WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON? by Cheri Holdridge & Kurt Young

We’ve heard lots of stories of church conflict. It sometimes goes a bit like this: the Senior Pastor and the Associate Pastor got into an argument at the church Board meeting one night, right in front of everyone, over something, we’ll pick a topic. . . . baptism at the river.

Or in Kurt’s personal experience a fight over a parsonage. Should we buy a new one now. He remembers a meeting where the woman next to him loudly referring to Kurt, who had been one of the leaders in selling the old parsonage, in the third person, “he voted to sell the old one . . . and he’ll be against buying this new one”. Sadly, this person did not know that Kurt was actually one of the supporters of buying the new one, despite what would be a personal inconvenience for him, as he got that the church was best served by the new one.

You know what happens. The church members chose sides. In the baptism story, the next week, the Associate Pastor opened up her own church a mile away with half the folks. A year later, there are two churches, neither church had grown. Guess why? One or both systems are unhealthy. In Kurt’s experience, the church stays divided and conflict after conflict grown until the church shrinks. They don’t know how to focus on one love, one heart, and how to deal with what’s important and how to get along. This is not a good way to deal with conflict.

It started when we were kids. No one wants to be friends with you when you are the one who says: “I’ll take my marbles (now video game) and go home then.” Were you like this as a kid? Do you have one of these kids in your house? And we hate it when our friends make us choose. We have some kids who act like this. We know some adults who still act like this.

On the other hand, Cheri grew up in a family, where she did not really learn how to deal with conflict constructively (actually, Kurt’s family is not that much more functional, slightly, but only slightly on this point). Her Dad, who is no longer with us, kept it inside. He came from a family who never expressed their anger and conflict well. Her Mom just ran into her room and had a good cry, but she never knew what it was really about.

Cheri never really got a good model of dealing with conflict (Kurt again claims no greater level). Cheri started going to therapy 20 years ago to learn to deal more appropriately with conflict. And she is still learning how to deal with conflict. She feels like even people like her best friends or Kurt will abandon her if she fights with them.

Just recently Cheri read a book about dysfunctional teams in business, and church, and other organizations. The writer, Patrick Lencioni, talks about these dysfunctions: The first of these is a lack of trust. The Second is a fear of conflict; we’re not able to deal with healthy conflict in order to learn together. The third dysfunction is a lack of commitment to the higher common purpose. We’re not focused on solving our problems so we can live out our mission.

Now sometimes you have conflict because a powerful person, makes a decision without consulting others and just imposes the decision on others, like I did with the ban on pot-lucks (we did a little skit in worship that Cheri had banned pot lucks and Allen was leaving the church). That’s a lack of trust in the ability of a group to come up with a good decision together. If we are going to be a community here at The Village, then some decisions have to be made by teams, and we need a bit more collaboration on some decisions. We have to trust that the team can make good decisions together.

Sometimes in churches, (and families and other organizations,) conflict happens because one person wields too much arbitrary power (Cheri in our skit wielded power without discussion and information and banned pot lucks based upon a misreading of a story). But what we find that in churches, conflict happens quite often because of what I call the “niceness” factor. We are absolutely paralyzed to deal with anything because we are TOO NICE. We don’t trust one another to be grown up. And we are afraid people won’t hang in there with us through a bit of conflict so we don’t tell the truth. And so, in fact, WE LIE. We say we are being nice. But we don’t want to tell the truth. So we withhold the truth. And in that act, we create conflict. And we do harm to God’s mission through our church. We SAY we don’t want to rock the boat, but usually the boat is already rocking. We are just trying to pretend it is not, in the hopes it will stop, because we are afraid of conflict. But in reality, some healthy conflict helps us learn and helps us move forward as a community. When we share ideas, debate them, and listen to other’s ideas, we can learn.

Such as the church council where the Associate Pastor and the Senior Pastor were in tension about having a baptism service by the river or keep them in the sanctuary. If they had simply avoided that conversation in the effort to be nice, the conflict would still have been there. A constructive conversation would have helped the congregation have deeper conversations about needs within their congregation for different worship experiences to meet the needs of the different people that we worshiping with them. Or in Kurt’s experience, where a nasty confrontation could have been avoided by not assuming what each other’s stances were. Avoiding that conversation in the name of being “nice” would not negate the fact that the conflicting worship needs and values were there, under the surface. Many of our churches have done this being nice, and they’re stuck.

And the truth is, if the conflict exists, it WILL be dealt with, in one way or another. Either we will deal with it, or it will eat us alive. People will deal with it by staying home, withdrawing from the community. In Patrick Lencinone’s book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” he lays out this process and explains that in any organization, the inability to deal with conflict, keeps us from focusing on our commitment to a higher purpose.

This is what Paul was writing about in his letter to that young church in Corinth (I Corinthians 3: 1-9 for those reading along at home). Remember we talked about them last week. Corinth had been a really rough town. Many changed their ways because of Paul’s ministry there. After he left they started back-sliding.

Conflict erupted, competition, read what the message version says “ 9Who do you think Paul is, anyway? Or Apollos, for that matter? Servants, both of us—servants who waited on you as you gradually learned to entrust your lives to our mutual Master. We each carried out our servant assignment. I planted the seed, Apollos watered the plants, but God made you grow. It's not the one who plants or the one who waters who is at the center of this process but God, who makes things grow. Planting and watering are menial servant jobs at minimum wages. What makes them worth doing is the God we are serving. You happen to be God's field in which we are working.”

They were jockeying for which one was more important based on who had baptized them, sort of like one group staying in the church with one pastor and the other leaving the church with another pastor. We don’t think two pastors focused on God would let that happen. The point is to love God, and follow Jesus and to change the world by walking in this Way. We need to keep the main thing the main thing.

So what does all this mean for us at the Village? We are still a young church. Guess what we are here to tell you – there will be conflicts among people within our church. Gasps are permitted as is “well Duh!” We may fight over small things and big things. Soon we are going to begin serious conversations about another location in addition to this one. Some will have hurt feelings about that. “I might go to the new location,” one will say. Others will say “Why would you leave and go help at the new location?”.

Well, because both are important for the mission of The Village and to help other people experience the love of God that we have experienced. And that is the big picture. The main thing is for hurting people out there to know that God loves them and find a community like ours. That’s it. That’s the only thing really. We are not going to reach all of them. Some of the other faith communities will reach some of them but there are more of them, that God wants us to reach.

But we can’t get side-tracked by internal conflicts. So when we find ourselves in conflict, we need to sit down, and work it out like grown up. We’re not going to be infants, (like Paul wrote about) and have a hissy fit and storm out and take our pot-luck pans and go home (Allen was supposed to do that, but they felt the crowd was getting too concerned in the skit in worship)! And We hope we will remember this skit and refer back to it with each other. If we are going to be in community, then we owe it to one another to sit down and talk about it when we are in conflict.

We have something special here in our Village Community. We experience the love of God in powerful ways. And there are other people out there who need this love. BUT, let there be no mistake. We will have our conflicts. (Say that out loud, whether you’re a member of The Village or another church out there, CHURCHES WILL HAVE CONFLICT!) The early churches had conflict. And we will have them too. We are asking us, to take a lesson from Paul’s lesson to the Church at Corinth. Let’s remember to keep God at the center of all that we do. Let’s trust one another and trust God enough to deal with our conflicts and hang in there with one another. And when we are in conflict over things here in our Village Community, let’s work really hard to keep the one love, that one thing, the mission of this church the focus. Lots of other things will take care of themselves, when we remember that our purpose is to share the message of God’s love with a world that needs to hear that message just as much as we do.

If you want to be a part of a community without conflict, that’s not us. But if you want to be a part of a community where we try to deal with each other and keep the main thing the main thing, consider joining us here at the Village. We’re here Sundays at 9:45 and 11:30 AM on Sundays at the corner of Monroe Street and Central Avenue in Toledo.