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The Blame Game in Church Change PDF Print E-mail
David Sawyer / Conflict and Organizations
Written by David Sawyer, Ph.D.   
Tuesday, 03 March 2009 00:00

Dr. David Sawyer“It sure feels like it’s about me,” the pastor responded to my attempt to reframe the criticism she’s been receiving. I recalled a similar kind of bickering experienced by at least three previous pastors of the church. Even the beloved and saintly pastor who stayed over a quarter of a century had his sticky moments with high powered church members who insisted on doing things their way. “It’s not really about you,” I suggested. “It’s about the changes the church is experiencing.”

She’s right, too, of course, because resistance to change can be very sophisticated, and church members have lots of practice finding a chink in their pastor’s armor and aiming straight for it. There’s usually some truth in the criticism, too, or it wouldn’t work as well. Maybe the pastor is not the best preacher in town. Maybe family crises have drained the pastor’s energies over the past few weeks. Maybe a key feature of the church’s year failed to be observed (and maybe no one told the pastor about it until after the fact), but for the anger and critique to go over the top, out of proportion to the situation, something else must be going on.

This particular pastor had been doing what she had heard the calling committee asking her to do—invite new people to church, involve more children and youth in church programs, warm up a tired and sleepy congregation. So she introduced a children’s sermon, and she added “passing the peace,” and she had the choir sing some of the newer praise songs (just sometimes, not every Sunday). The congregation really enjoyed the children’s stories—truth be told they got more out of them than they did the regular sermons. After a few Sundays, they spent several minutes up and around greeting everyone in the sanctuary and it was hard to get them to sit back down. And even some of the older folks had to admit that they liked some of the newer songs.

But not everyone was pleased. Some of the power brokers began to talk about how things weren’t going so well down at the church. They were getting pretty grumpy about the changes in their church. Not surprisingly, they had a well practiced method of fixing that sort of irritation—try to tame the pastor and train the pastor to be more like their beloved old pastor who had come over from Scotland in 1920 and stayed until 1943.

The deal is that any time there’s change in the congregation’s practices or life, or in the leadership, the whole system becomes unstable. That instability sets off emotional turbulence and it usually shows up as some kind of conflict. If the congregation tends to find a single source for all its troubles, it resorts to the blame game to try to ease the rocking of the boat. If the congregation tends to overreaction, emotions will run extra high. If this particular church deals with instability by distancing, people will start staying away from worship.

Notice, here, that the preferred response to a rocking boat trying to return to stability is more rocking the boat with some kind of conflict symptom. That can set off a spiral of conflict that further destabilizes the congregation. Suddenly the solution has become the problem, and the church has moved away from directly addressing the underlying source of the instability. Rather than talking about change, we talk about what’s wrong with the pastor. If the pastor then reacts to the critiques with her or his own default response—either fight or flight-- a further instability is added and the system becomes even more wobbly.

Yes, pastor, it sure feels like it’s about you, but more importantly, it’s also about change. In this kind of a rough ride, the church really needs you to stay steady, keep your eye on God’s grace, and find ways to love them through this patch. Don’t succumb to the blame game.

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