New book argues why conflict can be good for a church – Baptist News Global

Efforts to avoid conflicts in the community can backfire in churches whose members feel unable to live and worship authentically within their own community, according to the author of a new book on dealing with divisions within Baptist churches.

“In many cases, people in our churches do not feel free to tell their stories and name their truths,” said Christopher Schelin, author of The Controversial Church: Dissent, Democracy, and Baptist Ecclesiology.

Christopher Schelin

“One example in moderate Baptist circles is a shyness away from hard conversations about the presence of LGBTQ people in the church and what collective stances might be taken on affirmation and inclusion,” says Schelin, an American Baptist minister who serves as dean of studies and assistant professor of practical and political theology at the Starr King School of Ministry, a Unitarian Universalist seminary in Oakland, California.

Schelin said he had been in churches where the presence of homosexual members was an open secret and considered too scandalous to talk about.

In these cases, everyone misses out on opportunities to build deeper relationships rooted in truth and love, he says. “Retreating from the difficult conversations means that people have to hide these truths about themselves. And if the church is to be anything, it should be a place where we can be fully there for each other.”

But The controversial church also examines the other end of the spectrum of ecclesiastical conflict as inevitable and potentially constructive in grasping the spirit of Christ, he said.

Schelin suggests that faith communities apply the principles of radical democratic political theory, based on the work of political scientist Romand Coles. The process encourages robust and often messy discourse as a means of achieving political consensus. “Applied to the church, it seeks the tension of conflict so that through a respectful, conflictual encounter we can discover new ways of being church.”

And who could experiment better cope better with this approach than the Baptists, whose lack of central authority and emphasis on individual conscience have in the past led to internal power struggles and a split in the community, Schelin notes in his book.

“The very first Baptist church became the very first schism in the Baptist church.”

“The very first Baptist church became the very first Baptist church to split when Thomas Helwys led 10 members of John Smyth’s congregation in Amsterdam to resign in protest against Smyth’s overtures to the local Mennonites. Early English and American Baptists merged into separate denominations, disagreeing over the extent of Christ’s salvation or the proper day for worship.”

The tradition of strife and division continued in the United States when fundamentalists, feeling offended by the perceived liberalism of some churches, left the Northern Baptist Convention in the 1920s and 1940s, and when conservative control of the Southern Baptist Convention led non-conservatives to form groups such as the Alliance of Baptists in 1987 and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991.

“This large-scale survey of denominational conflict inevitably ignores the countless and largely undocumented controversies that have characterized individual congregations over four centuries of Baptist tradition,” writes Schelin. “Their participatory community not only invites members to develop habits of responsibility, attentiveness, creativity, and humility, but also encourages vices such as manipulation, strife, partisanship, and abuse of power.”

To prevent these tendencies from leading to further paralysis and division, Baptists must reconceptualize their ecclesiology, anticipating and managing recurring conflicts, he advises. Radical democracy offers a way to overcome the frictions in the church by seeing conflict as essential and necessary and by creating spaces in which the expression of opposing viewpoints is encouraged and cultivated.

“Baptists who accept this statement “Those who engage in constructive conflict can rightly, but only analogously, view their ecclesiology as radically democratic,” he says. “This way of being the people of God in and through differences of opinion, with the aim of growing in faithfulness, is what I call the contestable church.”

“This way of being the people of God in and through disagreements, with the goal of growing in faithfulness, is what I call the contestable church.”

Schelin said his book also shows how Baptists have dealt with conflict in a healthy way: “Again and again, we in the church have had to find new ways to recognize what it means to be a believer. If we had held on to old or prevailing assumptions, we would not have made progress in living the gospel more fully on issues such as racism and the dignity and role of women in the church.”

The key is to work through disagreements over deeply held, sincere views about what it means to be a disciple of Christ – not to skirt around them or avoid them. Baptists should also strive to rethink doctrines such as believer’s priesthood, soul competence and pastoral authority to avoid conformist authoritarianism and extreme individualism, Schelin said.

“We must engage in conflict-ridden discussions in the hope that the Holy Spirit can lead us to a new understanding through attentive listening. Radical democracy invites us to show humbly patience in these conversations and to pause and reflect: “How do I see things differently through my encounter with the other?”

Congregations interested in radical democracy might consider ways to foster the communal dimension of religious communities, he said. “One start would be to return to communal reading of Scripture. We have often reduced Bible study to individual spirituality or made it routine, following curricula and lesson plans that publishers have created for us.”

Schelin said he once led a Sunday school class that read a lectionary passage twice and then discussed what it meant to the students. “There was no agenda, no goal. I didn’t lead the class to a conclusion. I just let people talk about what they noticed. It was very powerful and sometimes it was very surprising to see what people came up with in that process.”

Towards a consensus The decision-making process also promotes radical democracy because it takes more time to consider different points of view than discussions governed by Robert’s rules of procedure, he said. “It is more nuanced and deliberately avoids that zero-sum approach to conflict by taking more time and working through differences of opinion.”

The controversial church is part of Mercer University Press’ Perspectives on Baptist Identities Series, which also includes Crawford Howell Toysby Mikeal C. Parsons, Inhabiting the worldby Ryan Andrew Newson, Light sourcesedited by Amy L. Chilton and Steven R. Harmon, and The global mission of the South, where Jim Crow laws applyby Joao B. Chavez.