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Dealing with Dysfunctional Church Leaders

Posted in Church Conflict, Conflict with Church Antagonists, Please Comment! on May 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »

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!

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Who Are We Trying to Reach?

Posted in Change and Conflict in Church, Church Conflict, Current Church Issues, Please Comment! on May 23, 2011| 2 Comments »

In my mind, the biggest question facing every pastor and church leader is this one:

Who are we trying to reach?

As soon as a pastor answers that question, nearly everything else falls into place – but his problems are only beginning.

For example, if a pastor believes his church should reach men, that will impact his message themes, the kind of music the church offers, the way people dress, and a host of other decisions.

The church my wife and I have attended for the past year targets men.  They believe that if they reach a man, his wife and their children will also come to church.

So the parking lot attendants are all men.  The initial wave of greeters are men.  (The second wave includes women.)

At yesterday’s service, the pastor talked about what happens to partners after they divorce.  The video testimony during his message was given by a man.

The music style at services is primarily rock with a little pop thrown in.  The worship leaders and band members are always men.  There are always two backup vocalists – one on either side of the stage – and they are usually women.  Performance songs are sung equally by both women and men.

The pastor announced that softball leagues are beginning for the summer, and you can either play on a coed team or a men’s team.

The dress at the church is Phoenix-casual.  Many people – including men – wear shorts, some year-round.  In other words, men don’t need to get dressed up to come to church.  (That appeals to a lot of guys who never get dressed up for anything.)

When new men visit the church, they relax when they see other men everywhere.  They start thinking, “Maybe the Christian faith isn’t just for women and children after all.”

However, a lot of pastors are afraid to decide on a target group because they know such a decision is inherent with conflict.  And yet if a church tries to reach everybody, it will eventually reach nobody.  No person – or church – can be all things to all people.

Once a pastor decides on a group to target, should he announce that decision to the congregation?  It might seem like the church is excluding entire groups, especially in this politically-correct world.

So if a pastor announces the church is targeting men, some might say, “Then you obviously aren’t interested in women or children!”  And if a pastor says, “We’re trying to reach young families,” some of the seniors might complain, “Then it’s obvious you don’t care about us.”

It’s a dilemma for pastors: if you do target a particular group, then your ministry has more focus and you enhance your ability to grow – but some people also might feel excluded, which can affect their attendance, giving, and morale.

If a pastor can’t make a decision about this dilemma, then his church won’t grow until he does.

But if the pastor doesn’t handle the target thing just right, it can result in a mass exodus – or his head on a platter.

In my second pastorate, there was a couple in the church who came from the Midwest.  They had Swedish roots, and they attended that church partly because it had a Swedish background.

One Sunday morning, the couple sang an old hymn in Swedish – and they did not sing it well.  Who was their target?  People who knew Swedish.  How many people in our church knew Swedish?  Probably a handful.

I thought to myself, “These Swedish songs have to go.”  I’m not sure I ever told anybody that, but I set up a policy that insured that all song selections had to go through me before they were done in a service.

That went for any songs in French, Japanese, and Navajo, too.

But that didn’t make me popular.  In fact, the couple that sang that hymn became the worst church antagonists I had for years.  (However, they have since been surpassed.)

Then I had to discern who we were going to reach.  I settled on young families.  Why?  Because younger people are more receptive to the gospel than older people.  The older a person gets, the more resistant they become to the gospel.  God’s grace can reach down and touch anyone’s heart, but if a church truly wants to make an impact in their community, they usually target younger families.

Once a pastor and his key leaders make that decision, they need to view the entire ministry through the lens of that group.

And they need to make sure that the music style fits their target audience.

The leaders need to ask themselves, “What kind of music do young families listen to these days?”  While most younger people are pretty eclectic musically, most churches can’t produce a variety of genres at a weekend service.  So the leaders also need to ask, “What kind of music can we offer that will attract those families?”

Once that decision is reached, it may exclude the choir, the organ, and the musical saw.

The “worship wars” were fought in the 1980s as baby boomers gradually began to assume the leadership of Christian churches.  Choirs and pipe organs started to disappear.  They were replaced by guitars and keyboards.  While this trend delighted younger people, it upset many seniors.

And this once again created a real dilemma for pastors.  While seniors are often more generous and consistent in their giving, younger people tend to be more stingy and sporadic.  So if a church changes their musical presentations from a choir to a rock band overnight, that move might offend older people without necessarily attracting younger people – and the seniors might withhold their giving or take it to another church.

This is why a pastor needs to bring all the leaders along together in determining which group a church is going to reach.  Because when the outcry comes – and it will – the pastor will need all the support he can get.

Some of you might remember the musical changes that happened in the ’80s and ’90s:

*The songleader (who waved his arms to the time of the music) was replaced by a worship leader (who played guitar or keyboard).

*The organ and piano (sometimes) were replaced by several guitars, bass, and drums.

*The volume was cranked up a lot (to give the service an event feel).

*The words to the songs were transferred from the hymnbook (which caused everyone to look down when they sang) to a video screen (where everyone had to look up to see the words).

*The worship leader often introduced new songs into a service, which meant fewer hymns were sung.

*While the congregation used to sit while singing some songs, now everyone stood for every song.

*The churches whose music hit the target group grew, sometimes rapidly.  The churches that canonized their musical presentations usually remained stagnant, sometimes going into a death spiral.

(Incidentally, I love many of the old hymns.  I have a “Christian Hymns” Playlist on my iPod that includes 175 songs by artists as diverse as Amy Grant, Johnny Cash, and Michael W. Smith.  If we have a hard day, sometimes we play those songs all night.  Hymns are great as long as they aren’t done in a dirge-like style.)

Once a target group is chosen, the following questions become easier to answer:

*What time will our services start?

*How long will our services go?

*How will we structure our services?

*What kind of events will we offer our church and/or community?

*How will we follow up guests?

*What kind of lighting will we have?

*How will we invite people to receive Jesus?

Choosing a target group simplifies scores of decisions just like these for a pastor.  But the alternative is for a pastor to impose his own personal tastes onto a congregation, which some pastors do.

I love the band U2.  For years, I looked for opportunities to sing a U2 song like “40” or “Yahweh” in a service, but it never happened.  (We did manage to play “Magnificent” between services, however.)  And yet if the worship leaders didn’t like the songs, or the target group didn’t like U2, then we shouldn’t have done their songs just because I liked them.

While it might not have worked in that venue, many worship leaders where we attend now love U2, and their songs are played all the time.  (When I heard “In God’s Country,” I knew I was home.)  Playing U2 songs works at this church – but it doesn’t work everywhere.

Someday, people from every race and tribe and culture will surround Jesus’ throne, singing songs of praise directly to Him.  What a great day that will be!

While every kind of person will enter Christ’s kingdom, no church can reach everyone.  A pastor needs to prayerfully consider the group a church is best positioned to reach and then pursue them vigorously.

I’d love to hear from you.  Who is your church trying to reach?

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A View from the Pew

Posted in Change and Conflict in Church, Current Church Issues, Personal Stories, Please Comment! on May 16, 2011| 2 Comments »

Over the past sixteen months, my wife and I have been visiting various churches in the greater Phoenix area.  For ten of those months, we’ve been attending CCV – Christ’s Church of the Valley – a mega church in the northern Peoria area.  CCV knows what they’re doing and does it all extremely well.  We love everything about the church and try not to compare it to other churches that we visit from time-to-time – but sometimes, it’s hard not to do so.

Since all of my pastoring has been done in small and medium-sized churches, I understand them very well and have a good idea of what they need to do to reach the next level.  As Rick Warren is fond of saying, it’s harder for a church to go from 100 to 300 in attendance than it is for that same church to go from 1,000 to 3,000.

Let me share with you five ways that a smaller or medium-sized church can make some simple improvements that will help them reach more people for Jesus.  This is not intended as an exhaustive list but just some things I’ve been noticing recently:

First, station greeters outside from the parking area into the worship center.  Kim and I visited a medium-sized church yesterday and no one said anything to us until a woman gave us our bulletin at the door.  Then after we sat down, the pastor’s wife came and said hi to us.  But we would have felt much more comfortable with a greeting and a handshake before we got to the door.  Even though I’ve been a pastor for eons, I still feel nervous walking up to a new church for the first time.  Strategically-placed greeters help alleviate that anxiety more quickly, and a host of good things happen with guests once they relax.  CCV does this expertly.  We’re greeted by five or six people before we even get to the lobby.

However, these greeters need to just say “hi” or “it’s a great day” or “welcome to our church” rather than do any prying.  Whenever people ask our names, they love to say, “Oh, Jim and Kim!  That rhymes!”  A staff member at a church recently went on-and-on asking Kim about herself and he was practically hyper-ventilating in the process.  “It’s SO GOOD to have you today.  We hope you’ll come back and see us again SOON!”  We couldn’t leave that guy fast enough.

Second, do whatever it takes to have outstanding music.  If I were starting a church, the first person I would hire would be a worship director who could attract people who could sing and play well.  We live in the American Idol age where everybody expects great music and everybody thinks like a critic.  If the music isn’t good, people cringe.  If it is, they relax and might sing.  From what I’ve been noticing, the better the music is, the more the people in the congregation sing.

I realize that there will be days when the music director is gone and the quality of the music will suffer.  But this just argues for the importance of having a deep bench.  At CCV, they rotate the worship leaders, the band members, and the vocalists and spread them all over the stage – but they always have at least two guitars.  Kim and I recently visited a church where the band used a keyboard, drums, and a bass guitar but didn’t have any guitars – and I cringed all through the worship time.

Third, the service can run between 60 and 75 minutes but not too much longer.  If a church is trying to reach Christians, then a service can go on for hours.  But if you’re trying to reach unbelievers, 60 minutes is best, and 75 minutes is as long as you can go if the service is good.

The last two churches that we visited had services that both went 90 minutes.  Again, that’s fine for the people who go there, but if a church wants to grow, it needs to tighten up the service, especially the transitions.  At CCV, every service lasts exactly one hour and you’re left wanting more.

Fourth, avoid mentioning the denomination during the service.  We live in a post-denominational age where people care much more about the quality of the local church they attend and far less about the affiliations that church has with headquarters.  At a service we recently attended, several of the announcements specifically mentioned denominational doings.  Because we aren’t a part of that denomination, the references made us feel like outsiders.

I have a theory: the better a church is doing, the less it mentions its demonination, and the worse its doing, the more it mentions it.  (Or the worse a denomination is doing, the more it asks its constituent churches to promote it.)  Think about it.

Finally, tell us what the Bible means.  Decades ago, I learned this little truth: there is one accurate interpretation of a biblical passage, but scores of personal applications.  One interpretation, many applications.  When the Holy Spirit inspired the authors of Scripture, He did so with a single intent in mind.  John 3:16 doesn’t mean whatever you want it to mean.  It means whatever John – as inspired by the Spirit – meant it to mean.  When I study a passage, it’s not my job to impose my own views on it (called eisegesis) but to take out of the passage what is actually there (called exegesis).

Let me give you an example.  In Revelation 3:20, Jesus spoke these familiar words: “Here I am!  I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”  Who is Jesus talking to in context?  Many people believe that Jesus is encouraging unbelievers to open the door of their lives and let Him be their Lord and Savior.  But Jesus is speaking to “those whom I love” and those whom “I rebuke and discipline” (verse 19) instead.  In other words, Jesus is talking here to believers, not unbelievers – and specificially to believers who have shut Him out of their lives.

We can’t twist Scripture into saying what we want it to say.  It’s our job to discern and discover what the Spirit meant by a passage and only then to apply it to our lives.

Why bring this up?  Because we’re living in a day where too many preachers are coming up with their own thoughts and then scouring the Bible for support.  And in the process, we’re getting borderline heresies and novel teachings that make the teacher famous but cause God’s people to starve spiritually.

The first four ideas above are just my ideas.  Feel free to disagree with them.  Better yet, prove me wrong.  But the last idea is non-negotiable.  Surrender that idea and we’re going to have syncretistic Christianity – and we’re already headed in that direction because many pastors only preach what’s culturally acceptable so they can stay popular.

That’s why Jeremiah is my favorite prophet.  He told the Lord, “Ah, Sovereign Lord, I do not know how to speak.  I am only a child.”  The Lord replied, “Do not say, ‘I am only a child.’  You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you.  Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you.”  After touching Jeremiah’s mouth, the Lord told him, “Now, I have put my words in your mouth.  See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”

Talk about an impossible assignment!  It’s far easier to build and to plant than it is to uproot and tear down.  But Jeremiah was faithful, and he got a book in the Bible for his trouble.

And that’s where I’m headed right now – to Jeremiah 32.  This is “A View from the Pew” signing off.

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Neutralizing the Church Police

Posted in Church Conflict, Church Health and Conflict, Conflict with Church Antagonists, Fighting Evil, Personal Stories, Please Comment! on December 29, 2010| 3 Comments »

It’s quite a challenge to be a youth pastor in any era, but it was particularly difficult in the late 1970’s.  I served in a church that was about ten miles from Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, and many of our people were drawn to the verse-by-verse teaching of Pastor Chuck Smith as well as the praise choruses emanating from that body.  (Contemporary Christian music originated at Calvary.)  Some people would attend the Sunday morning service at our church but then sneak over to Calvary for the evening service – and then they would come back to our church and want it to be like Calvary, which it was never going to be.

Our church had a piano, an organ, and a choir (with robes), but Calvary had guitars at several of their evening services during the week and rock bands at their Saturday night concerts.  It wasn’t long before that influence crept into our youth group, a development I welcomed.  We sang a lot of praise songs – with acoustic guitar accompaniment – but that was as far as we could go.

Until one day, a young man in the church decided to put on a youth musical written by John Fischer.  The musical required drums.

One Saturday afternoon, before or after practice (I forget), as the youth were banging on drums and other instruments in the worship center, two retired men walked into the sanctuary and threw everyone out.  These men especially expressed their disdain for drums.  (Hadn’t they read Psalm 150?  Guess not.)

I liked these men personally and always counted them as friends and supporters.  But without warning, they assigned themselves the unofficial role of church police.

Suddenly, they were wreaking havoc everywhere they went.  They would drive by the church at different hours of the day.  If the pastor’s car was missing from its customary space, they assumed he was at home napping or watching television.  If my car was missing, they assumed I was out goofing around someplace.  The pastor preferred being away from the church building because he liked to visit people in hospitals and their homes.  Because I was attending seminary in the mornings, I didn’t arrive at the church until 10:30 am, but even then, my ministry wasn’t confined to the church campus.

Before long, the church police began making all kinds of wild accusations, mostly against the pastor.  They believed that because they didn’t see his car parked outside his office all the time, he wasn’t working hard enough for them.  They successfully began to find allies who agreed with them.  A man walked up to me after a Sunday evening service and told me that if the pastor didn’t start working harder, ten percent of the church was going to leave.

I loved my pastor and tried to do everything I could to defend him against the attacks that were building against him.  I went to the governing board and pleaded with them to stand behind their pastor, but they chose to do nothing.  Frustrated, I then took a friend with me and we visited the most powerful layman in the church, but only because we knew he supported the pastor whole-heartedly.  As we recounted the onslaughts against our pastor, we tried to protect the identity of the troublemakers, but this wise man told us, “Gentlemen, when Paul talked about those who caused him trouble in his ministry, he used names.  Who are these people you’re talking about?”  Reluctantly, we told him.

As far as I could tell, no action was ever taken against the Destructive Duo.

Then one day, when the pastor was on vacation, I received a phone call.  One of the two “church policemen” dropped dead of a heart attack.  He was in the process of moving to another state when he collapsed and immediately expired.  Since I was the only other pastor on staff, I went to this man’s home to console his shocked widow.  His funeral was held a few days later, and I’ll never forget it, because our pastor had to come home from vacation to conduct the service – and he wasn’t very happy about it.

After that pastor retired, another pastor came to the church.  After a short while, he was tired of the antics of the second retired guy who complained about everything.  After several warnings, this pastor told the complainer to leave the church campus and never come back.  It didn’t matter that his wife was a sweet woman, or that they had friends in the church, or that they had been there longer than the pastor.  The pastor had had enough, and since nobody was willing to take any action concerning the griper, he took matters into his own hands – and it worked.  The church was able to get on with its mission because an internal dissenter had left.

Hear me loud and clear: when people cause trouble in a church – whether they are charter members or have many friends or are politically connected – they need to be informally or officially confronted and warned to stop their complaining, because complaining has a way of growing into church cancer.  If they won’t stop, then there are at least four possible scenarios:

First, their complaints spread while more people take up their cause.  This is a recipe for a church splinter, split, or coup.  Believe me, you do not want this to happen.

Second, their complaints spread and eventually focus on the pastor, who becomes the scapegoat for all that is wrong in the church.  These kinds of complaints can easily lead to the pastor’s forced exit and throw the church into chaos.

Third, the official leaders of the church gain some God-given courage and confront the complainers, telling them that they have three choices: (a) come to a board meeting and lay all your complaints out there, (b) then stop the complaining altogether and let the board handle matters, or (c) leave the church without taking anyone with you.  Unfortunately, many boards back down at this point because some of the complainers are their friends, and after all, they reason, it’s easier to get a new pastor than it is new friends.

Finally, God strikes somebody dead.  “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:26).

One of the constant themes of this blog is that the people of the church – not just the pastors and the governing board – have the power to stop troublemakers dead in their tracks.  Complainers are only permitted to operate because the people of the church listen to their gripes or look the other way even when they are aware that divisive actions are happening all around them.

If you attend a church and know that certain people are engaged in divisive activities, what could you do about it?  I’d love to hear your responses.

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Railroaded at Church Meetings

Posted in Church Conflict, Church Health and Conflict, Please Comment!, tagged , , on December 17, 2010| 2 Comments »

Last month, our country held its mid-term elections.  Imagine that you went into the voting booth having no idea who was running for office until you got there.  (If I still lived in California, I’d exclaim, “Oh, no, Jerry Brown is running again?”)  Many of us become familiar with those who are running for major offices, although we still don’t know anything about more than half the names on the ballot.  But how wise would it be for officials to unveil the names of political candidates only on the day of voting?

And yet that’s how thousands of churches choose leaders every year.

When I was in my late teens, I was asked one year to count ballots for the annual business meeting at my church.  95 people cast their ballots for elder, and one man received 20 “no” votes.  Because the candidates only needed to receive a simple majority, he was still elected to office, but shortly afterward, he resigned due to sexual misconduct.  I wonder how many of those 20 people knew something about this man’s life that the rest of us didn’t?  Maybe if some of those people had known ahead of time that his name was being considered for elder, they could have shared what they knew with the pastor or church staff and his name could have been quietly withdrawn.

For years, I attended public church meetings (whether they were called “business” meetings or “congregational” meetings) in which candidates/issues were presented to the church and then the church was expected to take a vote immediately.  This process often raised the anxiety level for people because some of them simply were not ready to make a quick decision.  They wanted time to think, pray, and talk to others before casting their vote.  When they were not given that opportunity, they sometimes claimed they were being “railroaded.”

That’s why I like the process of selecting elders that our church has.  Last Sunday, three potential elders came and stood on the  stage with their wives.  The pastor briefly introduced each person and then referred to their biographies, which were made available on an insert in the program.  Then the pastor said that we had a month to give feedback about these men and we were told how to do that.  Only after the one-month feedback time would these men become elders.

Those who know me know that I am very deliberate when it comes to decision-making.  The more crucial the issue, the longer it takes me to decide, but once I do, I don’t look back.  Whether it’s voting for the President of the United States or an elder in my local church, I take my vote very seriously.  And from the time a candidate’s name is introduced to me, I need time to think, to pray, and if need be, to speak with others.

When a church introduces candidates in a public meeting, and then expects God’s people to vote immediately on those individuals for office, people are denied the ability to think.  They are denied the ability to pray.  They are denied the ability to speak with others.  In a word, they are being manipulated.  Some people may vote “no” on some of the candidates just because they inherently sense this even if they can’t put it into words.  They feel violated.

Why do churches do this?  Sometimes it’s because the leaders figure that people will only come out to one meeting, if that, so that have to take all their votes at once.  Sometimes it’s because the leaders don’t know who is running for office until right before the meeting!  But usually, it’s because of anxiety.  The leaders just want to get the “voting thing” over with.

But if believers aren’t allowed to think, pray, and talk with others, why vote at all?  Then the members end up becoming “sheeple,” just doing whatever their leaders tell them to do.

Is there a better way to handle such meetings?  I believe there is.  That will be the topic of my next blog.

Check out our website at www.restoringkingdombuilders.org  You’ll find Jim’s story, recommended resources on conflict, and a forum where you can ask questions about conflict situations in your church.

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