Someone says to you: “As I’m sure you can see, I have an enormous wart on my nose—I just ask you to be polite and not stare at it” What’s the very next thing you do?
Conflict is the wart on the nose of the bride of Christ. People want to pretend it is not there, but everybody can’t help staring at it. Churches, after all, are supposed to be models of redemption, reconciliation, holiness, integrity. The bride is supposed to be beautiful.
But the reason the church is called the bride of Christ is not because it is beautiful, but because it is loved.
Here is a biblical truth we all must cling to: the holiness of the church does not rise and fall on the holiness of its members or its leaders, but the holiness of its God and the holiness of the calling it has received from God. And because we are called to the high purposes of God for the Whole Church, on our better days we behave more holy.
Conflict is costly. So the obvious solution is to decide not to have conflict in the church, right?
Congregations are smarter than that, and so should be church leaders. Conflict is inevitable as long as we are human. The question becomes how to deal constructively with conflict, and how to lessen the frequency of conflict. Keeping conflict contained is also important. Conflict between leaders is not the same thing as conflict in the congregation. To use an analogy, husbands and wives who get into spats are not wise when they decide to spread the conflict to the children. The central parties involved in a conflict are the ones responsible to deal with it.
Conflict may fragment a church, but a church can be fragmented even without conflict (and then that becomes the seedbed of conflict rather than specific problems). The classic form of it is party spirit–and it is a scourge of the church today because we have a consumer mentality more than ever before. Party spirit has always been there. Just read 1 Corinthians 1:12: “One person says: ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ.'” Sound familiar? I like this preacher rather than that one; I like the last youth minister better; I want only the kind of music I like; I want things to be just like that church across town. I want. I want. I want. Here is the problem: focussing on what we want rather than asking, “what does God want?”
Here is an irony. If your church has a broad enough vision to value the Whole Church, then you will invite in and attract people from a diversity of economic, social, ethnic, racial, political, theological, and spiritual backgrounds. If your church is centered on the core essentials of the gospel, and if you avoid hobby horses and fads and social limitations, then you will have diversity in the congregation. Here is the irony, the more diversity you have in a church, the greater the possibility for factions and party spirit.
Whole Church is at the same time both an unattainable goal, but also the only goal worth striving toward.
So we try our best, week after week, to do the right thing. The way we get through is knowing that Christ loves us, warts and all.
[Excerpt from Whole Church: Leading from Fragmentation to Engagement, Leadership Network/Jossey-Bass. CLICK]