A few years ago, I passed through an extremely difficult season of conflict that involved reporting pastoral misconduct at our church. My own part involved trying to help our priest regain trust after we uncovered several instances of dishonesty. I wasn’t prepared for how quickly everything unraveled as we uncovered additional dishonesty, and things got really bad, really fast.
I have a lot of distance from that season of my life and have the benefits of time and healing to help me look back with a more analytical eye.
The writer in me can’t help thinking that I don’t want to have gone through all of that just to get through it. I hope that I can share a few things that will help others as well.
Some of the lessons are simple, if not a bit blunt. For instance, a dishonest, manipulative person in a position of authority gets ONE chance to come clean. After that one chance, do everything you can within the rules of your church to expose the dishonesty and take immediate action.
Others are a bit harder to explain, and the best I can come up with is this idea of each person having a starting point for handling church conflict.
Let’s begin by hoping for the best that each person has a similar way of processing church conflict and reported misconduct.
Starting Point A is where you learn about the misconduct.
Point B is where you consider all of the reasons why it could be happening.
Point C is where you arrive at a conclusion, whether through witnessing additional misconduct or hearing enough evidence from enough people who all corroborate each other.
Point D is where you are ready to take action based on your conclusion.
Now, here is the wild card in arriving at all of these points. Your personal relationships and trust level for each person involved will determine how fast you move from one point to another.
As a person in leadership at our church, I was one of a handful of people who started off at Point A where I learned about the priest’s dishonesty. I processed explanations, gathered evidence, and witnessed more incidents at Point B, arrived at my own conclusions at Point C, and then took action at Point D where we started having meetings to address the dishonesty.
What I didn’t fully grasp is that each person in leadership and then later in the church had to go through the same process I had just gone through. They had to learn about the dishonesty, process the explanations, accumulate evidence, and then come to conclusions as well.
Those who trusted me and knew me personally still had to go through that process, but their time going through it was much shorter than those who knew the priest well and trusted him. It took a lot longer for them to process the possible explanations and come to conclusions.
When I had been at Point D for a long time, ready to take action, it was hard to see some of my closest friends still at Point B, trying to figure out possible explanations for what had happened. Didn’t they believe me?
They did, but they needed to go through the same process I had just gone through. Mind you, they went through it faster because they knew me and trusted me. Yet, they still needed time to accumulate evidence. And once they witnessed more dishonest behavior, they were immediately ready to take action as well.
Looking back, even the people who didn’t believe me and initially concluded that I was a troublemaker came around to conclusions similar to my own. They just needed more time to witness the dishonest behavior. In retrospect, I have a lot more grace and understanding for them.
Of course, church conflict and pastoral misconduct can be quite complicated and painful, so my little diagram of points A to D won’t always apply perfectly. But it does help to see how we tend to process difficult situations and how personal relationships and trust determine how fast we process a difficult situation.
Even if I understood all of that, it probably would have still hurt a lot to go through it all, but I’m certain it would have hurt a good deal less.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
Ed Cyzewski: Author // Contemplative 