When we avoid hard conversations, problems go unaddressed, and tensions rise. These three principles help me to approach difficult conversations with humility and grace.
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humility
When you leave your own culture, you learn things about it. One of the things that I learned about Canadian culture when I moved to Japan is that we don’t seem to place a high value on wisdom. In Canada, we work hard at helping our children learn skills with lots of after-school clubs and activities, but in Japan, proverbs still have a significant place in a child’s development. In kindergarten, our children started learning Japanese proverbs along with the other kids. There are lots of well-made comic books that introduce them to age-old truisms that are recognized across society. In elementary school, children are formally taught proverbs and even tested on them. As a result, children grow with a sense that older generations possess wisdom about how life can be navigated effectively.
As you look through the lists of qualifications for elders in the New Testament, you can’t find words like tough, outspoken, bold, or unrelenting. In their place is the call to gentleness. An elder is someone who is neither quarrelsome nor arrogant but is marked by a considerate attitude toward others. Consider whether you’re gentle enough to do the hard work of Christian leadership.
The most common term to refer to church leaders in the New Testament is “elder,” but it sounds foreign because we value youth so much today. The tech revolution has deemed most people who are over 30 as out-of-date, and so calling leaders “elders” seems to require that they be old and traditional. There’s value in holding onto the term, though. While it doesn’t demand a certain age, designating Christian leaders as “elders” does draw attention to the value of time as a necessary preparation for the role. In response to the question, “How old do you have to be to become an elder?” the Bible seems to answer in several ways.
I think we make subconscious value judgments all the time. We decide whether something is worth our time by the impact we feel it makes. The same is true of ministry. We want our lives to count, the question is how? How can you make the most impact in ministry? Let me share four ways I think the Bible answers that question.
Two weeks ago, in my post, “How to have it out without making it worse,” we began to look at Brian Orme’s advice on how to deal with conflict. We covered the things he warns to avoid in marital disputes. The reality is that there are things we can do that inevitably hurt rather than help our chances of resolving issues that come up in marriage. Today we look at the positive side: his list of things to do to make our clashes more constructive.