By Greg Yee, Superintendent, PacNWC
I am beginning the official process of my 360-review this fall that comes at the end of each 4-year term for superintendents. I’m just starting to write my personal reflection portion now. As I’ve been looking back on the last 41 months, I am filled with joy and gratitude for the journey God has had us on. In a world full of so much brokenness, I stand with enduring hope. I see your faces. I know your stories. We struggle together. It truly has been a beautiful journey.
When people ask me what the most difficult thing about conference ministry is, I usually answer quickly. It’s hardest when leaders are in conflict or when factions grow in churches. Though as The Reconciled we should be professional reconcilers, the church can’t escape the human condition. Conflict is natural and normal and we shouldn’t be surprised by it. For those of you who have gone through church vitality work and have a relational covenant, you are familiar with this. Yet, the work continues to be challenging, especially so it seems, in these days.
I love the maxim “there is no insight until you are onsite.” I’ve shared this often but I feel like I need to say it again and look at in in the light of conflict’s ongoing presence.
Our warm days and cool nights have been epic. Yet, they have been a disconnecting backdrop when so much is stirring around us. Amidst all of the unexpected that has been contained in this year, what I have been praying for the most has been an anti-divisive heart-set for us.
It is shocking how ignorant and misdirected we can all be because we make judgements from so far away. We have the dangerous habit of creating whole realities before we invest time in understanding.
We don’t acknowledge our own filters or biases and quickly write people off. We are conditioned to listen for key phrases or telling behaviors and immediately turn and walk away. Too often we invest in listening only to those that share our same beliefs and we settle for a spiritual laziness in understanding others. That’s the “other” and “I am not them!”
I believe we do this interpersonally as well. We too often use expedient and non-personal ways like text or email to attempt important conversations when we should be talking face to face – or at least voice to voice. Like Adam and Eve hiding from God in the Garden, deeply rooted in the very beginnings of the birth of our sin nature, we have been avoiding each other.
It, unfortunately, is a predictable pattern – yes in our churches (where the the Holy Spirit-empowered, God-infused expert ambassadors of reconciliation can be found) – that we too often make assumptions and react too quickly to people, without first having direct conversations.
I believe there are too many ideological and financially motivated forces that are stirring an increasingly dominating spirit of division, impatience, and intolerance. It is the spirit of this world and we must not give it power.
What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us.
1 Cor. 2:12 NIV
We swim in waters that diminish true expressions of the Fruit of the Spirt. We breathe air that fights against our work of reconciliation interpersonally and corporately. We need commit ourselves to the vital work of sitting down and having clarifying conversations and civil dialogue. We must relearn how to slow down and open up vital connectional space to talk. Too often we hurry, hurry, hurry. We move on and away from each other.
Communication comes from the Latin root communicare which means “to hold in common.” Too often, we avoid the longer and more difficult work to sit down and talk enough to get to the point of understanding each other. Notice I did not say “completely agreeing with each other.” We have grown too used to staying distant when relationships are difficult. And worse, we’ve grown too used to not working on them and walking away. That is not the way of our Savior. With the incarnation, the root of our new life in Christ is the impulse to draw closer. It is the anti-hiding behavior that the Cross creates in us.
Biblical maxims from the wisdom literature of the OT and NT:
A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing their opinion.
Proverbs 18:2
If one gives an answer before they hear, it is their folly and shame.
Proverbs 18:13
Be slow to speak and quick to listen
James 1:19
Who do you need to draw closer to? How can we better submit to one another out of reverence for Christ (Eph. 5:21)?
As God continues to abundantly fill us with his grace and mercy, may we exude anti-divisiveness. As we embody Christ’s hope to the world, may it be ever present in our relationships with each other. As Jesus came to us in flesh and blood, may we draw closer to each other especially with the hard stuff. May we find divine insight as we are onsite with each other.
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Rom. 12:2 MSG