Conflict: A Gift to the Church?
Friday, June 22 (6 pm supper) to Sunday, June 24 (1 pm)
Every faithful, healthy church has been blessed with differences: divergent views, varied backgrounds, differing faith experiences and expectations. Our differences can enrich our lives and ministries; they can also lead to destructive conflict. To stay faithful and healthy, our congregations, and especially we, their leaders, need skills, strategies, understanding and faith resources to address differences in constructive and growth enhancing ways.
This is an introductory workshop intended to help us lay and clergy leaders:
☼ to lose some of our fear of conflict,
☼ to apply guidance from the teaching of Christ and the model of the early church to our leadership responsibilities in the midst of conflict, and
☼ to learn practical strategies for improving our own responses to conflict and those of the congregations we serve,
so that our differences and differing can be transformed into a source of strength and renewal.
In this workshop we will:
Explore the scriptures through the lens of conflict, integrating them with practical applications to our own and our congregations’ conflict behaviour.
Expand our repertoire of appropriate conflict responses, especially within leadership roles; consider Jesus’ use of various conflict response strategies; understand the preferred approaches of others and how to work with them.
Learn how to create a cooperative environment in which to catch disagreement before it becomes a crisis of conflict.
Design practical strategies to help the congregation to responsibly, usefully and safely express group conflict and make corporate decisions in ways that allow us to benefit from the differences in our midst.
Consider the meanings of forgiveness and reconciliation. Learn the stages of the cycle of reconciliation and strategies for facilitating forgiveness.
Leadership:
Nan Cressman has been working in the field of church conflict since 1990, first with the Mennonite Church, and, since 2001, through her non-denominational practice in church conflict transformation, Conciliation Services Canada. Nan enjoys working with the positive potential in church conflict. To be invited to walk with a church in conflict still feels like an honour to her – an invitation into the heart of things, to a place where God can do something entirely new. After 13 years as an elder at St. Andrew’s United Church in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and a Licensed Lay Worship Leader with the Algoma Presbytery, Nan has recently moved back to Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, and rejoined First Mennonite Church there.
Contact Staff: Annette Taylor
Cost: $325 Decision Day: June 1
Registration fees increase 10% after this date, so register early.
For more information please visit the website.