A recent phone call from an embattled pastor reminded me of an important point about these strong church laymen who enjoy running the show and running a bluff on pastors: Preacher-eaters can be nice people much of the time.

A layman who gave me the biggest headaches in one church I pastored owned a lovely vacation home in the mountains. On several occasions, my family enjoyed the use of that home. The owner and his wife were the definition of gracious.

It was only when it came to my being the pastor (meaning the sermons I preached, the leadership I tried to exert) that we had conflicts.

The young pastor who called told how the church boss had died not long ago. I said, “The Lord saved you from many a headache.” He agreed, but noted that after the man’s death they saw how many good things he had done for the church, also.

So, it’s not all black and white. This is a complicated issue, and if I made it seem otherwise in my earlier article, an apology is in order.

Case in point.

After a large online ministers’ service picked up that article and forwarded to 100,000 of their subscribers, my mailbox was filled with notes from pastors. Almost all thanked me. Some were in the midst of battles with what we called Sons of Diotrephes (from III John), while other told tales of their struggles with the SODs.

But one man who identified himself as a “pastor-eater” wrote. That letter stood out from all the others.

I’ve not asked for his permission to quote from the letter, so will paraphrase it and print my response. He answered my response, and I’ll tell you what he said. He makes some good points. We’ll call him Doug.

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I remember it like it was last week.

My older brother came home from a meeting all psyched up. He had attended a sales promotional meeting in the days before Amway, Avon, Shaklee, and a host of others had developed that layered-sales-technique into the world class system it became.

Ron must have been 25 years old, and his enthusiasm was understandable. The marketers told of a food supplement that would soon make vegetables and fruits and meats irrelevant. This would take the country by storm. To make sure they were not missing out on nutrients, everyone in America would be buying this product.

But that was not the big attraction.

By signing on early as a partner (or associate or who-knows-what-they-called it back then), you could enlist others who would work under you. You would make a percentage off all their sales. But even more remarkably, every time they lined up people to work under them, you raked in a percentage from their sales, too.

You could get rich in a hurry. (As, no doubt a lot of Amway and Avon partners eventually did. But alas, not all. But that’s another story.)

I recall Ron saying that Hollywood superstar Robert Cummings was a partner in this great undertaking. It had to be all right!

All you had to do was present the sales plan to your friends and family and start signing them up. Everyone was going to be rich beyond their wildest dreams.

There was one little hitch to the plan, as far as this 20-year-old skeptic could see: Sooner or later, someone had to sell the product to the consumer. Success would depend on meeting an actual customer and convincing him or her to purchase the supplement. Without that, it mattered little how many hundreds of underlings one lined up from which to skim off a portion of their earnings.

That early marketing blitz which Ron was so enthusiastic about came to nothing. Within a few weeks, it disappeared from the scene.

I’m tempted to tease my wonderful brother (who reads this blog) with something like: But Ron found another way to get rich quick; he became a preacher. The joke would be funny only to the two of us, however. Ron and I have preached for nearly 100 years altogether, but we’re both a long way away from wealthy. Which is as it should be.

Frequently over these years in the Lord’s work, I’ve seen pastors frustrated because their congregations do not respond to their pulpit pleadings to get into the community with the gospel.

I have an opinion as to why they’re not responding.

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“We’re being silly, aren’t we, Grandpa?”

I fell on the grass I was laughing so hard at that. Out of the mouths of babes!

No pastor or other minister of church leader enjoys being the butt of criticism. No one likes personal attacks, no one is blessed by the murmuring of the masses that undercuts faith, saps energies, and douses enthusiasm.

No leader in any realm–political, academic, religious, commercial–feels affirmed and encouraged by the constant bickering of those he/she is supposed to be leading.

However.

It’s what people do. It’s a human trait. And in the church, pastors, it’s a family tradition.

To bear this out, I suggest you take a quick gander at the constant carping and harassment to which Moses was subject.

Scriptures tells of at least nine incidents where the Israelis tried Moses’ soul with their bellyaching.

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It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

It’s not just that we don’t want dissent in the church when we call for unity. It’s not that we hate division, although we do that.

Unity is far more than the nay-sayers being gagged or rebellion put down. The old joke goes, “You can tie two cats’ tails together and throw them over the clothesline and you’ll have union. But you will not have unity.”

Unity is a positive quality.

When the oaring team refers to perfect moments in their boat, they do not mean the time they won a race. A perfect moment is when they feel all eight oars in the water together, working in perfect harmony.

At such moments, we’re told, the boat seems to lift right out of the water. Oarsmen call this the moment of swing.

In an old Readers Digest article, Olympic oarsman John Biglow says what he likes most about that perfect moment is it allows one to trust the other rowers. A boat does not have “swing,” he says, unless everyone is exerting equal effort, and only because of that was there the possibility of true trust among oarsmen.

We can put it in the form of a formula:

Equal Effort + Synchronization + Lift = Trust.

Now, if we apply this to the body of Christ–a local congregation is usually a lot more than eight people, but regardless of the number–we will see what lessons of harmony and unity it yields.

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“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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