The maturity of our members becomes evident when they must wear the practice of their theology, when they are on the receiving end of corrective discipline and when their preferences (whatever they may be) are challenged and must be set aside for the sake of others. It is in those moments we see just how mature our church is and we will only ever see it if we are actually willing to have those kinds of conversations. If you want a good test of maturity, here is one: how do members of your church react to their preferences being challenged? 

I was recently asked a number of questions about eldership. Not by somebody who didn’t know, but for the purposes of sharing my specific answers – and how things work out in our context – during the course of a bible study on the topic of church leadership. Which seems fair enough; if you will discuss what a church elder is and does, it makes sense to go and ask one of them how they perceive it biblically.

One of the points of that discussion was about leaning into difficult conversations. I must admit, one of the hardest parts of being a pastor is the difficult and awkward conversations you need to have with people. As one pastor put it: preaching is the nice part of the job, most of the role is conflict resolution. Which is about right. I love preaching, I love teaching the Bible in the various different forums I get to do that, I really love seeing people know more about Jesus, grasp rich theological truth and – best of all – seeing them grow as they see what those things mean in practice for themselves. But a significant chunk of my job as pastor is spent applying God’s Word to difficult situations and having awkward conversations about what Jesus says, what people seemingly want to do (or are doing) and the not insignificant chasm between those two things.

I am convinced very few pastors and elders actually enjoy having these awkward and difficult conversations. Whilst, no doubt, there are some who thrive on them, and I appreciate it is de rigueur to see personality disorders behind every corner, I genuinely don’t think most pastors are actual psychopaths. Which means for most of us, those conversations are not fun and are really, truly not the reason we got into being pastors. In fact, if you could leave us with all the preaching and teaching and take away the hard, awkward relational stuff – whilst somehow keeping all the genuinely lovely relational stuff – we would be delighted. But, delighted as we may be, we’d equally not be living in the real world!

In fact, not only do I doubt many pastors and elders enjoy having these awkward conversations, I think it is demonstrably true in that quite a pastors simply refuse to have them at all. Or rather, they put off the smaller awkward conversations because they’re, well, awkward. Only, in avoiding that first point of awkwardness, we don’t deal with whatever the issue we’re worried about is. That then has a habit of growing into a bigger problem requiring an even more awkward conversation. We might still be able to sort it out, but if we put off that awkward conversation too, we may find a bigger problem still down the track, only that one is too far gone to realistically deal with and our only moves are quite severe and unlikely to produce the fruit of repentance.

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