Friday, September 9, 2011

Conflict is the Price of Growth

In my prep for this Sunday's morning service, I came across an interesting blurb by Mark Driscoll in his book entitled "Vintage Church."  It's definitely something I need to ponder, especially as it seems that Grace Community has seen some decent growth this past year.  He writes:

"When a church grows, it changes, and that change causes conflict.  Importantly, conflict is not always a bad thing in a church.  Conflict, if handled in love and humility according to the principles of Scripture, can and should be the impetus for a more mature church that is more unified than ever.  By way of analogy, every married couple knows that there is inevitably conflict in any loving relationship.  The question is, "Not will we ever have conflict?", but rather, "How will we deal with our conflict?"  Having been with my high school sweetheart for many years, I can attest to the fact that learning to work through our conflict has allowed us not to fear conflict but to use it as an occasion to build our loving unity by God's grace, and the same is true for my eleven years of service in our church.

"The price of your church growing so that more people are worshiping Jesus is conflict.  I am convinced that many churches refuse to grow, even building theological justifications for not growing, because they are afraid of conflict, which means that rather than worshiping Christ, they are worshiping comfort.  Simply, the desire to grow in numbers and maturity requires change, and change causes conflict.  Therefore, growing churches are the ones that are prone to experience the greatest seasons of division, as the following process illustrates:

     1. Growth causes change.
     2. Change causes complexity.
     3. Complexity causes chaos.
     4. Chaos causes concern.
     5. Concern causes conflict.

"This conflict comes in eight different forms.  With each form, a person or a faction of people want something that they perceive they lost due to a change.  They fight to preserve what they lost and in so doing oppose change.  Their efforts focus on gaining or regaining one of eight forms of church currency that they value."

Driscoll goes on to list that these eight currencies, which I am simply going to list, are:

     1. Power
     2. Remuneration/compensation
     3. Preference
     4. Information - newcomers have access to the same things veterans have 'earned' during the years
     5. Visibility - when gifted newcomers become visibly prominent, this often threatens the veterans
     6. Personal energy - more people requires more leadership and service
     7. Pace - veterans constantly pull the emergency brake because they fear loss of control
     8. Control

Driscoll concludes by saying:

"For a church to grow it must accept the pain that accompanies change.  Because we want more people to worship Jesus as God, we must be willing to accept the inevitable conflict that change brings.  Such change can be perceived by some as a loss of power, remuneration, preference, information, visibility, role, sustainable pacing, or control.  Or, it can be viewed as an opportunity to share those things with others for the sake of Jesus' gospel and his church."

Since this is already a lengthy blog post, I will save my theological musings for later posts.  Feel free to leave your comments, as I value them.  I am in agreement with Driscoll here, and so if he is out to lunch, then so am I. 

Jesus promised to build His church, not make it comfortable (something that actually kills it, well at least according to most of the NT letters).  May we pray that His kingdom come, not that our comfort remain.

In Christ, and for the sake of His supreme glory to the ends of the earth,
Pastor Ryan

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