Conflict isn’t far from your church. I don’t simply mean that it’s in that congregation down the street—I mean it’s coming to yours.

AN EXCELLENT PRIMER ON CHURCH CONFLICT

Tara Barthel and David Edling have written an excellent primer on church conflict titled Redeeming Church Conflicts: Turning Crisis into Compassion and Care. With years of experience in conflict mediation through Peacemaker Ministries, they are well qualified to speak to this issue.

It’s easy for “discipleship” and “discipling” to be mere buzzwords, labels we slap on things to make them sound spiritual. And if our churches move beyond buzzwords and try to create a culture of one-on-one discipling, it’s easy to turn even that into just one more program. Weekly meeting at Starbucks—check. Reading the Bible or a Christian book together—check. Talking about the same two or three struggles with sin every week—check.

There aren’t many doctoral dissertations which are directly relevant to the work of pastoral ministry. This review, however, is about one of them: Jim Samra’s book Being Conformed to Christ in Community, which is the published version of his 2004 Oxford DPhil thesis.

Discipleship is fundamental to Christianity. To be a Christian is to be a disciple—a follower, an apprentice—of Jesus. This entails a lifetime of grace-driven effort in pursuit of greater and greater conformity to Christ. Yet in many churches, real spiritual growth among church members is an anomaly. Stagnation is the norm.

In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Denton published Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, the first book to draw from the groundbreaking discoveries of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). Their description of teen religiosity as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” has been eagerly embraced by journalists, ministers, and other interested pontificators.