14. Community, change, conflict, and mission
As living communities, congregations are involved in
change, experience conflict, and find themselves needing to
re-evaluate their mission.
Conflict itself is not always bad, though it
can be seriously destructive. Heresy trials and polarised debates
over ethical issues and leadership carry considerable risk to unity
and mission, but even they can be sources of growth, and an
opportunity to connect at a deeper level with the Christian message
and its values. It is when things go wrong that we really test what
the Gospel means to us. While conflict badly handled can wreck a
congregation or destroy a denomination, it is not necessarily the
antithesis of the sort of unity that leads to growth. People can be
attracted to a church that handles its differences well. Although
conflict management is not an infallible tool, it is a very useful
skill for congregations to be able to draw on. Congregations that
own their differences and connect with a greater goal have a sense
of reality which strengthens their capacity for mission. It is not
just migrant churches such as the Pacific Island Congregations
discussed by Jemaima Tiatia, where it is important to move past
denial and deal with the genuine issues raised by generational
differences. Too many congregations have resolved this problem by
not having more than one generation, or if there is more than one it
is clear whose culture is in control.
In the 1970s church union was a driver for
structural change, which was threatening to many, yet parish
councils in many Presbyterian congregations are a legacy of more
flexible ministry-focussed leadership structures envisaged in the
Plan for Union. Churches like the Uniting Church of Australia are
representative of the pain of change and the unwisdom of doing it
badly, but they also indicate the opportunity for renewal that the
amalgamation of related but distinct Christian traditions brings.
Cooperating Ventures in New Zealand still experience the frustration
of hope where new models were anticipated yet not fully implemented,
and yet the development of local shared ministry in CVs provides
lessons for the wider church on managed change, the affirmation of
the gifts of the whole people of God, and a fresh engagement in
mission that makes better use of available resources.
These are national and regional as well as
local issues. At the start of the 21st century, stimuli for
structural change include cultural and social changes in society,
the tiredness of traditional decision-making models and worship
patterns, and a widely accepted emphasis on the ministry of the
whole people of God.
Many churches are seeking to take this
seriously. In the late 1990s the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand
went through restructuring at a national level while seeking a model
which would serve parishes more effectively. This included adopting
the concepts of "Healthy Congregations" and "Servant Mission
Leadership" as policy goals. Further restructuring is now
contemplated and an ongoing challenge is how to apply this to
presbyteries. The Church of Scotland has adopted a report "Church
without Walls" and is processing the implications of a different
kind of thinking about what it means to be church at local, regional
and national levels.
Nobody likes restructuring, especially when
they are affected by decisions they feel they had little hand in.
The promise of organisational change and its benefits does not
always take seriously failures in human nature which don't change.
Nevertheless where structures are consistent with Christian values
and help people make decisions in ways they respect good structures
make a significant difference to the ability of the church to get on
with its life. If we get it right, and do it well, it can be well
worth doing.
A “Competency Framework” for ministry
training developed by a
policy group of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand included the
category of “Change Agent”.
Except in the sense of calling people to the change of repentance or
a better aligned Christian life, it may surprise us to think of
change management as a desirable skill for parish leadership. Yet in
churches of all theological stripes a source of unnecessary conflict
is change that is managed badly, and whether it is setting up a
sound system and data-projector or reorganising pastoral care in the
parish, leading a community through change is a skill Christian
leaders need to value.
To make the effort worthwhile it is important
to have a sense of what is essential to the identity and
theological and ethical integrity of the church,
and what expressions, behaviour and structures
can responsibly be changed in different circumstances. It
is also important to have some clues about how people can work
together to determine the changes that are appropriate for them.
Effective change is about prayer and about people. It is a spiritual
issue and a practical one. It requires a commitment to hard thinking
and detailed planning, not just bold visions.
Structural change and spiritual renewal can be
related. At a common sense level spiritual renewal would seem to
have little to do with how we organize the church, it only has to do
with people’s relationship with God. Yet theoretically as well as
practically there is much more to it. A bad structure makes life
difficult for the best of people. An appropriate and well-understood
organization may not make people good, but it can make a huge
difference to how effective good people can be. The health of a
congregation, as of a presbytery and the national church is affected
by how we process decisions and allocate responsibilities. Some time
attending to these issues can make a positive difference. Too much
time attending to them can be worse than doing nothing.
There is a mixture of faith and pragmatism
widely at work in the church which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Sometimes in church history it has been more spiritual to pray than
to do anything else to lead people to faith in Christ. Church Growth
theory may have also intensely believed in prayer, but it was
very much about doing things – including changing structures – to
make it more likely that people would respond and grow in Christian
faith. Schemes like Natural Church Development may take some of
their imagery from nature, but are actually carefully designed
structural schemes intended to produce wanted outcomes. We may need
to be careful about structural changes which are described only in
spiritual terms as some of the other important dimensions about what
is going on may be fudged.
Some of us will have experienced the pain of
restructuring in our work place as well as in churches. In any
setting there is need for pastoral care as well as better
communication. We need to provide help for people hurt by change as
well as those who do not understand what is going on, and who
may never get it. Even those sympathetic to change may wonder whether it is all
really necessary and all
for the best. One of the lessons from the history of communism is
that idealistic ends do not justify violent means. Some church
change is implemented with inadequate concern for staff and members,
but it can also be done well.
Where is mission in all of this?
Of course mission itself may be a source of
conflict — for instance, not all would agree with the decisions of
Littlefield Church in the paper by Ronald Stockton in the reader,
even though their faith in facing difficult options and their
determination to live their mission in relation to their actual
context is undeniable. A proposal to do mission differently, or to
do it at all, is a change in the life of a community which needs to
be led and managed if it is to take root in the life of the
congregation.
Sometimes a call to mission is used as a cover for issues of conflict locally which really need to be addressed. The Crusades are a classic and tragic example of an attempt to bury internal division by mounting a militant mission directed at an external threat.
Yet it is possible to grow our mission while we are honest about issues which challenge our identity and sense of community. Some of us feel that the church needs to be more agreed on a range of issues if it is to do mission, others see its diversity as a gift to that mission provided we are honest about what is actually going on.
What this may also tell us is that, wherever the church is facing change, missiology is needed as a servant of the church, but that is another story.