Biblical ignorance, lack of prayer lead to conflict, mediator says_80904

Posted: 8/06/04

Biblical ignorance, lack of prayer lead to conflict, mediator says

By Toby Druin

Editor Emeritus

SAN ANTONIO–Ignorance of what the Bible says about relationships and lack of prayer are common denominators in most church conflicts, said Blake Coffee, a San Antonio attorney who heads a growing ministry to congregations in trouble and those seeking to avoid it.

Coffee is executive director of Christian Unity Ministries, an organization he founded in 1995.

His father, Ken, was a pastor, associational director of missions in San Antonio and associate director of the Baptist General Convention's State Missions Commission before retiring in 1999 and now is associated with his son in Christian Unity Ministries.

Coffee earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Texas Tech University and had a successful litigation and mediation practice with a San Antonio firm when he said he felt led of God to leave it in March 1995.

A couple of years earlier, he had gone through the Experiencing God discipleship study and had become a facilitator for that program.

“It really opened me up for any possibility the Lord had for me,” he said. “It made me sensitive to a call out of the law firm. I left and did not know what I was leaving to. I just knew that I was supposed to leave.”

A phone call from Dick Maples, then director of minister/church relations for the BGCT, help give him direction, he said.

“Dick asked me to come and learn from his experiment in solving church conflicts,” he said. “As an attorney, I had been involved in mediation and had gotten involved in some leadership areas in my own church, First Baptist of San Antonio, which was in pain over a split. So I was learning about unity from the pain in my own church, and it motivated me to want to learn how to bring people together.

“Dick awakened a call within me, and the more I looked at conflicted congregations the more I felt called to address it.”

Since then, he has developed a package of seminars and retreats for churches. They include sessions on unity, leadership and biblical accountability, as well as a retreat to train pastor-search committees and a seminar to help a church examine how it is building spiritually while building physically.

The services are conducted for a love offering except where he is called in on an intervention case and charges a fee. With the ministry up and going, he has joined another San Antonio law firm as a mediator and litigator.

Coffee leads 25 to 30 of his conferences a year, and a team of associates he has developed are leading more. Last year, one of his advisory board members led one of the conferences, “Five Principles of Unity,” in the Ukraine. This October, eight to 10 more will participate in two citywide crusades there.

Everything they do, Coffee said, is designed to help a church achieve the kind of unity Christ intended for it and to help it avoid–or at least minimize–conflict that seems so pervasive, especially among Baptist congregations.

“I probably don't have any better read on it than anyone else who is regularly in a number of congregations,” Coffee said of how many churches are in conflict. “But I would say a good percent are in the middle of conflict or have just come out of it and a good many are getting into it.”

“There are lots of levels of conflict in a church, and there is a level that is healthy,” he added. “People will disagree, and they will discuss it and move on and it is a good thing.

“Where it becomes unhealthy is when communication with each other begins to break down, and the issues go underground and are no longer on the table, out in the open.”

Such breakdowns may be the result of dysfunctional communications patterns of longstanding that have made conflict difficult to manage, he said. They can be caused by abusive pastors or leaders in general.

“But the more common example,” he said, “is where there is conflict, and we don't talk about it, where the church culture frowns on overt conflict and lets it fester. It goes underground and is really unhealthy.”

When he uses the term “conflicted congregation,” Coffee means a level of conflict in a church that has not been dealt with biblically and that involves unresolved pain.

At least one common denominator in most church conflicts, Coffee said, is a church's ignorance of the Bible and what it says about relationships or a decision to ignore what it says about relationships.

“God's word is one big story about reconciliation, not only man to God, but man to man as well,” he said. “Paul's letters are all filled with guidance about how we relate to each other. A foundational Scripture for our ministry has always been Jesus' prayer for unity in John 17:20-23, and for me personally it has been Romans 12:18.”

“The Bible doesn't speak so much to the concept of organizational reconciliation,” he said. “In biblical terms, it's always about individual relationships. Organizational reconciliation is nothing more than multiplied individual reconciliation.

“So reconciliation is an individual thing, and it occurs only if people want to be reconciled. Where we have had failures (in achieving reconciliation), 99 percent of the time it's been where we have gone into situations where individuals don't want to be reconciled. If one person doesn't want it, there won't be any reconciliation.”

The church at large, he said, can do a lot toward building a foundation for reconciliation by creating a culture where reconciliation is expected; where broken relationships are not accepted.

“I think that's what Jesus and Paul mean when they speak of relationships,” he added.

Too often, Coffee said, the church is influenced by the world, and the world is not about reconciliation.

“We live in a world where true, genuine confession and reconciliation and being involved in one another's lives are not part of the culture, which is resistant to seeking help. That pattern makes it difficult for churches, where often so much pain has been inflicted that the road back to congregational good health is a long one.”

The good news, he added, is that more and more churches are recognizing problems early and are seeking help, wanting to address issues while they are healthy.

“If we are in 25 to 30 churches annually, all but a handful are healthy. And most are doing the preventive things to stay that way,” he said. “They are like healthy couples going to marriage enrichment retreats to ensure they stay healthy, and I rejoice in that.”

A key to good congregational health is prayer and improved biblical literacy, Coffee said.

“I don't think we pray enough corporately,” he noted. “We don't have a full appreciation for what prayer is all about. We must not believe it works, and that leaves us vulnerable.

“The problem is not that we don't have prayer meetings; it's that no one comes. Most churches have prayer meetings, but only 2 percent of the active members are there.

Churches must begin to create a culture that values interpersonal relationships, which have suffered in a climate that stresses getting decisions made quickly, getting programming done and simply following a checklist, he said.

“The church has to hold relationships with everyone in the church at high value. We must have accountability. We need a cultural shift where I as a church member feel free to bring a group close enough to hold me accountable in every area of my life.

“When we have that, when we have that woven into the fabric of the church, we will have gone a long way toward resolving conflicts before they can begin.”