Larry Talotta is an active member of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Bethlehem, Pa. He’s been a member there since 1981 and he teaches a Sunday school class. But when the church elders asked him to head up a peacemaking committee, he was uncomfortable.
"It’s something I never really thought about until we had the conflict," Talotta said. "I’m a little more comfortable with it now." The committee has dealt successfully with three conflicts in the past year — none as destructive as the dilemma that motivated the church to do something proactive about conflict.
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Even after a professional conflict resolution organization came in, at great expense to the 125-member congregation, Talotta added, neither consensus nor compromise was to be had. "It was just sad," Talotta recalled. The elders decided to put it to a vote for removal, but the pastor resigned.
Several families also left the church, disillusioned by the conflict, Talotta said. And even those that stayed were hurt by the ordeal. "There really needed to be a lot of healing."
Now, nearly three years after the blow up, Bethlehem Baptist is recovering. The attendance in worship is up and growing after a sharp decline in the wake of the pastor’s resignation. In fact, the church leaders are looking for land in anticipation of growth. And they are expecting something else — conflict.
What Talotta and others at Bethlehem realized through their ordeal with a leadership conflict is that the perfect church is an illusion. "We’re wiser serpents now," Talotta said, "harmless as doves, but you just realize you’re going to have conflict.
"The bottom line is that conflict is the norm and not the exception. Just read Acts and Corinthians. It’s really foolish for a mature Christian to think everything is going to be hunky dory all the time."
It may be foolish, but that is just how many Christians view the church, even Christian leaders, ministers who may not know what conflicts are going on right in front of them or how to deal with them.
The disagreement in the church where Ken Newberger was pastor caught him off guard in just that way. He was neither prepared for conflict nor trained in seminary to deal with it in the church. Most ministers are not. That is unfortunate, Newberger said, because for church leaders the path of conflict is particularly destructive.
"When leaders get involved in conflict, they lose ministry focus. It’s like a Catch-22 when people criticize you. Leaders become uncharacteristically aggressive or depressed so that they don’t make good decisions."
Newberger was in ministry 10 years before a conflict ripped through his church like a hurricane. Even when leaders called in a denominational representative, the two sides were never brought together. "When it was all said and done we were more hurt," he recalled.
But it was through that fiasco that Newberger said his interest in conflict and consulting arose. "The reason I got into this was because it was handled so badly."
Newberger left the ministry to pursue his Ph.D. in one of only two accredited universities in the field of conflict resolution, Nova Southeastern University. He also holds four training certifications in the field and is a member of the Association of Conflict Resolution, the Maryland Council for Dispute Resolution, and the American Association of Christian Counselors.
Newberger trains churches in peacemaking and healing and has developed a system of conflict resolution he calls "The Guardian."
The system was instituted at Bethlehem Baptist so that grievances could be aired without spilling over into the whole body of the church, Talotta said. Peacemakers such as Talotta deal with conflicts that he said usually boil down to style and personality differences.
The Guardian system provides three occasions for church members to resolve their own issues. "It encourages church members to express themselves in constructive ways before little problems become unmanageable ones," Newberger said.
Scott French served as an elder in a Maryland church that eventually split over a conflict between the pastor and the church leadership. He said one cause of the split was that the leadership wan't interested in addressing problems as they arose or in seeking help.
"The pride that comes with feeling that we could solve it on our own doomed our chances for resolving the conflict," French said. "I believe the only way this split could have been avoided was for the leadership to address problems as they arose."
With The Guardian, churches are given a tool to head-off major battles by addressing problems when they are still small. First, they are instructed to go to the person with whom they have a conflict. When it comes to conflict most Christians turn to one particular passage of Scripture to cite the biblical precedent for interpersonal problem solving: Matt. 18:15, "If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you."
Newberger said speaking to the other person in conflict resolves a lot of issues, but when it doesn’t, that’s when churches get stuck. "People become frustrated when the problem is not resolved."
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Ken Newberger, left, is a conflict resolution consultant. He and his wife, Mary, have been married since 1975. |
And the Matthew scripture doesn’t address conflicts that are not necessarily sins.
"Some of the conflicts come because people have different ideas of what should be done in the church," Newberger said.
Talotta said just having a system to deal with those different ideas helps keep the peace at Bethlehem. Offering the congregation someone to whom they can tell their troubles is important.
That is step two, to go to an "informal guardian," or "peacemaker." The position is designed for a volunteer lay person in the church who is trained to resolve issues — and keep things confidential.
Talotta said he listens to people who have a conflict, then prays about it to decide where to send them next. There are three other peacemakers at Bethlehem. "It’s a funnel approach," he explained.
Newberger said the third-party mediation model holds great hope for church conflict because it is based on Christian theology itself.
"The key to resolving a two-sided conflict is to bring in a third party," he said. That is a biblical model of resolution, according to Newberger. Just as people were separated from God because of sin, i.e. two-sided conflict, God sent Jesus as a third-party reconciler, he explained. “Likewise, when individuals follow in Jesus’ steps as peacemakers, we, too, become ‘sons of God’” (Matthew 5:9).
The third occasion to solve a problem in church conflict through The Guardian system comes through a formal mediator, someone from the church that has been trained in conflict resolution, preferably someone in the listening business, such as a counselor.
Only when those three options are exhausted should a church take a problem to the leaders. And only if that doesn’t work would a church need to call in a professional mediator such as Newberger. His work consists primarily of training churches to resolve their conflicts internally.
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A third party is an essential part of conflict resolution. |
Calling for outside help is difficult for churches because of the erroneous theology that casts Christians as perfect, but it is also difficult for leaders because they must admit a sort of failure. Just as sinners must admit their sin and their need for a Savior, pastors must recognize when church conflict is beyond their means to resolve.
"Here’s a little secret," said Newberger. "Leaders have to acknowledge they haven’t been able to manage the conflict to call out for an outside mediator or peacemaker. They have to acknowledge they don’t know what to do. That is difficult; yet that’s essential."
And sooner is better than later in finding help to solve problems, so that conflict can lead to positive changes and relationship building, rather than pain and division.
"When people’s needs are not met they become more fault finding," Newberger said. That spirals into dissatisfaction with the church so that people stop inviting friends, stop supporting the ministry financially or leave.
But Newberger said that if conflicts are handled in a healthy way they can actually lead to better relationships because real conflict reveals more about people than surface agreement.
"If you work through it in a positive way, yes, you’ve gotten to know someone at a deeper level," said Newberger, "because it is in conflict that real intentions, motivations and desires come out. Learning to accept one another at this level is the essence of real fellowship and community."
And conflict that is accepted and expected as part of the makeup of the church can actually be an opportunity to increase the faith of its members. "Part of the peacemaking process at our church is education," said Talotta, "and trying to bring people along to see things so it won’t break faith."
French said that after his church split and people were leaving the church, he saw some who "chucked their Christianity and chucked their marriage. That might have happened anyway," he said, "but who's to say. I'm fearful when I think of Christ's words regarding those who lead others astray."
Some of the families who left Bethlehem Baptist after the pastor resigned because they were disillusioned during the conflict, have returned, Talotta said. A new pastor was recently hired. And the church looks to the future optimistically. Over the last year the peacemaking committee has dealt with three conflicts.
"We’ve met with different successes," said Talotta. One party agreed only to disagree, but Talotta said the system works because it has changed the church's outlook on conflict.
"I think one of the big problems is conflict is under the rug. It's not talked about. It's taboo, because we’re supposed to present this image that everything is wonderful here."
Instead, he said, churches should be prepared for inevitable conflict. "Expect it."
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