Managing Conflict in the Church

by David W. Kale, Mel McCullough

A music minister resigns from his church because several board members threaten to have him removed if he doesn’t return to a traditional worship style. Several people stop tithing in protest when their church decides to spend money on a new gym rather than a new fellowship hall. As a church starts a second service to accommodate their growing congregation, thirty members leave because they want to start a new building project instead. The consequences of unresolved conflict in the church are disastrous. A small argument can grow into a tug-of-war that rips the church apart. From personality conflicts to power politics, the causes of discord in the church are as diverse as the people involved in them. But you can handle the variety of conflicts that you encounter daily if you have a fundamental understanding of the nature of conflict. Managing Conflict in the Church will help you recognize the roots of conflict, develop communication skills to manage conflict, and even learn to transform conflict from an affliction to an asset.

152 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2003

Reviews

[Shaun Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is well-researched and packed with information that is sometimes cited from other authors in the Church Conflict circles. Kale and McCullough make an attempt to provide reenactments of real-life church conflicts to illustrate the substantives but often fall short of the believability factor that Dan Allender, for example, is a master of. Sometimes, the stories drag on for way too long; a dose of brevity would be much welcomed. Each chapter closes with a short story in a segment titled "from the pastor's desk" that is similarly unimpressive. One such uninspiring example would be Chapter 8's mentioning of Charles Swindoll's irritation with an unruly cow that led him to threaten to sell her to a Presbyterian who could strike her (he as a Quaker apparently could not) but then it did not lead well into the substantive thereafter.

The content is relatively insightful, although the book's formatting made it lose some lustre in terms of readability. Much can also be improved with regards to how engaging the material is - avoiding walls after walls of text by providing quotation blocks of notable concepts and by adding pictures/comics. Overall the book is so-so - it has some sparks of great content but other times the material is clearly off the mark. For readers who would like to learn more about manging church conflict, I'd instead recommend the excellent If You Bite & Devour One Another: Biblical Principles for Handling Conflict by Alexander Strauch (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

[Luís Branco · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is built on a survey made with several pastors about their experiences managing conflicts. The survey provided the author some significant basis to identify the focus of different problems and how they were addressed positively or negatively. From these experiences, the author also developed some kind of orientation for people dealing with similar situations in their organization.

This is a delightful book to read, I mean, it gets our attention easily because it has many stories of different people. I like the story and each story has new things to help the reader to learn and apply the ideas of managing conflicts.

The stories related to churches were the ones that capture more my interest since I am a resident pastor myself. I liked the statement: “There does not have two members having a private battle that does not involve the church as a whole. The impact may be small members, but everyone is affected. ”

The book encourages us to identify the conflict as soon as possible and to cope with it. Ignore the conflicts and led it to find a solution by itself may not help much. Therefore, leaders need to develop skills to deal with each situation in particular.