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Hoosier United Methodist News Archives
| Hoosier United Methodist News |
April 2001 |
Leaders seek alternative ways
to deal with church conflicts
By Rich Peck
United Methodist News Service
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) -- Twenty-six percent of churches are highly conflicted, and one out of every 50 churches are sued each year.
Responding to those statistics, 130 United Methodists involved in the constructive engagement of conflicts in churches and annual conferences met here March 20-22 to sharpen their skills and to learn from one another.
This was the first major event sponsored by a 1-year-old center for mediation and conflict transformation named "JUSTPEACE." The United Methodist General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA) founded the center. After dealing with a host of lawsuits and people who felt they had been betrayed by their church, said GCFA attorney Mary K. Loga. The center was created in order to find a better way to deal with conflict in the church.
Jerry Haas, director of the Academy for Spiritual Formation for the Nashville-based Upper Room, told the group that he had just transferred into the California-Pacific Annual Conference when the regional body called a closed-door meeting in 1977 to discuss the case. "The church missed an opportunity to engage in repentance for giving residents a painfully fraudulent promise on which it could not deliver," Haas said. Pacific Homes ran into financial difficulties primarily because it accepted lump-sum entry fees for lifetime care and the residents outlived mortality projections. One hundred and nine of the 2,000 residents sued the conference for $220 million.
"We haven't been visionary enough," said the Rev. Tom Porter, executive director of the JUSTPEACE Center. After years as a practicing attorney, Porter said he is convinced that the current court system is not the way to resolve conflict.
Keys to conflict resolution
He suggested that any conflict-resolving process must:
- enable participants work out their own resolution to the issues;
- create reconciling relationships; and
- allow participants to listen for understanding, speak the truth in love, use imagination and practice forgiveness.
Porter, a United Methodist clergyman, suggested that neither civil nor church court system accomplish any of these goals, He urged the group to utilize other more productive conflict-resolution techniques.
Porter introduced the sacred circle, a technique that he said was first used by the Navajos:
Gather participants in a circle with a candle or something to remind them of God's presence at the center. A "circle steward" sets the tone of the discussion by raising potential questions, setting guidelines and time limits, and summarizing consensus. A Bible or a "talking piece" is then passed around the circle. When participants hold the Bible, they may speak or they may pass, but no one can speak who is not holding the talking piece. All those in the circle therefore know when they will get an opportunity to speak.
Appreciative inquiry
Another approach, known as "Appreciative Inquiry (AI)," was introduced by Cynthia Sampson, president of Peace Discover Initiatives, a peace-building program based in Arlington, Va.
An author and former editor on foreign affairs for the Christian Science Monitor, Sampson reported that basketball coaches who use film to point out errors by players attain worse results than coaches who show films of the great plays their players made on the court.
To introduce the philosophy behind AI, she quoted psychologist Carl Jung who said problems couldn't be solved but can be outgrown and replaced with new and stronger life urges.
Spiritual discernment
Haas introduced spiritual discernment as a technique that has been used since the 16th century. He offered stepping-stones in the process based on Discerning God's Will Together by Chuck Olsen and Danny Morris:
- frame the question;
- ground the question by setting guiding principles based on the unique gifts of the organization;
- shed, or temporarily suspend, biases or personal prejudices about the issue;
- root the issue in a similar story found in Scripture or tradition;
- listen to all members of the group and provide time for silence;
- explore alternatives;
- improve the suggested alternatives;
- weigh the alternatives to find which one has "the shadow of God's love";
- close or begin again if the group has moved too far away from the original question; and
- rest the issue for a while (overnight if possible) to see what deeper feelings rise to the surface.
Participants suggested that discernment may be used even within Robert's Rules of Order by calling for the group to function as a "committee of the whole" before returning to normal parliamentary procedures.
Rich Peck, a free-lance writer, is a retired employee of the United Methodist Publishing House.