Restoring Kingdom Builders

My professors never said anything about this issue when I was in seminary.  Over the years, I only recall reading one article on the topic.  And yet it’s one of the biggest sources of conflict in any church – especially for pastors.

What should a pastor do when a church leader is highly dysfunctional?

We all have our dysfunctions, don’t we?  There are areas in our lives that just don’t work.  It could be that we experienced trauma in our childhood or pain in our recent past, and we’re just not very good at handling certain issues.

Many years ago, a church I led hired a contractor to do some remodeling for us.  The contractor turned out to be a crook.  The board had to hire a lawyer.  It got nasty.

For months after that experience, if I sensed that anyone was even remotely cheating me out of money, I became very upset – even if it was just a store clerk handing me the wrong amount of change.  It took a while for me to heal, but I eventually did.  During that time period, I was dysfunctional in that one area of my life, but that didn’t mean I was unhealthy overall.

However, some people never heal from their hurts, and they in turn have a habit of hurting others.

So granted that “we all have our issues,”  how should a pastor handle a dysfunctional leader?  Notice that I didn’t say anything about a dysfunctional attendee (because everyone needs to feel safe in a church).

Instead, I’m talking about people who cannot communicate properly, have consistent problems with authority, engage in highly inappropriate behavior, and seem blind to the way others respond to them.  In a word, dysfunctional people are unpredictable.

And many of them are experts at maneuvering their way into leadership positions.

Dysfunctional people have a way of making their entire ministry dysfunctional.  Rather than advancing the cause of Christ, they cause such consternation that their overall impact damages others.

Let me give you an example.  I once supervised a staff member who could not write a coherent sentence.  This person would submit a newsletter article to me but it was such a mess I couldn’t publish it.  Someone had to rewrite it for publication, and since I served as editor, the responsibility fell to me.

For a while, I asked the staff member to do the rewriting, but his second attempts were usually no better than his first ones.  So I rewrote his article, gave it to him, asked if he wanted to change anything, and then submitted it for publication.  While this system tied me in knots, it was the best we could do at the time.

But after a while, he started to become upset with me.  Since he didn’t see anything wrong with his articles, he thought I was being way too critical – but we could not publish something that made him, his ministry, and the church look bad.

While I really liked this person, he carried that same attitude over into his ministry.  He was going to do what he desired and no one – not even his supervisor, the pastor – had the right to dictate otherwise.  Yet what was normal for him was abnormal to others.

Should I have let him remain in leadership?  While I wanted to think about his well-being, I also needed to think about all those people that he was adversely affecting.

Since I have always tended to give staff members more chances than they deserve, I let him stay until he resigned.

In another situation, I served with a woman who had a bleeding heart.  She was very intelligent but always gravitated toward wounded people.  If I yelled out to our leaders, “Let’s take the next hill for Jesus!” I’d focus on making the hill while she would stop and help the first casualty.  It’s safe to say she had the gift of mercy.

Remember when the OJ verdict came down?  It happened on a Wednesday morning.  That night, at our midweek Bible study, I made a passing comment about the verdict.  Most people were tracking with me, but this woman said, “But why did you think he was guilty when his own mother believed in him?”

After the service, this woman trapped me in the church kitchen and ranted at me for at least ten minutes.  Whatever hostility she had bottled up inside of her came pouring out.  I thought pots and pans were next.

Here’s where this gets tricky.  What was the real reason that she came unglued?

It may have been that she saw her husband or her father or her boss in me, and because she couldn’t tell them how she really felt, she unloaded on me.  Pastors are usually perceived to be safe people who won’t hurt back.

But she led an important ministry in the church.  A lot of people looked up to her.  Should I have let her stay in leadership?

She later apologized.  I forgave her.  We both moved on.  And she stayed at the church and continued in leadership.  But it wasn’t an easy call.  It never is.

Let me share a few thoughts about pastors and dysfunctional leaders:

First, sometimes a pastor inherits dysfunctional leaders from his predecessor.  Whether it’s a staff member, a board member, or a ministry team leader, a new pastor usually comes to a church with many leadership positions already filled.  Since the previous pastor chose them, these leaders sometimes feel entitled.  As time goes by, the pastor tries to determine which leaders are healthy (and effective) and which are not.  The healthy ones get to stay.  The unhealthy ones either need to be marginalized or removed – or else that entire area of ministry could go up in smoke.

Second, the pastor needs wisdom to do this well.  For example, he can wait for the ministry to go into decline and then die.  He can then bury it, wait a while, and restart it with a new leader.  Or he can offer the leader another position in the church (usually one where they can’t cause much damage).  Or he can call the leader into his office (possibly with a witness) and gently but firmly remove the person from office.  But if he does this:

Third, the pastor may face a backlash.  The dysfunctional leader probably won’t understand what the pastor is saying.  He or she may interpret the pastor’s words as personal rejection.  Then they’ll contact their friends and begin to lambast the pastor (proving his judgement right).  While every pastor wants peace in the church, allowing dysfunctional individuals to remain in leadership can ultimately lead to church wars.

I’ve had this happen so many times.  After you make your decision, you know what’s coming.  The former leader and their friends may form an unofficial coalition and mount a counterattack against the pastor, or withhold their giving, or leave the church altogether, encouraging others to join them.

If the pastor can just wait it out, the whole situation usually blows over in a couple of months.  But as these scenarios become more difficult over time, a pastor may stop making the hard calls and allow unhealthy leaders to remain – but he’ll have more problems down the road if he does.

Fourth, some people will applaud the pastor for his courage.  Many years ago, I needed to remove someone from leadership who had only been there a few months.  By doing this, I was admitting that I had made a mistake in choosing this person in the first place, but it was evident they just weren’t working out.  After I made the decision, a top leader came and asked, “What took you so long?”  It quickly dawned on me that other leaders were seeing what I was seeing and were just waiting for me to eliminate the dysfunction – and when I did, they gained new respect for my leadership.

Finally, it’s better to have no one than the wrong leader.  For the church’s first 18 years, Don Cousins served as Bill Hybels’ right-hand man at Willow Creek Church.  As the church grew into the thousands, the leadership team could not find the right person to lead their Jr. High ministry.  While they searched, many families left the church and went elsewhere, but this did not sway the leaders.  They were determined to wait until they found the right person for the job.  They believed that if they acted out of anxiety and placed the wrong person in that position, then (a) kids and families would leave anyway, (b) it would take up to a year to remove the person, (c) then they’d lose people who liked the Jr. High leader, (d) it would cost them a severance package, and (e) they’d have to engage in the whole search process over again.

In the end, they waited two years to find the right person, but it was worth it.

After a whole night in prayer, even Jesus chose a leader who didn’t work out: Judas.  If our infallible Savior selected a leader who was unhealthy, we can expect it will happen to pastors as well from time-to-time.

What are your thoughts on this issue?  I’d love to hear them!