When Parting Isn't Sweet: Help for Conflicted Churches

By Richard Van Doren

When Parting Isn’t Sweet is a “how-to” book for Christian congregations about to experience conflict or are already in the midst of it - how to heal and how to avoid making the same mistakes again. Written in a concise, step-by-step style, punctuated by gospel quotes and references, this 95-page manual deals specifically with the division, pain and distrust caused by ineffective, abusive or misunderstood clergy. The author, an ordained minister, offers unsurpassed experience serving and rebuilding churches reeling from conflict.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Van Doren
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005519575

Richard Van Doren

Richard Van Doren is an ordained minister in a mainline Protestant denomination. He has always been fascinated by the fringe element in American culture and the extreme events that test faith. All of his novels and short stories deal with the collision of spirituality and earthly crises, or the ongoing conflict between the forces of good and evil. He moonlights as a college composition instructor, and every semester he teaches his students the two most important rules of writing: 1) write on a subject about which you know something, and 2) write on a subject about which you feel strongly. Over the years he has read and heard about countless instances of dark invasions into every day, innocent living. Anyone who has ever experienced something very strange, or who believes that we live in a reality that extends far beyond this world of the five senses will find his novels and stories much to their liking. All of these works contain instances that Van Doren has either experienced in his career or was told about by friends, students, parishioners and family.

Book preview

Introduction:

the purpose of the book

As painful as it might be to admit, your church has crossed or is about to cross a line. You are either contemplating or you have already accomplished the removal of your minister from the pulpit. Yours is a fragmented church, full of hurts that are going to take years and very patient leadership to heal. Very possibly the conditions leading up to this conflict took decades, perhaps generations to develop.

All of this is incidental to the task at hand. You are reading this because you want to do at least three things:

1) You want to save your church. Churches that have suffered through a period of intense conflict are far more likely to close than those that have not. The churches most likely to remove a minister are those that have done so already. In other words, your chances of having a conflicted ministry are greatly increased because you’ve already had one. If two consecutive ministries end in conflict, you will officially become a minister eater, meaning you are now on a downward spiral, like a submarine taking water. The deeper you go, the harder it will be to surface. Lay people will leave and warn their neighbors to avoid your church. Experienced and gifted clergy will avoid you without apology.

2) You want to bring peace and heal the rifts. Like any self-help program true healing requires that you acknowledge you have a problem, but a problem that will be reduced only with the help of God. Also, like many self-help programs, every individual involved must make a commitment to change, grow, improve, knowing that there are certain aspects of one’s personality that can surface to do damage if the individual is not vigilant about keeping them suppressed.

For example, alcoholics must admit to themselves and others in their group that they are indeed alcoholics, victims of a disease and capable of doing great harm to themselves and those close to them. Even if they stop drinking, they know they will always be alcoholics and can never ever take a drink again.

Every Christian, whether lay person or clergy, possesses qualities that can lead to sinful behavior and the spiritual injury of others. To avoid chronic conflict, everyone involved will have to examine him or herself and identify those qualities that may have caused injury to the body of Christ. Why? Because

3) You want to avoid making the same mistake(s) again.

The body of Christ, your church, has sustained an injury. In fact, your church may have been injured for longer than you know. One must treat an injury to the church in the same way one treats an injury to the human body. If the injury is serious, you need professional attention. One does not try to set one’s own broken leg, for example. You get a doctor for that. If you try to walk on the leg too soon, you will almost certainly re-break it, or it will never heal properly.

Too many churches believe we can handle this ourselves when they cannot. It takes an experienced professional to help a church realize how bad the injury is and how radical the treatment will need to be for complete healing to take place.

Practical knowledge of this subject matter comes not from interviews or classrooms or reading books. It comes from experience alone. Having followed directly four ministries that ended in conflict, and served in a church where conflict loomed if the situation was not handled perfectly, I am as qualified to write this book as anybody, perhaps more than anybody.

I have also served on congregational care committees where I supervised churches in the throes of unhappy separation and after, and I visited many other churches in similar circumstances as a circuit preacher.

If you have any doubts, please read the last chapter Relevant Personal Information. If you’re reasonably confident that I know what I’m writing about, you might skip that chapter and move on to the nitty gritty, which follows immediately.

In either case, thank you for buying this book. I am certain that, with a tireless devotion to prayer, you will find it extremely helpful.

Ego Is the Enemy

He put before them another parable: The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, 'Master, did you not sow good see in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from? He answered, 'An enemy has done this.' The slaves said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he replied, 'No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'" (Matthew 13:24-30)

Our Lord's parable refers to the Garden of Eden and the fall, or the introduction of sinfulness into the human experience - sin being separation from God (Genesis 3). Adam and Eve were given life in a perfect climate-controlled environment in which all of their needs were met by God's grace. But this was not enough for either of them. Although Eve usually gets an unfair share of the blame, both she and Adam were not satisfied with the bounty God provided. They wanted more; they wanted to be like God, knowing good and evil, having the perception and inclination to judge events in this world - and other human beings.

In other words, they were driven by ego.

The serpent, aka the devil, recognized this flaw and exploited it, tempting Eve and ultimately Adam to disobey God's command not to eat of the tree of knowledge, to impose their own wills over that of God's, in other words. As a result, they became self-conscious for the first time, recognizing they were naked, and all the rest of human sorrow over the eons resulted from this same flaw.

Ego is the enemy—in the form of the weed and the agent which sowed it.

For this reason our Lord Jesus repeatedly commands us to be humble. He who humbles himself will be exalted; he who exalts himself will be humbled. I tell you, unless you humble yourself like a child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. The humility of which Christ speaks was perfectly exemplified on the cross, the willingness to die before unnecessarily harming another human being.

It is this kind of humility to which Christ calls us, the willingness to wash one another's feet, to go the extra mile, to turn the other cheek. This peculiar philosophy distinguishes Christians and our church from all other world religions.

When a church loses sight of it, trouble follows.

For a church to heal, every member must commit him or herself to it.

EGO IS THE ENEMY!

Let those who truly love the Lord their God, his son Jesus and their church be vigilant over the irrepressible determination of this weed. We need to pull it in prayer many times a day, and especially when we endeavor to save our church.

Christ states in no uncertain terms that we will be judged on this issue at harvest time.

Let those who are willing to commit to this peculiar philosophy read on.

Three Mentalities