  For the Church to regain its witness to the world, renewal must start with us, the pastors, and we must again believe anew that the good news is that our God raises the dead – even dead pastors. Alfred Poirier, author of ThePeacemaking Pastor and pastor ofRocky Mountain Community Church in Billings, Mont. |
Do American churches have a problem with conflict? A recent study by Hartford Institute for Religious Research concluded, “Here in the United States, conflict is a synonym for congregation.” The same study stated that “75 percent of congregations reported some level of conflict in the past five years.”
The devastating impact of unresolved conflict not only takes a toll on churches, but on pastors. Did you know that in North American churches:
- 23 percent of all current pastors in the United States have been fired or forced to resign at some time in their career?
- 34 percent of all pastors currently serve in congregations that forced the previous pastor to resign?
- 1,500 pastors leave their assignments every month in the United States because of unresolved conflict, burnout, or moral failure?
In fact, the leading reason pastors involuntarily leave pastoral ministry altogether is conflict.
What about you? Are you one of these statistics? Are you limping in your ministry because of unresolved conflict? Has constant conflict in your ministry or church dampened or diminished your own zeal for the Lord and love for his Church? Do you know someone who has left the ministry completely because they were forced out or just had enough of Christians bickering?
I do. John, the appliance repairman, was in my home one day fixing our washing machine. As I talked with him, I found out that he had gone to one of the best evangelical seminaries, grounded in the Bible, the original languages, and theology. He had pastored for about 10 years. But now he was fixing my washing machine.
“Why did you leave?” I asked. “What happened?” John replied, “After dealing with people and their conflicts, I came to realize that you can fix appliances, but you can’t fix people.” John entered the ministry trained to be a pastor. He left because he was not trained as a peacemaker.
I tell this story about John because I myself have many times felt tempted to flee the pastorate for a more peaceable vocation because like John I hate conflict.
Why I stayed in the pastorate was due to a renewing of God’s grace in my own heart, a renewal of my calling, which along the way had morphed into something less like Christ.
One of the reasons I wrote The Peacemaking Pastor was to encourage fellow pastors to recover anew the glory of God’s calling to the ministry of reconciliation – to be peacemakers. And one important reason is our witness to the world.
Our witness to the world
Jesus said that the world would know we are the adopted sons of God not by our prayer life, our mission programs, the size of our congregations, or our scholarly ability in understanding his Word, but by living our lives as his peacemakers. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” (Matt 5:9)
Yet that is the very thing the world sees little of when it looks at us and our churches. Instead of finding makers of peace, the church looks more like a bunch of breakers of peace. Not sons of God, but fighting street orphans contending for our rights and wants.
No wonder the world isn’t convinced of our “good news.”
No wonder the world has its own proverbs about Christ’s church: “The problem with Jesus is that he had disciples” (Bertrand Russell).
What, then, must we do?
Good news for desperate pastors
For the Church to regain its witness to the world, renewal must start with us, the pastors, and we must again believe anew that the Good News is that our God raises the dead – even dead pastors.
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Hearing the Gospel anew is the only thing that will renew us and compel us to be ambassadors of reconciliation. Alfred Poirier |
And how might we be dead? We pastors are dead in our unbelief. And conflict exposes our unbelief as nothing else can. In conflict, our unbelief manifest itself in manifold ways: unbelieving despair, anger, hatred, discontentment, complaining, envying of other pastors, criticizing, gossiping, and blaming others. The list goes on. Yet we will never be the pastors Christ has called us to be if we do not return to him who is the lover of our souls. As I write in my book, The Peacemaking Pastor:
“Instead of fleeing the world, Jesus Christ embraces us sinners, us rebels, in all our filth, wavering, double-mindedness, hesitating, duplicity, lies, thefts, adulteries, and idolatries. He rescues us from them all! He steps down into our pit rather than just shouting from on top. He steps down, picks us up, and carries us out. He cleans us off and dresses us anew. He never lets us go. This is the Christ who has come in the flesh! The Scriptures are replete with the record of his humanity, of his suffering. He hungered, thirsted, and grew weary. He wept, sweat, and agonized in his suffering. He was crucified, died, and was buried. And he settled conflicts. He reconciled us to God and us with one another.”
As Paul taught us, God’s power is made perfect in our weakness. So too, only when we cry out in our weakness as peacemakers will we see anew God’s power to reshape us in the likeness of his Son – the Peacemaker.
Hearing the Gospel anew is the only thing that will renew us and compel us to be ambassadors of reconciliation. The Apostle Paul himself makes this very point in his second letter to the Corinthians when he says, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.” (2 Cor. 5:18b-20)
Amen!
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