In addition to the North American Christian Convention featured recently on this site, Louisville, Ky., hosts another major meeting when the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) gathers there next week.

With growth in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination leveling off in recent years, President Johnny Hunt has called for a Great Commission Resurgence to spark growth. Some SBC leaders have advocated streamlining denominational bureaucracies.

However, another topic to be discussed at the SBC Pastors’ Conference June 22—a day prior to the start of the convention—has significance for church leaders from all backgrounds.

At the pastors’ conference, prominent SBC Pastor Tom Elliff will share his story of reconciliation with his father. After 43 years of marriage, then 65-year-old J.T. Elliff left his wife for another woman.

For more than two years, father and son had virtually no contact. The shock waves reverberated across the convention—J.T. Elliff had been a longtime pastor and director of missions of an association of Baptist churches in Oklahoma.

Then, through a series of events, including a phone call from J.T. Elliff that awakened Tom’s mother from a coma, God healed the family’s relationships. Later, the elder Elliff sought forgiveness from the association and the churches he pastored.

"As a pastor, I feel we don’t handle broken relationships very well," said conference president Ed Litton, who invited Elliff to speak. "I don’t know many groups who do.

"But the Lord said that if we don’t forgive others, our Father in heaven won’t forgive us either. One reason we don’t see more people coming to Christ in our churches may be that unforgiveness is blocking the movement of God’s Spirit."

(Elliff’s book about the situation, "The Red Feather," isn’t available on Amazon, but you can find a radio program about it.)

Litton’s words are worth heeding. When the world looks to the Church for clues of how it should act, hostility, backbiting and tales of revenge blemish its witness.

For every family in a church that resolves serious differences, there is likely another that leaves the dispute unresolved.

For a moving story of reconciliation on a much larger scale, check out "Reconcilable Differences" in the June issue of Christianity Today. The story details the ongoing efforts to bridge the gulf between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes after the brutal 1994 genocide that left about a million people dead.

Denominational leaders and pastors played a role in the carnage, including a priest who ordered his sanctuary bulldozed while 2,000 Tutsis sought refuge inside.

Yet in the aftermath of this devastation, peace-making is moving forward. It is happening on a personal level, such as the woman who lost 29 family members and has forgiven the longtime neighbor who killed 6 of them.

It also is occurring on a larger scale through grassroots reconciliation workshops, where killers and victims’ families confront each other to start the healing. Prison Fellowship Rwanda estimates 60,000 prisoners have confessed their crimes and 12,000 victims have openly forgiven their offenders.

Though there is a long way to go, the Church in Rwanda is playing an integral role in this movement. It stands as a vivid example to other Christians around the world. Reconciliation is a challenging, emotionally-painful task. Yet, not only did God tell us to forgive one another, the world is dying to see that in action.