Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Leadership

Dealing with Conflict: Boxing Gloves or Broom?

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Conflict is inevitable—in marriage, with your children, at work, and pretty much in all arenas of life.

How do you deal with it when it comes? Do you pick up your boxing gloves or a broom?

On the one hand, if you deal with conflict by picking up your boxing gloves, then you likely face it head on, talk it out, and push through to a resolution—no matter how inconvenient it might be, or how awkward it is to those around you.

On the other hand, if you deal with conflict by picking up your broom, then you might walk out, ignore it, pretend it never happened, change the subject, or tell yourself that it’s not that big of a deal and to stop acting like a baby.

When it comes to conflict, do you pick up your boxing gloves or a broom?

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So how do you deal with conflict when it comes? And have you ever wondered why you deal it with the way you do?

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The Influence of Hugh Hefner and D.L. Moody

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Hugh Hefner and D.L. Moody—these are two names (and pictures) that you don’t typically see side by side.

In a Chicago Sun-Times article on the most influential Illinoisans, Hefner and Moody were listed one after the other. Here was their rationale:

Hugh M. Hefner (1926-2017), publisher and bon vivant. Steinmetz High School graduate Hugh Hefner was a product of the Northwest Side Bungalow Belt. His imagination and drive forged a publishing empire and changed the social and sexual mores of American society in profound ways during the 1950s and 1960s. Whatever else one may think of him, he was one of the most influential people of the mid-to-late-20th Century.

Dwight Lyman Moody (1837-1899), American Christian evangelist, author, publisher and founder of the Moody Bible Institute. Born in Massachusetts, but influential in Minnesota and Illinois. Moody converted to Evangelical Christianity as a 17-year-old in April 1855. During the Civil War, President Lincoln visited and spoke at a Sunday School meeting he sponsored on November 25, 1860. Moody preached on many battlefronts including Shiloh, Stones River and Richmond. After the Civil war he moved to Chicago begin a congregation in the Illinois Street Church. Wiped out by the Chicago Fire, Moody began anew and over the next 20 years he became internationally known, holding many religious revivals in Great Britain and Sweden. Moody led the Chicago Bible Institute, and after his death the Chicago Avenue Church was renamed the Moody Church and the Chicago Bible Church became the Moody Bible Institute we know today.

If influence is measured by your ability to affect someone else—their opinions, character, development, actions, and thoughts—then yes, both Moody and Hefner are influential.

And if influence is what we truly want, then we’re living in the best time of history, since everyone has a voice—all you need is a smartphone or a computer to amplify it. Just take a look at your social media feed and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

However, what we desperately need to understand is that influence is not neutral.

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A Letter from Eugene Peterson on Christian Celebrities, Transition, and the Megachurch

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Eugene Peterson has deeply shaped my outlook on life, spirituality, ministry, and pastoring—probably more than anyone else. He will be deeply missed.

I’m not here to give you a synopsis of his last days, if you want that, you can read it here. If you want to hear ministry lessons on the life of Eugene from a wide range of church leaders, you can click here. And if you want to read about the one sermon Eugene preached, you can be inspired here.

What I want to share with you today is a letter that Eugene wrote to one of his friends after his friend had told him that he wanted to change churches because he felt that his gifts were being wasted where he was. His friend wanted more of a challenge and an opportunity to multiply his effectiveness. He wanted an opportunity that was more promising, so he was going to leave his small church for a larger one—one that was three times larger than his current pastorate.

Letters like this are precisely why I love Eugene Peterson.

When I came back from Korea—bruised, hurt, devastated and in the desert, thinking that I wasn’t called to ministry anymore—God used Eugene to pick up the pieces in my life (you can read about it here). Not personally, but through his lectures at Regent College and his book on the life of David, Leap Over a Wall.

It’s sad that I never got the chance to personally thank him for just how much God used him in my life, but I guess now that he’s in glory, it doesn’t really matter.

I came across this letter from Eugene as I was preparing a talk for an upcoming conference.

I’ll be speaking at Exponential—a conference for church planters, pastors, and ministry leaders. So while I was writing about the shift that needs to take place so that we can move from being the hero to becoming hero-makers, I immediately thought of this letter that he had written to a friend in his Memoir.

Although it had been several years since I read the book, for some reason, this letter had been seared into my soul as a warning. And am I ever glad that it was—and is—because I don’t want my story to go the way of the recent implosions of pastors that you might’ve come across in the news.

Here it is, it’s from page 156 of his Memoir:

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How to Develop Servant Leaders

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Have you ever tried to change something in your church, only to be met with skepticism? Or with responses like these?

We’ve tried that before!

What makes you think that this will work better than the last idea?

Why can’t we just do things the way we’ve always done them?

Believe it or not, situations like these shape us more than we know. Resistance after resistance, shut down after shut down—they just stock pile on top of each other until we wake up one morning being the one that is now resisting change.

After all, isn’t it easier just to keep the status quo? To let things roll? To continue as is?

Change is difficult to implement in our churches because the immune system of our church body knows when we try to transplant foreign ideas. And not only does it detect the new idea, it sees it as bad bacteria, a virus, or foreign material—thus resulting in its rejection.

In your church, is change usually detected as bad bacteria, a virus, or foreign material?

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But as a leader, you know that change is not only inevitable; it’s necessary to reach a new generation with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Although the Gospel is timeless, methods aren’t. After all, when’s the last time you saw teenagers or young adults in your church using a pay phone or hand writing a letter?

If you want to raise up the next generation of leaders in your church, you can’t just do what you’ve always done. Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will continue to work. The rate of change in our culture has sped up to the point where we are now measuring cultural shifts, not by the century or decade, and not even by the year anymore. But now by the month, the weeks, and in some cases, minutes.

Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will continue to work.

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Rather than feeling overwhelmed or suffering from a paralysis of analysis, I want to suggest three shifts that will change the trajectory of your church so that you can raise up a new generation of servant leaders, or harvest workers as Jesus mentions in Matthew 9:35-38.

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3 Wrong and Right Ways to Change and Grow Spiritually

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There are wrong ways to do things, and then there’s my way to do things—so make the right choice.

Have you ever said that to your children or to those you’re discipling? Or perhaps you’ve thought about saying it to your spouse, but quickly made the wise decision to keep your mouth shut?

When it comes to change, we often forget to take our own advice.

We end up telling others to do as we say, not as we do. The reason we’re hypocrites is because of the habits that are already ingrained in our hearts and lives.

When it comes to change, we often forget to take our own advice.

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In Darryl Dash’s book, How to Grow: Applying the Gospel to all of your life, he describes this dilemma aptly: “Growth is possible, and God promises He will change us. But we’re often frustrated because we’re not changing as quickly or as much as we’d like. Is it possible we’ve been going about it in the wrong way?”

In his book, he lists a few wrong ways that we go about change:

  1. “New information—We read books, watch videos, listen to sermons, and attend Bible studies. We think that new information will change us. When this doesn’t work, we go looking for even more information. We become knowledgable, but we often don’t change. We become educated beyond the level of our obedience.”
  2. “Big goals—We also set big goals to start or stop behaviors. We want to read the Bible every year, but then get stuck in Leviticus. We want to stop surfing social media, but find ourselves scrolling through once again in a moment of boredom, avoidance, or procrastination.”
  3. “Willpower—We think we need more willpower, but find it doesn’t last as long as we’d like. Some argue that willpower is quickly depleted. Others argue that we can learn to increase our willpower, and boost it when it’s weak. Either way, willpower can help us, but it can’t create the consistent, sustainable change we want in our lives.”

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