Healthy Church Environment

Healthy Church Environment — Guidelines for leaders on conflict resolution

Even in a healthy church environment, conflict is inevitable. As your team continues to dig into significant issues regarding the past and current status of your ministry effectiveness, it's certain that members will approach topics from a variety of vantage points. Healthy dialogue in the face of conflicting viewpoints is key. The questions for you to wrestle with are: What are the value-added benefits of conflict and how is it to be redeemed and resolved when it occurs?

Maintaining a healthy church environment involves dealing with conflict in a direct, mature, and loving way. The problem is most of us in local churches handle conflict poorly, and therefore, consider conflict a threat to relational health and ministry effectiveness. Actually, conflicts can have positive outcomes if they are properly handled. Most of our conflicts share one or more common root causes:

• Communication breakdown. Either we don't communicate enough or we communicate inappropriately.
• Expectations that are too high. We get disappointed when our unexpressed or overly high expectations are not met.
• Lack of relationship building. We don't take the appropriate amount of time to really get to know the other people we are working with, and as a result we make assumptions of others that oftentimes are totally inaccurate.
• Speaking to the wrong person. We tend to vent our frustrations about others to those who will give us a listening ear, all the while side-stepping the biblical approach of dealing directly with our brothers and sisters in Christ who have offended us.
• Inappropriate responses to conflict. We all have a "preferred reaction" to conflict when it arises, most often learned from childhood as we observed the adults around us deal with conflict themselves. We end up choosing either to bully or manipulate our way to victory or we back down in the face of a more powerful and aggressive personality, seeking peace at any price, or we back out and avoid the relationship altogether. Few of us choose the route of resolution of the conflict so that all parties are fully engaged in working through whatever issues land on the table and need to be settled.
• Spiritual and emotional immaturity. We also observed that healthy churches were shifting from program-based to relationship-centered ministry planning; in effect, a deprogramming of the church.
• Use of personal stories. We see the true depth of individuals when conflicts erupt. Often the most strident ones in the process are the most immature. Those who can calmly, rationally, and empathetically seek resolution are the ones who are in essence expressing their depth of maturity, wisdom, and insight.

Healthy Church Environment — Guidelines for leaders on facilitating effective dialogue

In a healthy church environment, the purpose of dialogue is to seek mutual understanding and harmony. In essence, it's the process of building healthy, successful relationships. Dialogue builds community and a common identity of mission and purpose. It breaks down barriers and builds strengths within the team and the broader family.

In a healthy church environment, effective dialogue encourages you to grow in love for one another. That alone is a good enough reason for meaningful engagement in the process. In dialogue everyone coming to the table shares an equal role in the discussion; no grandstanding is allowed! Listening with empathy - willing to walk in another's shoes - is a must. Dialogue also brings out assumptions that otherwise would lie dormant in your church.

In his book The Magic of Dialogue (Simon and Schuster, 1999, pages 129-146), author Daniel Yankelovich describes the ten potholes to avoid in overcoming the challenges of dialogue. They are:

• Holding back - being reluctant to participate



• Being locked into a box - unable to think beyond the status quo
• Prematurely moving to action - the tendency to rush into action
• Listening without hearing - the unwillingness to empathetically understand (or being more concerned with what you are going to say next than hearing what the other is saying)
• Starting at different points - member at different stages of the judgment curve on an issue
• Showboating - showing off how much we know about the subject
• Scoring debate points - listening only to offer a competitive response
• Contrarianism - automatically advancing an opposite opinion to set off fireworks
• Having a pet preoccupation - being obsessed with a single idea or interest
• Aria singing - unable to resist the temptation to advance a special interest, however ill-timed

When effectively acknowledged by the facilitator and recognized by the group, these portholes can be avoided. If allowed to persist, they can kill dialogue quickly. The goal is to set up a system for effective dialogue that cuts through the barriers and achieves tremendous results.

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