This is an AI-generated transcript of a video from my old website. Soon I will tidy it up! In the meantime, forgive the terrible writing and punctuation. -Clara
There often comes a moment when I’m teaching a group or a course when we come to this question, what am I supposed to do with the dysfunctional person in my congregation? And sometimes this is laity asking about a dysfunctional clergy person, sometimes this is clergy and or laity asking about a dysfunctional lay person. And this is such an important question, this is such a painful question for the church, so I just wanted to do a little video about it. The first question is, what kind of dysfunctional person have you got? Not all dysfunctional people are the same as we know.
So sometimes what we’ve got is we’ve got a dysfunctional person who maybe is lacking in some social skills or some mental health or has lots of difficulties in their lives or up against insurmountable obstacles. And all those challenges come out in some ways that are disruptive. And so these are the people in our churches that need a little extra love, a little extra tolerance, and we say, what does it mean to accept and welcome this person in a healthy way in our congregation? Okay, that’s one kind of dysfunctional person.
But let’s talk for a second about the other kind of dysfunctional person. And this is the person who is actively seeking to cause harm to other people in your congregation. This is a real thing that we have in the church.
And if you have it in your church, you are not alone. So when we’ve got people who are trying to cause harm to other people, where harms to other people are part of the benefit of what they’re getting out of it. This is one of our bullies, abusers, or narcissists perhaps.
And it’s really important to say, what does it look like to care for the 99? We have a little bit too much of a focus in the one that Jesus goes out to save. Well, let’s do Jesus, let’s let Jesus do Jesus-y things. Jesus is perfectly capable of attending to the needs of that one sheep, regardless of where they are in regard to the 99.
But sometimes we’re actually called vocationally to care a lot about the 99. So the question is for me, if we’ve got 99 sheep, and one of our sheep has turned into a wolf and is now preying on our 99 sheep, well at that point in time, this is a different kind of business that we’re in. And at that point in time, our vocation as Christian leaders, we can let Jesus go find that person out in the wilderness, but we do actually have to care for the 99.
So if you’ve got somebody who’s preying on the people in your congregation, they’re stirring up conflict, they’re enjoying it, they’re seeking to get power over other people, they are setting expectations that they’re actively rewarding people for following, and they’re actively punishing people for violating. At that point in time, you’ve got to ask yourself some really serious questions about what you want to do to protect the 99 people in your church. I’ve made it sound like it’s really easy to tell one kind of dysfunctional person from another, and it’s not.
So I strongly encourage you to take this question to obviously to God in prayer, in self-reflection, but also reach out to your people that you trust in your life and have this conversation with them. Have this conversation with your bishop or your leader of your presbytery, somebody higher up than you in the hierarchy who can add some authority to this question. Have this conversation with your spiritual director.
Have this conversation with your therapist. Figure out how it’s triggering past experiences and memories that you might be wrestling with. I do that a lot.
Let’s not underestimate the importance of therapy when we’re dealing with dysfunctional people in the church and how they might trigger us with other dysfunctional people in our lives. But also, if you’re seeing this and if you’re noticing this, then don’t just cover it over and say we’re supposed to be loving to everybody, because dysfunctional people, really seriously harmful people, will convince us that we are supposed to be loving and accepting to them at the expense of being loving and careful for the other 99 people in our churches. So we just need to be a little bit careful.
Who are we loving? Who are we using our power to love and to serve? Who are we showing compassion to and at whose expense? These are really important questions for us. So if you’re dealing with a person like this in your congregation, my prayers are with you and reach out if you need additional support.
