I was recently asked a number of questions about eldership. Not by somebody who didn’t know, but for the purposes of sharing my specific answers – and how things work out in our context – during the course of a bible study on the topic of church leadership. Which seems fair enough; if you will discuss what a church elder is and does, it makes sense to go and ask one of them how they perceive it biblically.

One of the points of that discussion was about leaning into difficult conversations. I must admit, one of the hardest parts of being a pastor is the difficult and awkward conversations you need to have with people. As one pastor put it: preaching is the nice part of the job, most of the role is conflict resolution. Which is about right. I love preaching, I love teaching the Bible in the various different forums I get to do that, I really love seeing people know more about Jesus, grasp rich theological truth and – best of all – seeing them grow as they see what those things mean in practice for themselves. But a significant chunk of my job as pastor is spent applying God’s Word to difficult situations and having awkward conversations about what Jesus says, what people seemingly want to do (or are doing) and the not insignificant chasm between those two things.

I am convinced very few pastors and elders actually enjoy having these awkward and difficult conversations. Whilst, no doubt, there are some who thrive on them, and I appreciate it is de rigueur to see personality disorders behind every corner, I genuinely don’t think most pastors are actual psychopaths. Which means for most of us, those conversations are not fun and are really, truly not the reason we got into being pastors. In fact, if you could leave us with all the preaching and teaching and take away the hard, awkward relational stuff – whilst somehow keeping all the genuinely lovely relational stuff – we would be delighted. But, delighted as we may be, we’d equally not be living in the real world!

In fact, not only do I doubt many pastors and elders enjoy having these awkward conversations, I think it is demonstrably true in that quite a pastors simply refuse to have them at all. Or rather, they put off the smaller awkward conversations because they’re, well, awkward. Only, in avoiding that first point of awkwardness, we don’t deal with whatever the issue we’re worried about is. That then has a habit of growing into a bigger problem requiring an even more awkward conversation. We might still be able to sort it out, but if we put off that awkward conversation too, we may find a bigger problem still down the track, only that one is too far gone to realistically deal with and our only moves are quite severe and unlikely to produce the fruit of repentance. Had we raised our concerns much earlier and had the much smaller, albeit nevertheless awkward, conversation the problem might well have been dealt with altogether.

But what I think is even more significant than whether your elders are willing to have difficult, awkward conversations – and, for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think they are qualified for the role if they can’t or won’t¹ – is how people respond to those conversations. As I said before, I don’t know any elders (though I’m sure somebody will find someone out there) who enjoy these hard conversations with people. After all, we all feel the sting and pull of the line: who are you to judge me? We might well recognise intellectually and biblically that we’re the people appointed by the membership, and given the authority from Jesus, to do exactly that in the church. But we can still feel our smallness, our weakness, our own sin as we get about doing that and half wonder it ourselves. Nevertheless, grasp the nettle we must.

But one of the real benefits of having these conversations is it gives you such a helpful measure of where your church is at in terms of maturity. It is the reaction of to those conversations that tell you a lot about where your people are at. Do people welcome that sort of church discipline as a loving thing done out of genuine concern for them? Do people appreciate that the conversation is awkward – and one you’d rather not be having – and thus must be important enough for you to press into? Do people receive your comments well and take them on board or not? Even if things aren’t exactly how you perceive them – and it becomes clear that is the case – rather than becoming irritated with you for ‘not getting the facts straight’ (which is why you are having the private conversation in the first place), do they see that you are willing to call them on what appears not to be right and are seeking to encourage them to do what is right? Do they see that you are encouraged either when things are righter than you first realised or, despite them not being right, you see a right response to what you are saying? These things all speak to the maturity of your members.

By contrast, if all discipline is met with defensiveness and hackles being raised, there may be a problem. If naming sin is seen to be more of an issue than engaging in that sin, we are in trouble. If there is greater concern over a person seeking to raise a matter as an issue of godliness than there is a person openly flouting godliness, things are not healthy. But we will only discover just how healthy our church is if and when we actually have these kinds of conversations. The response of the person on the receiving end of them tells you a great deal about their godliness, their maturity and their desire to grow in Christlikeness.

Many churches, sadly, are simply unwilling to have these conversations. They are too awkward and too difficult. They also fool themselves into thinking, because most people affirm the doctrinal basis and can talk in abstract theological terms, that the church is fundamentally healthy. We may talk about sin, but only from the front and possibly not too pointedly. But it isn’t hard to get people to sit in the room and nod along to what is said from the front. The question is whether, when we put these things meaningfully into practice, we get the same nodding agreement and understanding. That is where the rubber hits the road. The maturity of our members becomes evident when they must wear the practice of their theology, when they are on the receiving end of corrective discipline and when their preferences (whatever they may be) are challenged and must be set aside for the sake of others. It is in those moments we see just how mature our church is and we will only ever see it if we are actually willing to have those kinds of conversations.

If you want a good test of maturity, here is one: how do members of your church react to their preferences being challenged? How do they respond to loving rebuke over what somebody perceives as sin in their life? Do the church more broadly welcome elders – and even other members – stepping into difficult and awkward, but nonetheless necessary, conversations or do they baulk at the thought anybody would do such things? Not only will you see the maturity of your church writ large in these things, they may tell you whether you have seriously problems brewing down the line too.

1. I think this is both an outworking of some of the biblical criteria for eldership as well as just an evidently pragmatic reality ↩︎