Attend church very long, and it’ll be easy to find you dislike people there. The reason is obvious. The people we attend church with are people–flawed, broken, sinful people. Every church, even the most homogeneous, is full of people with different understandings, convictions, and personalities. It’s natural for conflicts to arise. What matters is how we handle them, that we don’t let them fester and weaken the body. Three factors can make the difference between handling these clashes well and flubbing them badly.
Be Willing to Examine Your Own Heart
First, before you rush to deal with difficult personalities around you, undertake an unsparing examination of your own heart. Maybe you’re too critical. Maybe you’re too eager to find fault. People sometimes disrupt the harmony of their church and limit her ministry by having too high an expectation for how they should be treated, by taking even innocent remarks too personally, or by expecting others to accept their standards of behavior in areas where the Bible offers liberty. These people rarely suspect they are the reason their relationships are so rocky. Ask yourself if you are this kind of person. If you think you might be, you probably are.
Be Willing to Overlook Offense
Second, realize that sometimes we just have to put up with them. People bring their problems to church and those problems sometimes come through in the form of annoying personality quirks. They need time to work it out, time to grow. They need people willing to stand by them as they seek maturity. The church ought to be the place to find those people. When we let go of the little slights of others, we offer them grace that allows them to change. So, when that guy says something that rankles you in Sunday School this week, the best course of action may be to go home, enjoy your lunch, take a nap, and forget about it.
Overlooking offenses isn’t just good for the offender. Scripture makes it clear that being quick to forgive yields benefits to the offended too. Proverbs tells us it is a man’s glory to overlook an offense. When the church succeeds at her mission all her people are blessed. In order to see that success, our relationships must be characterized by love, and Peter tells us love covers a multitude of sins. The world needs the church at her best, and so do you. So, start covering.
Be Willing to Confront When Necessary
Finally, appropriate confrontation of a person who continually violates boundaries, is rude or dangerous, might be necessary. Church people do one another a disservice when we fail to be clear that this kind of behavior hurts. If some guy in your church is a real jerk–not just someone you dislike for personal reasons or who is socially clumsy–but a real honest-to-goodness jerk, someone ought to take him aside and tell him to cut it out. Not having that kind of talk with him stunts his growth. Without clear feedback he’s likely to say stuck where he is and continue to damage the congregation.
Someone should have a talk with him. But, that someone may not be you. Some people are eager to confront when they have neither the necessary skill nor insight. You could be one of these people. Confrontation is healthy when done in love with an eye toward producing growth, but when done in anger, or to settle some personal grievance, it bears a bitter fruit.
A good rule of thumb is to check yourself with others. Ask others if they have experienced the same thing from this person. Talk to the church leadership. If the guy needs a talking to, ask them if you are the right person to do it. If not, then go back to covering this jerk’s multitudinous sins.
There is, of course, much more to say on this topic than this quick primer can cover. But these are the basics and will go a long way toward increasing peace and unity. Implementing them is tough but worth it. The way we deal with people who grate on us at church says a lot to our neighbors about our souls and a lot to the world about the Church’s Lord. Let’s watch what we say.