are inconsolable. One day they try to cheer themselves up by singing once again their “favorite things.” They get a few lines into the song and the smallest girl speaks up. “It only makes me sadder to sing without Maria here.”
So it is with God’s call to unity in Christ. Passages like Philippians 2 and First Corinthians 13 are lists of God’s favorite things. And were it not for him with us, they would drive us to despair. As Lewis Smedes puts it in Love Within Limits, the love of God is not an ideal but a power. He would enable us before he obligates us.
Copyright © 1997
