This is an adaptive leadership challenge before the United Church of Canada. It is a call to create better educated, better trained clergy who are better prepared to lead within conflicted communities, where they are called to both “maintain peace and harmony”, and be “agents of change”. A major impediment to better preparing clergy for conflict within the United Church of Canada today is the culturally systemic fear of conflict itself. The Church readily accepts conflict as a natural and inevitable consequence of ministry and is well structured and motivated to “heal and reconcile” once conflict occurs. However, the motivation to better prepare clergy in anticipation of conflict in their ministries is less apparent. Reluctant leaders generally lack the education, training and experience necessary, not only to respond to conflict within congregations when it occurs, but to anticipate, plan and encourage the surfacing of conflict, as the means of church vitality and growth. A cultural change is required in order to understand and work with conflict, a vital source of vision and renewal for Christ’s Church. Clergy must claim our role as “evangelists of conflict.” We must radically reconsider the doctrine of the Trinity to be “Our Holy Contradiction” which celebrates our diversity, surfaces our dissent, and personifies our one and vital unifying purpose - the unconditional love of God.
