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Peacemaking in the Church and Beyond - Lesson 7

Crafting a Culture of Peace

In this lesson, Dr. Sessoms teaches you to build a culture of peace with four key elements: passion for the gospel, unified leadership, comprehensive peacemaking theology, and practical tools. Learn to make the gospel the dominant influence in life, model peacemaking as a leader, apply a cohesive biblical approach to conflict, and equip others with practical peacemaking skills. The lesson emphasizes forgiveness and the gospel's power to foster reconciliation and strengthen the church community.

Rick Sessoms
Peacemaking in the Church and Beyond
Lesson 7
Watching Now
Crafting a Culture of Peace

Building a Culture of Peace

I. Building Blocks for a Culture of Peace

A. Passion for the Gospel

B. Unified Leadership

C. Peacemaking Theology

D. Peacemaking Tools


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  • Learn about the crucial role of leadership in conflict resolution, explore the various types of conflicts in the church, and understand the importance of building a peacemaking culture to prevent and address conflicts effectively.
  • Examine how the church's growth in conflict regions, particularly Rwanda, reveals a need for a more comprehensive gospel that addresses systemic issues and reconciliation, highlighting the church's role as agents of God's reconciling work.
  • You will gain insights into the gospel and its applicability to everyday life, as well as its impact on society, including bringing reconciliation and creating heaven on Earth. The discussion acknowledges the difficulties of living out the gospel in society and the tension between living in the world and living for the gospel.
  • Gain insight into the sparks that ignite conflict in the church, understand how conflicts can escalate, and discover the importance of developing peacemaking skills and fully embracing the gospel to foster unity and resolve conflicts.
  • You will learn about conflict culture in the church, which is an inherited culture for resolving conflict shaped by visible and invisible elements and assumptions and values that drive conditioned responses, and how recognizing and addressing it can lead to healthy conflict resolution.
  • This lesson explores how pastors and church leaders address people-pleasing cultures, examining the attitudes and actions of laissez-faire, controlling, and peacemaking leaders, and discussing the role of the church in promoting peacemaking, involving others, and establishing support systems.
  • Learn to build a culture of peace through passion for the gospel, unified leadership, comprehensive peacemaking theology, and practical tools, emphasizing the transformative power of forgiveness and reconciliation.
  • You learn how unified, gospel-centered leadership can transform church crises into growth opportunities by focusing on strong relationships, clear communication, and shared goals, while addressing the dangers of disunity and competition within leadership teams.
  • You will gain insight into the importance of preparation and certain characteristics that need to be in place before conflict in order to build a united leadership team, using an analogy of running a marathon.
  • Learn the importance of a comprehensive peacemaking theology, the nature of conflict, and effective biblical responses, focusing on escape, attack, and conciliation strategies, illustrated through a wilderness leadership training example and practical applications for congregations.
  • Learn practical steps to overcome conflict by reflecting the glory of God, responding with humility and grace, prioritizing unity over self-interest, speaking the truth in love, and pursuing forgiveness and reconciliation.
  • By learning practical peacemaking tools and focusing on communication, you'll enhance your ability to resolve conflicts by mastering responsible listening and speaking, enabling you to better understand others and communicate your message more effectively.
  • Understand the critical role of listening in ministry and leadership, recognizing how assumptions and selective retention impact comprehension, and you learn to adopt responsible listening patterns to foster understanding and trust in communication.
  • Gain insights into the barriers to good listening, the 600 word gap between listening capacity and speaking rate, and the objectives of responsible listening to improve communication and build trust in relationships.
  • Gain insight into responsible speaking by ensuring clarity, avoiding lengthy speeches, focusing on benefits, and offering solutions only when asked, using strategies like speaking briefly, providing limited information, checking for understanding, and acknowledging listener differences.
  • Learn how to effectively manage the grapevine, an informal communication network, by feeding accurate information to key individuals, which can prevent conflicts and enhance communication in complex organizations like the church.
  • This lesson highlights the crucial role of peacemaking beyond the church, touching on the history of American evangelicalism, race relations, and the inspiring story of Koinonia Farm, which exemplifies the importance of fostering reconciliation in a divided world.

How conflict and leadership intersect.

Dr. Rick Sessoms
Peacemaking in the Church and Beyond
MC613-07 
Crafting a Culture of Peace
Lesson Transcript

So, we've talked about this slippery slope. So now let's try to begin building a culture of peace. I want to suggest that there are several building blocks for crafting a culture of peace, and this is sort of the outline, if you would, for the rest of this course. Building blocks for building a culture of peace -- try to say that five times. 

The first is what we might call a passion for the gospel, to craft a church culture where people are truly excited about the gospel of Christ, and this gospel is the dominant influence in their lives. It's not just an entry point, it's not just a ticket, but it is their passion, the essence of the gospel, and we're going to talk about that quite a bit. 

Secondly is what we call unified leadership; church leaders that are committed and equipped to model and to apply peacemaking in their own primary relationships. This unified leadership exhibits a shepherd's heart to protect and to guide, and I believe without the heart, all the skills in the world will be of little use, and so that's why it's really about a passion for the gospel and unified leadership. 

Thirdly, is what I might call a peacemaking theology. It seems to me, and I've been guilty of this as well, too often, we leaders revert to what might be called a ‘devotional approach to conflict.’ You know what a devotional approach to conflict is? Some of you may have daily devotions, say, in the morning time, and so you read a scripture and you apply that scripture for the day, and it may not be the whole counsel of God, but it's that scripture for the day. Well, that gets you in a little bit of trouble when it comes to conflict, because if we only are able to apply the most recent thing that we’ve read in the scriptures related to conflict, that can really get us into some interesting territory.

Let me give you an example. This morning we're in Proverbs and we read Proverbs Chapter 19, verse 11. It says to overlook the offense, and so we overlook it because of what it is. But then a week from now, we're over into Luke 17, verse 3, where Jesus instructed his disciples to rebuke the sinful brother, and so we rebuke. That's a devotional approach. It's well-intended, but we end up with a sort of a schizophrenic approach to conflict resolution and peacemaking. I believe we need a biblical theology of peacemaking for the church that pulls these principles together so that we can apply them thoughtfully and properly as the situation calls. We need a biblical and a practical theology to be effective ambassadors of reconciliation. 

And then finally, we need peacemaking tools. We're going to look at some very practical tools that leaders can learn and that they can teach to people in their church so that all the way to peacemaking, as I said at the beginning, is not on the shoulders of the leader, but like Moses in Exodus chapter 18, we need some help, and so the more we can equip others to do that, the better off we’ll be. 

So, let's begin with the first building block, which is a passion for the gospel. The greatest conflict in history, of course, was the estrangement of sinful humankind from the Creator. As a result, Adam and Eve were not only estranged from God, they were alienated from one another. She did it, God. She ate the forbidden fruit; blame her. And the enmity immediately escalated in the next generation, of course, where brother murders brother, and so it goes. The good news of the gospel is just as this estrangement entered through the sin of one man, so also by one Man, Paul told the Romans, namely Jesus, a way of peace has been made through the cross for the reconciliation with God the Father and with one another. 

Often when I go to speak to a group, someone will ask me what I'd like them to say about me by way of introduction, and over the last few years, my usual response is to just tell them that I'm forgiven, and they're kind of, you know, taken aback by that. But that's all I want to tell them is I’m forgiven, because I've never gotten over quite the miracle of that reality, that I am forgiven, and what potential that opens in relationship with other people. 

So that's really the essence of a passion for the gospel, and there are a couple of examples, and if you're taking this online, I would encourage you to study through these. It's the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew chapter 18, verses 21-35. In that parable it's remembering the great debt that we have been forgiven. And then in the story of the Pharisee and the sinful woman in Luke chapter 7, verses 36-50, the message there is whoever has been forgiven will forgive and love much, and Jesus’ own example, of course, when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they're doing.” And Stephen, as he was being stoned to death, echoed Jesus’ words. “Then he fell to his knees and cried, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’” 

Romans chapter 5, verses 6-8: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person, some might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” When there is estrangement, God doesn't wait for the other to make the first move, He takes the initiative to reconcile, and this is his example to us. 

Now, one of the tasks, then, of being a peacemaking leader is to find ways to fan into flame this passion, this love, this adoration, this embracing of the gospel. In that way, people keep living in the reality that we are new creations, ambassadors of reconciliation. This gospel is what helps us avoid sliding into people-pleasing or controlling leadership styles to serve people as peacemakers. 

I want to share with you a story about a little girl that was born in 1935. They named her Nancy. Nancy's mother and father lived together for a little while after Nancy was born, but they were always arguing and bickering and fighting. It was not a happy home for Nancy and her sister. Her father was a big, large, gentle man. He was a professional musician. He loved people. But Nancy's mother was another story. She was Scottish, she was rough, she was tough. She had an eye for the dollar. She loved to bet on the horses there in St. Louis at the horse track. She always was very strict with her two daughters. Well, there were lots of crisis moments in the home until eventually, when Nancy was still very young, four years old, her dad was forced to pack his bags and move out, and from that day, Nancy's mother would not allow him to even as much as step foot in the home ever again. 

Nancy loved her dad and she was hurt by all this, but there was little that she could do as a child. So during the years to follow, her mother invited the sleazier people in the city of St. Louis to hang around the house. She enjoyed entertaining gamblers and horse track hustlers, who would often spend the night when they visited, so Nancy went to school during the day with the stigma of a mother who slept around. The men who would come, they'd come to drink and they'd eat and they'd play poker until the wee hours of the morning while Nancy and her sister were made to stay up and wash the dirty dishes until 2:00, 3:00, or 4:00 in the morning, and then they had to get up and go to school the next day. Although Nancy was allowed to visit her father, he wasn't allowed to visit her, so she would take the train some Sundays to go and be where he was, and they enjoyed their time together fishing, going on picnics, but the moments were few and too far between and too quickly gone. 

When Nancy was 12, her father passed away. Nancy lost the only person in the world she believed that loved her and cared for her. She endured living with her mother for another five years until she was married at 17. Nancy hated her mother during her adult life after she got married. She hated her for all that she'd done, and I suppose for good reason. But about ten years after she was married, Nancy came to know Christ, and she experienced the miracle of forgiveness. But she still had this thing about her mother, and how could she reconcile with all that pain, with all that could not be fixed in her life, the horrendous childhood that she was forced to live through? 

Well, some years after she did become a believer, Nancy came to a crisis, a crossroads in her walk with God. She knew that her spiritual health depended on forgiving her mother for that awful childhood. There were lots of tears and lots of prayer, but in the end, she finally was able to make peace with her mother, even though her mother never asked for it. In fact, by that time, her mother had passed away. Nancy is 77 years old now, and she is my mother, and she was able to be a peacemaker in the most difficult of circumstances because of the power of the gospel that not only she embraced, but the gospel that embraced her. 

It's helpful to improve our skills as peacemakers, but the gospel is simply the most powerful tool we have for peacemaking; it's the most powerful tool there's ever been. It is the promise of forgiveness, not threats, that inspires people to confess sin and forgive others. The hope of what God has done for us through Christ is what pulls marriages together. It pulls ministries back together. It is that hope for what God has done for us through Christ. The more we and the people we lead truly embrace this gospel of Christ and are transformed by it, the more effective we’ll be in guiding our people through conflict in a way that glorifies God and strengthens his people and our witness. 

So in conclusion, I want to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and I have some questions about his theology, but his understanding of the church, I don't have any question. He said, “The gospel is not a tool for an occasional crisis. Rather,” as Bonhoeffer wrote, “it is the essence and nature of every aspect of our life together. And so that's what the passion for the gospel is all about. We started with this four-chapter gospel, because I just hope that we can capture how central and how core this is to who we are as the people of God, because it makes all the difference in how we approach one another in our seasons and our moments of conflict.

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