By Thomas Scarborough

Christian leadership guru Bobby Clinton writes: "I have been particularly amazed at how much conflict there is in Churches... I would guess that most leaders spend the majority of their time and energy dealing with conflict" (The Making of a Leader, pg. 162).

While I wouldn't fit the profile of "most leaders", by the grace of God my ministry must have survived some of the finest Church wreckers. In my experience, such persons nearly always use the same techniques (originating, some might claim, at the same source)! This experience has been complemented, for me, by insights from Church consultants, and by no small number of ministers who have shared similar experiences.

One might ask why a minister should publish a guide to Church wrecking. Might this not play into the hands of a thousand foes? However, the tips which follow should, at the very least, enable Christian leaders to identify the marks of "classic oppositional behaviour". They should also help Churches to anticipate what they will probably, at some time, need to address. This article concludes with a brief exegesis of the apostle Paul.

While some of the Church-wrecking tips which follow might in some situations seem legitimate, they are of course intended, in the hands of the wrecker, for oppositional, obstructive purposes. Here they are, then, some of the finest tips on Church wrecking, gleaned from various experts in the art:

1. Make many friends, do much good, and seek respectable office in the Church. When your moment comes, you'll want an army of people to attest to your many virtues -- even your indispensability. You can't be a wrecker without being a model member. Great virtue is a necessary evil.

2. A useful preparatory phase is to flatter the minister. Butter him/her up. When your time comes to strike, this should make him/her reluctant to lose your admiration, and should generally confuse. But be careful, some wary ministers consider flattery a prelude to a strike.

3. It's especially gratifying to set a situation up, then to watch people squirm. Feed them false information, or give them flawed advice. If they act on trust, they are sure to err. Then cut them down. But remember, this is not the goal, it is merely a pretext for what is yet to come.

4. Make assurances, then break them. Then deny that you ever made such assurances. People won't trust their own judgement. If they're rankled, it might serve to prove that they have irrational bias.

5. Get the attention of Church leaders, and make sure that you get them to act on your behaviour. If you want to be a real Church wrecker, then sooner or later you have to appear on their radar screen. Best of all, arouse the minister. Ultimately, he/she is your finest target.

6. Once you've made an entrance, make it personal. If the minister acts or reacts in his capacity as minister, if the Church leadership acts or reacts as leadership, reduce it to personal malice. Give attention to putting a personal slant on every word and action. This is important.

7. Reserve your worst for carefully selected private encounters that nobody else will witness. The minister is as good as it gets. Say and do things in private that no one will believe if they are ever repeated - better, that people will dispute.

8. Divert attention from the obvious. Church leaders have a dangerous quality called spiritual discernment. You need to do all that you can to keep their attention away from the big picture. Get them preoccupied with side-issues.

9. Pick at detail. There is no shortage of marginal issues which could legitimately be in doubt. The more marginal, the more promising. People quickly forget exactly who said what and when. Open up the smallest cracks in each story. People will soon confuse the marginal with the central.

10. Claim that a host of people in the Church stand behind you. Whether it's only a few, or none at all, no matter, it's the effect that you're after. People are very afraid of shadows. But don't reveal critical detail. Someone might check it out.

11. Question every resolution that the Church leadership takes regarding your righteous crusade. Claim that it wasn't really a resolution. It was just a conglomeration of individuals, none of whom really understood their motives or really agreed with each other. Record every shred of evidence of the same, and disseminate.

12. Pick at the Church constitution. There wasn't a document in history that was perfectly watertight. Give the impression that you have complete confidence that you have discovered fatal flaws.

13. Question established procedures. Quite likely, people won't even remember where they recorded them. Some won't remember them at all. And if new procedures are decided, refer to what is remembered of the old.

14. Cast aspersions. The shrewd Church wrecker knows that every word and every action potentially has more than one possible motive. Choose the sinister motive. Repeat it often, and repeat it with confidence. The more often it is repeated, the more likely it is to stick.

15. Demand evidence that nobody will be able to produce. If anything happened without a witness, demand one.

16. Appeal to guilt. Everyone's a sinner. Whether it's the minister or any other office-bearer in the Church, there have to be tinges of guilt in there somewhere. These can be exploited to great effect. There's nothing like a subtle appeal to personal inadequacy for getting a Church leader on the defensive.

17. Deal in fear. Fear drives out love. The more vague your threats, the greater the potential for fear. Make people believe that you will rain terror upon them. Conjure up spectres of doom in the Church. If you're lucky, people will act on them.

18. Widen the circle. Draw in as many people as you can. Every good Christian gives another Christian's grievances full attention. You deserve to be heard by everyone. A mere committee, a mere Church leadership, will not do. But be sure to widen the circle in stages. Complete exposure in one grandstand moment could be counter-productive.

19. Get as many responses from your opponents as you can -- and get them in writing. Get a paper-chase going. Ferret out pieces of paper at every opportunity. It's amazing to what advantage printed words can be put, not least in mass mailings.

20. Divide and conquer. In order to accomplish this, it's good to find people alone, so that they can give you their full attention. Work on people one by one. And even if you can't divide people, speak openly about divisions. Suspicion itself breeds division.

21. Proclaim that the Church is about grace and mercy. God Himself is a God of love. Proclaim that the minister is unforgiving, and anyone else who presumes to hinder your righteous purposes. Whoever heard of such a strange notion as Church discipline?

22. Use legal letters. It's dangerous to let a Church Body deal with a matter organically. Skew the power dynamics through legal means -- or through the threat of legal means. There's a range of creative options to choose from.

23. Create ambiguous situations. If you promised to come alone, bring a few others. Wait for a deadline, then respond half an hour later. Withdraw from your duties, but do as much as you can get away with. Block the minister's path, but make it look like a broken shoelace. The possibilities are endless, and the results can give you great mileage.

24. Force the minister to act or speak in isolation. Transgress a resolution in his or her presence -- or threaten to - then wait for the reaction. Accusations of high-handedness or paranoia could apply.

25. Feign a final resolution of the situation. Then, just when everyone thinks they've finally put it all to bed, spring a grand surprise. Reopen the issue. Get back to the basics. There's nothing like surprising tired troops who are under the delusion of victory.

26. Ask humbly for forgiveness, then launch into a malicious tirade. This is sure to confuse. Alternatively, try the opposite. Refuse conciliation, then request it. That should have everyone on the back foot.

27. Wear people down. Select a few soft targets, and work on their spirit. They're not likely to know much about conflict, they're not in your league. They could crumble sooner than you think. Find out who said what, and challenge them personally and aggressively. The mere fact that they supported a resolution might give you "a handle" on them.

28. Evoke sympathy. Look miserable, and do it publicly. People might wish to place the blame on your antagonists. At the least, people will find this hard to bear, and will want to make it all go away as fast as they can.

29. Claim that the Church leaders are dispensable, that one could easily do without them. Divine calling is a superstition, a ruse, a pretext for self-aggrandizement. A thousand people could fill the same posts at short notice.

30. Finally, if you're feeling a little devilish, frame the minister. This is not hard, and there are many techniques. You needn't induce the minister to do wrong. It can be made to look that way, very convincingly - whether it's for the Church or for the courts. Mature Church wreckers pride themselves in the finer techniques of the set-up.

Having shared these tips, there are many resources available to Churches which they might refer to in dealing with the wrecker. A particularly dangerous guide, from the wrecker's point of view, is to be found at http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=532.

Finally, here follows a less quoted text which addresses many of the Church wrecker's tricks which are listed above:

Chapters 4 and 5 of 1 Corinthians contain a doublet: 1. "Judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes" (1 Cor 4:5) and 2. "I have already passed judgement on the one who did this, just as if I were present" (1 Cor 5:3).

The first part of this doublet tends to be quoted indiscriminately, yet it refers specifically to those who judge Paul: "I care very little if I am judged by you..." (1 Cor 4:3). The second part refers to those who persist in compromising the wholeness of the Church. Paul lists six categories of people who call themselves brother, yet are "already judged" (1 Cor 5:11).

In short, where people cast undecidable aspersions against a Church leader, suspend judgement and leave it "till the Lord comes" (see also 1 Tim 5:19). However, where people engage in any of the activities listed by Paul, judgement has already been passed -- until such time as they show evidence of a change.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thomas Scarborough is in his 15th year of ministry in an urban, cosmopolitan Congregational Church in Cape Town. He is registered as a postgraduate student at Fuller Theological Seminary and at the South African Theological Seminary, where his focus has been Christian leadership. He keeps a ministry blog at http://thomasscarborough.blogspot.com.