Ralph Moore, the original Hope Chapel guy, has seen tons of churches planted. He says in his book, Starting a New Church, "A new church can be a magnet that attracts disgruntled Christians who have a history of conflict in other churches. My observations over the years tell me that more new churches fold from an inability to confront disruptive people than from any other cause." (p. 37)
MORE THAN ANY OTHER CAUSE OF CHURCHES FOLDING--wow that's serious.
So, how do we train our people to deal with conflict? How do we train them to confront the disruptive among us?
My husband is thinking of developing a curriculum for training church planters. Has anyone run across a source for a class on this topic?
Also, an admonition to those of you training church planting teams--don't leave this important instruction out of your "curriculum"--however formal or informal it may be.
1 comment:
Good point. My input would be to model before others dealing with conflict. How they see us dealing with personality problems will greatly affect how those we are training deal with them as well.
In our own work we have conflicts between people in nearly every church. Conflict seems to go with the territory. When things get really bad they usually give me a call to come help moderate. This is by no means anything close to my specialty, but I have learned that "saving face" is very important in Latin culture. If anyone loses face, they will leave and there will be permanent damage. We also try to get to the root issues and not be distracted with the superficial complaints. Once we understand the heart of the conflict it is easier to deal with and we can confront the issue rather than the person.
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