“Whew! Glad that’s over with!”

I’d just come out of a situation that had threatened to undo all the good we’d accomplished in five years of pastoral ministry in that church. At no time had I feared for my job, and I had not seriously anticipated anyone leaving the church. But still, the existence of division within the membership was a matter of great concern. It boded ill for new ministries we planned to do in the near future.

Something about conflict sucks all the air out of the room. It stifles creativity, dampens the joy, weakens the enthusiasm of your best workers, and absorbs all the energies of leaders trying to deal with it. Like the Arizona forest fires, once these infernos build up their own momentum, nothing seems to quench them. So, once you see the smoke rising, you rush to the conflagration and try to put it out before it spreads.

Now it was out. The problem was resolved.

The storm clouds had dissolved, the sun was out, the birds were singing. And the preacher–me–would live to serve another day.

No healthy-minded spiritual leader loves conflict. However, no God-called pastor with an ounce of faith runs from one, either.

The best way to deal with conflict is to head it off before it starts. And the best way to do that is to fortify your people in peaceful times on how to recognize a conflict-in-the-making and neutralize it.

Train them right and you’ll prevent most battles before they get a chance to take root.

Here is my blueprint for preparing your people to stop conflict in its tracks.

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I remember it like it was last week.

It was the mid-1970s and we were living in Columbus, Mississippi, where I’d gone to pastor First Baptist Church. A seminary professor who had taught some of us (“us” being myself and several area pastors) was in town for a few days, bringing a series of Bible studies in a local church. On Monday morning, we had gathered in my church and were sitting around drinking coffee and visiting.

The professor told us that Dr. Landrum Leavell had just been announced as the new president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He was currently pastoring First Baptist Church of Wichita Falls, Texas. I knew him slightly, having met him a couple of times when in the company of his son Lan, whom I taught in Sunday School in Jackson, Mississippi, when Lan was in college.

It seemed like a good choice to me.

The professor had his reservations.

One comment he made about Dr. Leavell lingers to this day: “I was in seminary with Landrum. We go a long way back. With that great shock of white hair and that imposing presence of his, the rest of us have to put twice as much content into our preaching to get half the hearing he receives.”

Catty? Unkind? Maybe. But we’ll cut him a little slack and say it was an off-the-cuff remark the way most of us sometimes talk with friends and assume we will not be quoted.

So, why do I recall that comment to this day? Because it completely misses the mark.

What the professor failed to realize is that Landrum Leavell had one more quality that went a long way to account for his popularity as a preacher and his desirability as a seminary president: He was so cotton-picking likeable.

I can see him smiling down from Heaven at that.

Dr. Leavell met you and learned your name and remembered you. If he believed in you–and for reasons known only to the Heavenly Father, he seems to have believed in me–then you had an advocate of serious dimensions and influence.

He loved people and they adored him. He was a straight shooter who would tell you what he thought, and you still liked him, even if you disagreed. It’s a rare quality to be highly desired.

Elsewhere on this website, we have posted something like 71 articles on the subject of leadership. I’ve not checked it lately, and have not perused the shelves of books on leadership from the guru himself, John Maxwell, but I’m going to venture that this is the one quality no one mentions as making a whale of a difference for those who go forth to lead: “likeability.”

Jesus had it, in spades.

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I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this quote. I read it online as the report from a television station in a Southern city. A large, new, huge church in that city had made the news because the previous Sunday its leaders had asked a woman to leave the church and take her severely handicapped child with her.

The child, according to the article, had made noises during the service. The kind of noises one might expect a handicapped child to make.

“We’re not set up for handicapped people,” she was told.

The crowning statement came from–according to the article–a staff member who said, “Our church is not about ministry. We’re about worship.”

Pardon me while I throw up.

Where in the sam hill, I want to know, did someone come up with the idea that it’s possible for disciples of Jesus Christ to pick and choose the portions of the Gospel they will abide by?

Where did churches get the idea they may choose to emphasize evangelism or ministry or worship or Bible study or doctrine to the exclusion of all the others?

At what point did we decide it’s all right to subdivide the gospel?

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In the Lord’s work as in anything else in life, there are essentials and non-essentials. There are the loadbearing features and cosmetic for-appearance-only aspects.

If we don’t know which is which, we’re in big trouble.

In the late 16th century, the mayor of Windsor engaged architect Christopher Wren to design and oversee the building of a town hall. When it was completed, the mayor refused to pay the bill, insisting that it needed more than the few columns Wren had designed. No matter that it was pointed out to him that the columns were holding up the building just fine. He wanted more columns and would not pay until they were installed.

Christopher Wren had several more columns added to the building. Each was identical to the first ones he had installed, with one exception. Each lacked one inch going all the way to the ceiling.

Some of those columns were load-bearing and others were cosmetic.

It’s a wise church leader who knows which is which in the Lord’s work.

Here is my list of “six load-bearers,” six essentials which we must get right in the Lord’s work or it’s all over.

Please let me point out up front, these are not arranged in the order of priority. This is to ward off letters I sometimes get from debaters and arguers that B is more important than A, that C should be higher. I suggest, somewhat impishly, that he should have read the article more fully, because I said in the body that there was no particular order, that they are listed as they occurred to me. Anyone who writes learns quickly that some people prefer to skip the reading of the material in order to get on with criticizing it.

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Recently, in an article on this website, I cautioned young assistant pastors on a snare lying in their path (i.e., certain church members puffing them up into believing that they are superior to the pastor and ought to have his job). In telling my own story from several decades back, I expressed gratitude that I had not become the senior pastor for several reasons. Chief among them was the extremely strong laymen who exercised great influence in that church, and who would have “chewed me up and spat me out.”

Nothing that follows is meant to imply that I have all wisdom on this subject. Far from it. I carry scars from encounters with some of those men. Not men from that church in my previous article, but from their clones with whom I did battle in two subsequent churches.

The Apostle John wrote to a friend whom he called “beloved Gaius” in the little epistle we call III John. The key issue is a church boss who was exercising tyrannical control over the congregation. John says, “I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to have the preeminence among them, does not receive us. Therefore, if I come, I will call to mind his deeds which he does, prating against us with malicious words. And not content with that, he himself does not receive the brethren, and forbids those who wish to, putting them out of the church.” (III John 9-10)

They’ve always been with us, these self-important self-appointed church rulers who reign as big frogs in small ponds and get their thrills from dominating God-sent ministers.

Who are they?

They are almost always men. I’ve never seen a woman try to control the church and the preachers the way some men do. Perhaps you have. Human nature being what it is, doubtless there are female Diotrephes out there. Thankfully, they are rare.

Where do they come from?

Ah, there is the rub.

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I was 30 years old and had left my first post-seminary pastorate to join the staff of the largest church in the state. My title was “Minister of Evangelism,” although some of my closest buddies kept pronouncing it as “Vandalism.”

Once in a while, the pastor let me preach in his absence. It was a heady experience.

The church I had just left ran slightly over 200 in attendance. The new congregation was over seven times that size, and was peopled with an entirely different kind of human beings. The governor was a deacon, a previous governor sat on the front pew, the state denominational leadership could be found throughout the sanctuary, and television cameras beamed the live broadcast across the state.

The first time I preached in the pastor’s absence he had come down with a cold and called me the night before. “Be ready to preach,” he said. “Just in case.” The next morning, his wife called. “You’ve got it.”

That day, a dozen people joined the church.

Leaders told the preacher, “From now on, when you see you’re going to be out of town, there’s no need to bring in guest preachers. Joe can handle it.”

And that’s when it began to happen. That snare that traps all assistant pastors at one time or the other began to be set for me.

One day, I found myself sitting in the office of the editor of our state denominational weekly. He was encouraging me. He liked my kind of preaching. My sermons, he assured me, were more biblical than the pastor’s. More meatier, more edifying.

I floated out of his office thinking I must be one of the best preachers in the state if that veteran leader thought so.

Not good. Not good at all.

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