Category Archives: Church Conflict

Some people we have to work at loving

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If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?  The unsaved do that…. But love your enemies and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great…. –Luke 6:32-35

I was a freshman in college, with everything that implies:  I was green, scared, eager, excited, learning, stupid, silly, self-centered, and a hundred other things.

Among the employees on our campus was Mrs. Grigsby.  I can see her to this day: stern, tight-lipped, unfriendly, and unloving. We thought she looked more like a man than a woman. She was all business, never a ‘good morning,’ and generally unpleasant, we all thought.

Among her other duties, Mrs. Grigsby cleaned the hallways and bathrooms of our dormitory.  (Students were expected to keep our own rooms clean. What a joke.)

The guys in our dorm would make nasty jokes about Mrs. Grigsby behind her back.  She was a convenient target and no one spoke up in her defense.  Boys being boys.

One day my girlfriend back home in Alabama told me something unsettling.  “I have a relative who works at the college where you go.”  She had never met her, but was told this by her mother.  A day or two later, she broke the news to me.

“Her name is Grigsby.”

Yikes.  My girlfriend was related to the campus nightmare.

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Preaching courageously in a climate of fear

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God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind.  –2 Timothy 1:7

You therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.  –2 Timothy 2:1

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus…preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. –2 Timothy 4:1-2

“They’re almost to the point of giving me my walking papers.  The animosity from some of our leaders is so thick you could cut it with a butter knife.  What do I do now?  How do I stand in the pulpit and preach? And what should I preach?”

If you’ve never preached the gospel while sitting throughout the congregation were people who hated you, arms folded and brows furrowed, you’ve missed out on one of the great experiences of the Christian life.

If you’ve never feared for your job for nothing more than preaching the whole counsel of God, you’re in a minority, pastor.

Sometimes the ill-will is for nothing you have done or failed to do.  The plotters and schemers have their own reason and their own private agenda.  Sometimes, the problem is you have stepped across an invisible line and intruded into forbidden territory.

You preached against guns when every man and half the women in the congregation were bonafide members of the NRA.  They were aghast.  “How dare you!”

You preached God’s love for all races when the KKK (or their modern successors) were looking around for their next victim. “You crazy, boy?”

You preached tithing to people who had made idols of their money, preached sexual purity to a gang of partyers, preached God’s definition of marriage to a liberal crowd. “Do you know where you are?”

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10 things healthy churches do well

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Write a book on “Why I’m Finished With the Church Forever” and you will make money. Many of us who love the church and have devoted our lives in her service will probably want to hear what you have to say.

Write a book on “Why I Love the Church” and you end up with a garageful of your efforts. Those who already love the church will “amen” you and critics on the outside will mark you off as deluded.

Whether we are a critic or a lover of the church–or for some of us, it’s a little of both–it’s important to be balanced.

Let’s acknowledge that there are both good and bad churches in the world today. Strong and weak. Churches that ought to be cloned and some that should be euthanized.

For a moment, let’s focus on the churches which are healthy and strong, faithful and loving, redemptive and grace-ful.

The good news is some churches in Scripture got it right. The incident in Acts 6:1-7 provides a wonderful illustration of a congregation that faced up to a crisis in a healthy, Christ-honoring way and bore great fruit as a result.

Let’s use that Jerusalem church as an object lesson.

Ten Things Healthy Churches Do Well– particularly when it comes to dealing with problems.

1) They have problems, too.

Any growing body will have its share of aches and pains.

The Jerusalem church had been basking in the sunshine. All was well. God had sent miracles, new believers were arriving daily, and a sense of contentment settled in upon the leadership. Suddenly, from inside the family, a groan went up. Then it swelled into a chorus of complaints.

In the distribution of food for the congregation, the widows received priority. But for some reason, Hebrew widows were getting the lion’s share to the neglect of the Grecian widows. (We’re told that “Hebrew” widows were part of the native population from Palestine, whereas “Greek” or “Hellenistic” widows were Jews from the Disapora, that is, everywhere across the Roman Empire.)

Did someone there say, “Oh no! We have a problem! What are we doing wrong?” Did they panic? Did anyone jump ship because the presence of a problem must indicate they were failing God?

Not that we can tell.

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Heresies inside my church

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“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine….”  “Preach the word….with great patience and instruction” (2 Timothy 4:2,3).

The best way to deal with bad theology in the church is for the pastor to always preach the Word.

Just hang in there, year after year, teaching and preaching God’s unchanging truth.  The changes in your people will come as you remain faithful.

The word “orthodox” means “right thinking.”  Straight shooting. Sound doctrine. Solid reasoning.

We think of heresy as something the bad guys do, the “spiritual gift” of cults, and the aberration of the rebellious. After all, aren’t all heretics nuts? (We interrupt to recommend a book. A half century ago, Walter Nigg wrote “The Heretics” to establish that the great heresies in church history were the work of some pretty smart people with real grievances, and not ‘nuts.’  Reading it was life-changing for me.)

As Walt Kelly’s comic strip ‘possum Pogo once noted, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

There is enough heresy inside the walls of your church to start twelve new cults by breakfast.

In a half-century and more of churchmanship–pastoring, assistant pastoring,and denominational involvement–I have seen these heresies, beggars riding in king’s chariots, as the saying goes….

1) “If you are having trouble in your Christian life, clearly it’s because you are not saved.”

So–you struggle with temptations, with disciplining yourself to a daily time of prayer and the Word, with controlling your temper, and a thousand other things. “Obviously,” someone says, “You have never been saved.”

The solution is for you to “this time, get it right.” So, you go through all those spiritual contortions–praying, seeking, crying, pleading, and performing autopsies on yourself–hoping that “this time it takes.”  You ask the pastor to rebaptize you because “if I was not saved before, it was not real baptism.”

Right thinking–“orthodoxy”–says it would help a great deal if you knew the Word. Christians struggle with temptation, they war against wickedness in high places, they fight a never-ending battle to conform their desires to the mind of Christ.  Anyone teaching otherwise is a deceiver.

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10 lessons I’ve learned about the church, all gained the hard way

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When I began pastoring–that would be 61 years ago, in 1962, I’d just finished college and gotten married–what I did not know was there were 100 things about the church of the Lord Jesus Christ I still had to learn.  What follows is a few of those.  And yes, I’m still learning.

In no particular order….

One. Bigness is overrated.

“It doesn’t matter to the Lord whether He saves by the few or the many” (I Samuel 14:6).

Most pastors, it would appear, have wanted to lead big churches, wanted to grow their church to be huge, or wanted to move to a large church.  Their motives may be pure; judging motives is outside my skill set. But pastoring a big church can be the hardest thing you will ever try, and less satisfying than you would ever expect.  (Now as a very-senior citizen, I find myself admiring and even envying those pastors who put in decades serving churches in small or rural communities.  And I hope they know how well they have things!)

Small bodies can be healthy too; behold the hummingbird or the honeybee.

Trying to get a large church to change its method of operation can be like turning around an ocean liner.  The Lord’s parable about the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32 and Luke 17:6) should forever disabuse us of the lust for bigness.

I groan at the stories of pastors who have manipulated God’s people and lied about numbers in order to create the illusion of bigness.  Forgive us, Father!

Two. Lack of formal education in the preacher is no excuse.

The pastor of the small church often has far less formal training and education than he would like. As a result, he often feels inferior to his colleagues with seminary degrees. I have two thoughts on that…

One.  It’s a mistake.  He can be as smart as they are and more if he applies himself.  Let the Lord’s preachers not be overly impressed by certificates on the wall or titles before their name.

Two.  He can get as much education as he’s willing.  All seminaries have online programs that make seminary education attainable, practical and affordable. So there is no excuse.

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10 signs the church worker has been there too long

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The pastor or church staff member or the chairman of a committee or a church officer has overstayed his/her welcome.

Let’s talk about how to tell.

One church I pastored had a vivid illustration of what happens when a member holds a position so long they begin to “own” it.  Behind the church–same block–sat the synagogue.  Across the street from the synagogue sat the funeral home, owned by one of our deacons. One day this good man told me, “Preacher, we could have bought the land the synagogue is sitting on for a pittance years ago.”

Our growing church needed additional land, which is why we were having this conversation.

He said, “When the house that used to sit on that property came up for sale, the people wanted $30,000 for it. I was willing to raise the money and buy it. I felt we’d be needing that property in the future.”

“The trouble was that Mr. McClanahan, the church treasurer who had held that job for decades, vetoed it. He said that was just too much money for that piece of land and we would not pay it.”

“No one, including the preacher, wanted to stand up to McClanahan, so we let it go.”

“And now,” the deacon said, “We can’t touch that piece of ground for a million dollars.”

He was right in that. I’d asked around discreetly and found that out.

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The “church conflict” question that will get you laughed out of church

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“Why do you not rather suffer wrong?” (I Corinthians 6:7)

A dog can whip a polecat, the saying goes, but it’s not worth it.

Some fights you need to walk away from.

We’ve told here of the time in 2004 when a small group of members of a local Baptist church was taking the pastor and trustees to court over what they perceived as breaches of scripture, ethics, and good sense.  As their new associational leader, I was invited to sit in with them one evening and hear the reasons they were taking such serious action. Toward the end of the evening, the leader said, “So, what do you think?”

I said, “I think you should walk away from this. No one is going to win on this thing except the lawyers. Everything about this is wrong and bad.”

He said quietly, “We can’t. It’s gone too far for that now.”

He was wrong. They could have stopped that train in its tracks by a phone call to the lawyers. In doing so, they would have saved a church from going out of existence (within a year, the church “gave” itself away to another church that would take over its indebtedness), saved themselves and the church a ton of money (both sides hired teams of lawyers from high-priced New Orleans firms), and saved the cause of Christ a lot of bad press (the media jumps all over these things).

It’s never too late to back away from a fight.

It’s just hard. And takes more strength than most people can muster.

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Rethinking divorce: What if we started believing Scripture?

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“And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God” (I Corinthians 6:11).

Many churches have in their bylaws a statement that divorce disqualifies a member from being considered as a pastor or a deacon.

I’m suggesting we need to start believing God’s word and quit making divorce the unpardonable sin.

In the qualifications for deacons (I Timothy 3:8-13), verse 12 says, “Husband of one wife.”  That “one wife” business has been interpreted in a dozen ways–everything from a deacon must be married (no unmarried person, whether single or widowed, can be a deacon), to no divorced person at all (no matter how many years ago and what kind of record of faithfulness you have achieved over the decades), to no one in a polygamous relationship, and so forth.

Likewise, some churches have women deacons because, while verse 11 says “the women also”–traditionally interpreted to mean wives of deacons–no similar statement is given in I Timothy 3:1-7 which gives qualifications for pastors.  If this refers to the deacons’ wives, shouldn’t there be something about pastors’ wives? But there isn’t. So, many have decided verse 11 refers not to wives of deacons, but to women deacons.  (Argue if you wish, but Paul is not here to tell us what he had in mind.)

The point is: Since these verses are not clear, faithful brothers and sisters in Christ interpret them in various ways.

Why then do our churches insist that I Timothy 3:12 prohibits a divorced person from becoming a deacon?

I suggest the answer is found in Matthew 19:9. “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.”  This seems to state very clearly that unless a person has “grounds” for divorce, remarriage amounts to adultery.

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What we wish for the preacher-killers among us

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They asked Andrew Murray the greatest thought that had ever entered his mind.  “My accountability to God,” he said.

My pastor friend Albert was facing a crisis in his church.

Twice the treasurer has threatened to cut my pay if I announce plans to stay on.  He tells everyone that our church cannot afford a pastor.  A couple in the church is spreading gossip about me.  A recent survey of the congregation assessed me and my ministry–which is fine–but the board chairman plans to discuss it at the upcoming annual meeting without clueing me in on the results ahead of time.

Nothing about this bodes well for Albert.   I’ve seen too many of these disasters-in-the-making to be optimistic.  Some people are determined to have their way and run “their” church as they please.

My friend concluded, “Pray for wisdom, shrewdness, strength and peace for my wife and me.”

Ask any pastor.  The stresses from these forces are preacher-killers.

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The preacher said something I disagree with. Horrors!

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“…they received the Word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11).

When I asked where he went to church, the man working on my house said, “I used to go to church across the river.  But the preacher said something I disagreed with.”

It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

But he was serious.

After giving him a moment to elaborate, which he did not do, I said, “Man, I would hope so.”

He seemed interested.

I said, “Wouldn’t it be terrible to have a preacher who said only the things that I know and taught only what I believe? What would be the point of going to hear him if I already knew what he was going to say? There’s so much more to God than what little I already know!”

Lord, make us teachable.

It’s a mark of maturity to welcome correction, to recognize and appreciate constructive insights to make our lives better. The godliest person comes to church hoping to hear something that blesses, something that corrects him, something that inspires her, whether they had previously known it or agreed with it or not. 

A quick scan of Scripture produces a long lineup of people who heard God calling their name, who made themselves available to Him, and then were told something they didn’t want to hear!

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