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Persevere: When crisis comes to the church – Part 5

Conventional wisdom for church crisis to be to replace the entire staff and start fresh. I strongly disagree. This is a huge mistake. The congregation already feels betrayed. They don’t also need to feel abandoned.

Staff members willing to do the hard, messy work are in a unique position to walk with the congregation through this valley. Many in the congregation will recognize you’ve been hurt too, creating a bond of shared experience. You are perceived as having a level of understanding that those coming after you will not have. Staying with the congregation also shows a level of investment, and can go a long way toward restoring trust.

When crisis comes to the church there will be pain. People will be angry and will sometimes direct it at you. People will leave. But you, the associate or other staff member, are in a unique position to be an agent of healing. Do not run away from that responsibility. Stick it out. Run the race. Finish the course.

Get ready to work hard: When crisis comes to the church – Part 4

Rather than several wounded members, you are now ministering to an entire congregation of the hurting. You will need to be on your game. Here are several helpful things you can do:

Sharpen your listening skills. According to those who have been through church leadership crises, all kinds of “stuff” will surface throughout the congregation. Your pastoral counseling skills will be put to the test during this time. Get ready. Be prepared every day to listen intently to hurting people.

Old wounds that have nothing to do with the crisis at hand will surface. New hurts have a way of reminding us of old wounds. People may come to you to talk about situations from childhood, the newspaper, previous churches, families of origin, bad marriages, and many other old hurts that resurface as people grieve. A financial offense might bring someone to the place of again struggling with the time their childhood pastor had an affair and was forced to leave. The pastor not fighting to defend herself, might bring up memories of a member’s mother who allowed his father to walk all over her.

There is an elephant in the room, and he is hiding in every worship service, every meeting, every dinner, every time two or more are gathered. Pain of which you were previously unaware will begin to be expressed. Listen intently to the pain. Some connections will make sense. Some will not. It doesn’t matter. All the pain is real – no matter how recent or how old. Listen and help the person sharing work through it with you.

Give others room to grieve – As you know from every funeral you have ever been part of, people grieve differently. They move at different paces. Give them room to work their process. It is tempting to try to “help” them move from bargaining to anger, but you know it will only frustrate the other. Listen a lot. Talk little. Don’t share your feelings, even when asked. They are probably not ready to hear where you are. Don’t be disingenuous or patronizing. Simply steer the conversation back to the feelings of the other.

At some point you are going to be done, or at least think you are. “Enough!” you will want to shout down the halls of the education wing, during worship, or in the midst of a meeting. Despite the strong pull in that direction, but you cannot proceed that way.

Back in step one, before the rest of the congregation was even aware there was a problem, you became intentional about your process. You started dealing with your feelings of grief – the anger, frustration, sadness, guilt, etc., weeks before the rest. You are long past denial, even maybe through anger, and moving on to healing, but the congregation is behind you. You will be facing people in all stages of grief – sadness, anger (often misdirected toward you or someone else),  bargaining, frustration, and more. Don’t try to speed their process along. Slow down. Come alongside them. You are still needed.

Have awkward conversations – Working through the crisis, you will become comfortable feeling uncomfortable. There will be plenty of awkward conversations, and if you are like me, you will want to avoid each of them. From the conversation with the staff member when you are wondering about their behavior, to the conversation with the committee where you advocate for disclosure, to the chat in the office with the one who is so very hurt that we are “doing this to our pastor,” to the one who shares with you a story of another time they were betrayed. Suck it up, take a deep breath, and go. Trust the guidance of the spirit to help you through this.

Dealing with the offender: When crisis comes to the church – Part 3

People are watching you. Working in the church, you have probably been aware of that for some time, but now it is even more acute. Your congregation is looking for normalcy and stability in the midst of an unsettling time. Be aware that you are setting an example on a whole host of issues, including how to feel and act toward the “offender.” That lead pastor who was asked to leave because there was money missing, the youth pastor accused of using church equipment to access porn, that children’s director on leave of absence because of inappropriate disciplining of the children in her care was once your coworker, friend, and/or boss. Others are conflicted about how to relate to this person who used to be their pastor or leader. You have an opportunity to set the tone.

This is not an easy task. You must offer grace without accepting the behavior. Those two ideas need to be kept in tension.

1. Don’t protect the “offender” – That may sound crazy, but when you are in this situation, it is often our instinctual response. You know the “offender.” You know he or she is not a bad person. You can name dozens of things she has done in the church throughout her career. You may have admired him as he mentored you in ministry. Part of you will want to come to the defense of the offender on some level.

Let me put this plainly: DON’T DO IT for at least two reasons. First, your defense will appear to trivialize the hurt of members of your congregation. Do not be matter of fact about the infraction, try to explain it, or remind the congregation of the positive things he/she has done. There will be time for remembering positives, but that comes much later, not in the midst of the crisis.

Congregants have been hurt and need to work through their pain. It is counterproductive to do anything to hinder that growth toward healing.

Second, the offender is not your responsibility. The congregation is. As a staff member to a congregation in crisis, your primary duty is to advocate for the health of the body and each of its members. As stated in yesterday’s post, be as transparent as possible, even in the face of pressure from the congregation or denominational leaders to sweep the crisis under the rug. Yes, some actions may hurt the “offender,” but your primary concern must be the health of the congregation. Your job is to do what is best for them.

One of the mantras I have heard from those who have been through church crisis is simply this – “short-term intense pain that leads to healing is preferable to chronic dull pain.” Think of it like surgery. Surgery hurts, and there is a quite a bit of recovery time but eventually the patient regains strength, mobility, and full functioning. Healing comes. When surgery is refused, the intense pain is avoided, but the wound festers and a lifetime of dull pain may ensue. At no point in this process can you be afraid of the pain of surgery and rehabilitation. Stay focused on being an agent of healing for the congregation.

2. Don’t attack the “offender” – At the same time, don’t go overboard the other way. Be pastoral when speaking of the one who has caused all of this pain.

If you have followed this plan, you are dealing with your anger, frustration, and/or guilt with a counselor, colleague, or in another appropriate way. Don’t let your feelings surface inappropriately. Stay in control. Stay pastoral.

As a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, you are a purveyor of grace. You have sin in your life for which you have been, and will be, forgiven. Every member of your congregation also knows of sin in their lives. Name that from time to time. The “offender” is a sinner under the grace of God also. Do not lose sight of that.

As Edwin Friedman teaches, diagnosing someone as the problem (or the one with the problem), does not fix anything. Instead, it can make things worse. You and the congregation can get so focused on the “offender” as the diagnosed patient that you can place all the ills of the congregation upon their shoulders. This is unhealthy as it will allow the congregation to skip the step of transparency and putting policies in place to keep the offense from reoccurring.

Walk the line of grace, and focus on the flock.

Be transparent: When crisis comes to the church – Part 2

When crisis comes to the church you serve the congregation’s trust has been breached, leading many to distrust the entire staff: What did you know? Were you part of it? Did you help cover something up? And less specific to the case at hand, things like: If one leader can do this to me, whose to say others won’t? See, you can’t trust anyone in the church? These are understandable defensive responses from people who have been wounded by one in authority. To regain trust there are at least two things you can help make happen.

The first you can do immediately: become more transparent. Make every effort to keep the congregation informed about everything – the crisis and how it is proceeding, other church business, even minor stuff you would have never thought to talk about before. The culture of secrecy has to end.

More than likely secrets allowed the crisis to occur on some level. Do all that you can to show everyone that secrets will no longer be tolerated. Tell the congregation everything the leadership is doing every step of the way. Bring both the decisions and the processes through which decisions were made out into the light. Make every process of church leadership as transparent as possible right away.

In one case, an associate was told by her denominational leaders not inform the congregation of the specifics of why their pastor was relieved of his position. While that associate could not talk about specifics, she decided to be as transparent as possible. While she needed to keep confidence, she could say that she could not say. Congregation members understood and respected that amount of disclosure. It showed care for them, and integrity on her part.

The second step is for further down the road, but you can lay the groundwork for immediately: advocate for policies to keep the crisis from happening again. Bring before your church board proposed changes to how you count money, how visitations are done, how counseling occurs – whatever needs to change. Be mindful of areas of vulnerability and offer creative solutions.

Be diligent in protecting the congregation from a recurrence of a breach. Remember, your goal is to work for the health of the congregation going forward. One crisis can make all involved aware of many other areas of negligence. Work to close those holes.

Acknowledge your pain: When crisis comes to the church – Part 1

One of the grim realities of church is its leaders are human. Ordination and consecration do not change us from sinful, broken human beings. This means lead pastors and fellow staff members will sometimes make sinful choices that affect them, their families, their congregations, and others. Some will leave ministry, some will retire under a cloud of suspicion, some will go through a church trial, and others through a civil one. I pray you will never experience such a situation, but many will – not because of their action, but because of the actions of someone else on the staff.

Everything inside of you is going to tell you to run away, ignore the crisis, hope and pray it will simply go away. Churches, and entire denominations, have used this approach, attempting to avoid the embarrassment of exposure, they try to sweep it under the rug.

Despite the adage, time does not heal all wounds. Experts in these matters tell us dysfunction in some congregations can be traced back to a crisis occurring as much as 100 years before (from a conversation with one such expert). Because the people tried to run from the infraction, secrets have become the norm and the system has remained unhealthy. To keep a congregation from getting stuck in bad patterns, leaders need to take the difficult route of working through the crisis rather than avoiding it.

As a staff member, you are in a key position to help move the congregation to a place of renewed health and strength. Don’t shirk that responsibility. You are there for a reason. Allow yourself to be used as an agent of healing.

In the next several posts I will share strategies to assist you in that role.

Acknowledge your pain – Do not skip this step or save it for later. Start here. Acknowledge your own feelings first. Unhealthy leaders are ineffective, so the best thing you can do for a hurting congregation is prepare yourself to lead by taking care of yourself.

You are not the victim, but that does not mean that you have not been adversely affected by the actions of the other. You have been betrayed, lied to, deceived. Your trust has been broken, your ideals compromised, your assumptions challenged. You may struggle with guilt over having missed clues, that now, in hindsight, seem patently obvious. You may have a history, either with a similar failing of another leader or with a general distrust of leadership. All of this can weigh heavily upon you.

This crisis, caused by someone else, will also cause you to enter a frustrating time. Your ministry will be on hold for a season while the crisis demands large portions of your time and attention. You will be asked to keep confidence, or might not want to share what you know with anyone involved in the church, even your spouse. This can be a heavy burden. You may wonder if you are seen as guilty by association, accused of covering things up, or just sense a general distrust that was not there previously. There are hundreds of reactions you may feel. Some will seem rational, others will not.

Don’t keep your feelings to yourself. Don’t ignore them. Don’t wallow in them. Deal with them. Unload to a counselor.  Call your health insurance provider and ask what counseling is covered, then take advantage of it. Find a colleague with whom you can vent. Seek out appropriate means of addressing your wounds. Take care of yourself so that you may be an agent of healing for others.

You may not be THE victim of the infraction, but you are A victim – one of many who suffer from the collateral damage. Church crises hurt every member of the congregation, including the staff. Acknowledge your pain and address it appropriately.