Conflict

Tomorrow I travel to train a women's ministry team in conflict resolution. I've never trained on the topic before but now I'm an expert.This is a fairly new team - they've been together only a year - and most of them are new to ministry. My guess is that they, like so many who are new to ministry, may be under the impression that serving the church is like working in a spiritual wonderland. You know, where everyone agrees because, after all, we all want what Jesus wants and we want it the same way at the same time. If only it were like that for even one day. That would be amazing.
Reality is, even if every one of us is saved, we are only a little bit sanctified and we still really like to get our way and for everyone else to agree and think our ideas are terrific. It rarely happens.
I'll begin by setting the record straight; conflict happens. Even in the most holy of human situations. One definition of conflict is "two people living in the same county." So it's okay for women that love Jesus to disagree. It doesn't give them license to be disagreeable- but it's absolutely okay if your team experiences conflict. In fact, some conflict is actually a very good thing. A very good thing.
Without conflict, bad ideas go unchallenged and mediocre ideas go without improvement. Without conflict we have groupthink which can lead to all kinds of uneffective ministry. They blame the space shuttle disasters on groupthink.
So this weekend this ministry team will learn to embrace conflict, manage conflict and resolve conflict.
I pray that God will make it better than the vehicle delivering it.