Authority issues lead to conflict, pastor terminations

Who runs the church?” is a question that divides many Baptist congregations.
   
In healthy churches, experts say, secure pastors and secure lay leaders share a common vision of mutual leadership. But when either the pastor or lay leaders attempt to tip the balance in their favor against the wishes of the other party, conflict often results.
   
Control issues are the No. 1 reason for forced terminations of Baptist pastors, according to research by LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention.
   
The number of ministerial firings by Baptist churches has grown to alarming proportions, says Jan Daehnert, director of minister/church relations for the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT).
   
However, Dale Huff, Director of Leader Care in Church Administration with the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM), said that is not the case in Alabama.
   
“We have not had an increase in firings but have stayed constant in the last five years at two and a half percent,” he said.
   
In a majority of the cases where pastors have been fired, disputes over pastoral authority play a significant role in the conflicts that led to termination, Daehnert said.
   
And that does not even include the many other cases where ministers moved on to another church to keep the issue from coming to a head.
   
While it’s easy to point fingers at pastors or laity in conflict over authority issues, responsibility lies at the feet of both, Daehnert said.
   
Two scenarios are common, he said.
   
In one, laymen accuse the pastor of being “too heavy-handed,” “too authoritarian” or a “dictator.” In the other, the pastor views lay leaders as thwarting his leadership with their controlling tactics.
   
Huff said in a church where the pastorial authority has been abused, the replacement pastor will not be granted as much authority. “New pastors have to realize authority is power that is granted to them,” he said.
   
Theological perspectives of some pastors, who believe they have a God-given mandate to run the church, compound the problem.
   
Authoritarian pastoral styles are commonly associated with a fundamentalist theology, but such tendencies affect nonfundamentalists also, said Howard Batson, pastor of First Baptist Church, Amarillo, Texas.
   
“It has nothing to do with Baptist politics,” he said. “It really is an interpersonal skills problem.”
   
“As a pastor develops a healthy self-esteem, he is less likely to be dictatorial and more likely to be a strong leader,” Batson said. “When he’s not sure of himself, he’ll either hide in a corner or shout from the rooftop. When he’s sure of himself, he’ll do neither of those.”
   
Bob Sheffield, a specialist in church conflict mediation with LifeWay, agreed with Batson’s assessment. “The more insecure a person is, sometimes the more authoritarian he has to be. If you’re secure, you can allow people to be involved in decision making.”
   
Daehnert said conflicts over pastoral authority stem from deeper, unresolved theological issues.
   
“Pastoral authority is a piece of the picture that has been overemphasized because other parts of the picture are out of shape,” he said.
   
He said he believes the problem is that Protestant churches “never completed the Reformation.”
   
“We’ve never known how to reconcile the role of the pastor and the role of the layman in ministry,” he said.
   
The fault sometimes lies with pastors who, even though Baptist, “have kept some of the old Catholic church tendencies” of clerical superiority, Daehnert said. That may be compounded when laity “turn over to the pastor authority that really belongs to Jesus.”
   
At other times, amid a succession of short-term pastors, lay leaders become so accustomed to managing all the business of the church that they leave no room for pastoral leadership. While another problem receives less attention, Batson said, some pastors give too little leadership. “On that end, they’re withdrawn and apathetic and provide sporadic leadership. They lack initiative.”
   
The best road to travel lies between these two ditches, he said.
   
“What most churches want is a healthy teamship approach to leadership. You lead, but you do it as part of a team, including the committees and the congregation. It’s not so much, ‘God told me, and this is what we’ve got to do,’ but, ‘Here’s what God has told us together.’”
   
According to Huff, “power is not the problem — it’s when people use their power to try and control. Anyone who tries to control what a Baptist church does will create a problem,” he said.
   
Batson, Daehnert and others acknowledged that some Baptist churches want a pastor who will give strong direction. That’s OK, they said, if the church hires a pastor who shares that vision of leadership.
   
This requires the pastor search committee to “really know the story of the church and match that with the story of the candidate.”
   
Too often, Sheffield said, search committees don’t adequately understand what the church wants in a pastor. “If you get one pastor who has been a precipitative-type pastor, trying to develop a shared-ministry approach, followed by a person who is very autocratic, you’re going to have problems,” Sheffield said. “Congregations don’t realize this. They don’t take this into consideration in the pastor-search process. 
   
“Sometimes what the congregation has been heard to say is, ‘We need a strong leader.’ But their definition of a strong leader and the pastor’s definition are different.”
   
But more often, “the pastor search committee will go on the basis of what they think,” without surveying the congregation, Sheffield said.
   
That can be a problem because “most pastor search committees don’t represent the church as a whole. They represent the cutting edge of the church. Why are people put on the pastor search committee in the first place? Because they’re leaders, and they want things to happen.”
   
Sheffield and Daehnert both believe many pastors have bought into an incorrect definition of leadership, confusing it with management. “If you take Ephesians 4 literally, our job as pastors is to equip the saints for a work of ministry,” Sheffield said. “We will be leaders, which is a sphere of influence, not managers.”
   
Daehnert pointed to a book, “The Servant,” written by a corporate executive using biblical principles. The author, James Hunter, quotes sociologist Max Weber’s distinction between power and authority.
   
Power, he said, is “the ability to force or coerce someone to do your will, even if they would choose not to, because of your position or might.” Authority is “the skill of getting people to willingly do your will because of your personal influence.”
   
So a person could be in a position of power but not have authority with people, Daehnert said. “Authority is based not on position but on influence.”
   
A practical misapplication of authority happens when young pastors or pastors new to their churches look at older mentors with long tenures and attempt to duplicate their leadership styles, Sheffield explained.
   
“The older, more tenured pastors have ‘gone through the fire’ and earned the right of leadership. Yet we may think we can be there without earning the right to be the leader.”
   
Huff used his first pastorate as an example of not realizing he was oversteping his bounds. “I was very young and the first month at the church I announced from the pulpit that it was time for deacon selection  and the selection would be done differently. I found out immediately that I had not been given the privilege to make this change,” he confessed.
   
The problem of church conflict due to leadership issues is well known, acknowledged Larry Ashlock, professor of pastoral ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. “We seem to know the reasons for the problems but have not taken proactive steps to correcting them.”
   
Southern Baptists are attempting to address the problem nationwide through LifeWay’s LeaderCare unit, which includes counseling and other resources for ministers. The BGCT addresses the problem through its minister/church relations office.
   
One practical solution is for pastors to learn better listening skills, Batson suggested. “We teach people in seminary how to talk, not how to listen. The greatest skill a pastor can have is his ability to listen.”
   
The Alabama SBOM offers a seminar taught by Huff entitled, “Power, Authority and Pastorial Leadership.” Huff said pastoral authority is a delegated, permitted power that differs from church to church. “The amount of authority a pastor has is determined by the church,” he said.
   
Daehnert said in an ideal situation, “The pastor has a role and responsibility as due laypeople. Together, they determine what is God’s will for the church.” (ABP, TAB contributed)