Church Conflict

Q: Through the years we've attended a handful of churches. Inevitably, each of them seems to hit periods of turbulence. I mean, there are nasty political situations in the church. People get wounded. Some get mad and leave. You keep thinking you'll find another church where they don't have the conflict or the drama. But then it happens again. Is it me? Am I a magnet for conflict? What is it about churches that make so many of them dysfunctional?

A: The real problem is simply that the churches are full of sinners who are in desperate need of a Savior. They're broken, flawed people with incomplete and impure thinking. This may be one of the most misunderstood truths in all of Christianity. People look at the problems in a church and conclude that they mean something about the authenticity or legitimacy of that church. They don't. They simply mean that the church is human.

If you set out to find the perfect church, I daresay you would never find it. For even if it looks perfect now, you're not seeing everything and/or it won't look that way for long. Everyone in a church must yield to a higher authority than mankind. It's the only way that everything can be made right. The fact is that not many churches or church leaders, including lay leaders, recognize that conflict is inevitable and therefore must be dealt with.

Churches, leaders and even the lay people in them need to acquire a "black belt in conflict." Seriously, because conflict is so natural to our flawed nature, we can only honor God when we learn to deal with it successfully. And for what it's worth, we honor God most when we walk through the conflict instead of around it.

I teach a course on conflict resolution. The Bible is chock full of advice and tools to help us deal with conflict successfully.

Resolving Conflict

Q: Is there a Biblical framework for solving conflict? I mean when we get into an argument with someone, how do we solve it? Is there some principle in the Bible that would work in any situation?

A: Yes, there is. Read chapters 5, 6, & 7 in the book of Matthew. It's Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and contains a variety of principles for healthy living. People are human and flawed. So we have the inherent drift toward conflict with each other. The only way to avoid or resolve that conflict is to focus on points of agreement instead of points of disagreement.

If my wife and I cannot agree on which sofa to purchase, let's back away from the sofa shopping exercise and look for some point of agreement above the sofa. Maybe it's the style of the room, the level of comfort we want, or the amount and type of entertaining that we'd like to do. Or if we can't agree on how many children we want, let's back away from that conversation and talk about why we want children, what kind of family we think we'd like to have, etc.

If you look for them, there will always be something that you can agree on that will be higher in priority than the point you're disagreeing on. So when you run into a disagreement, stop and go back to one of those points of agreement. From there, you'll find the compromise or the resolution to the conflict.