(finding moderate, mutually acceptable solutions)3 Accommodation (neglecting personal outcomes for the sake of the other)
4 Avoidance (sidestepping, postponing, or withdrawing from conflict)
5 Collaboration (seeking assertive and cooperative settlements)10
You may find that one of these approaches is your dominant style. Are you satisfied with how you handle conflict? Are there skills you would like to enhance? How does your conflict resolution approach compare with others in your faith community? In what ways do your conflict resolution strategies enhance or subvert others in your group? 11
5 T.V. Philip, "Christian Spirituality (1 Corinthians 1:18-25)," Religion Online, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1539.
6 Victor Frankle, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Pocket, 1959).
7 Hirschfield, Brad, You Don't Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism (New York: Harmony, 2009), 65.
8 Fischer, Noah. "Occupying Tension," Inquiring Mind (2012), http://www.inquiringmind.com/Articles/OccupyingTension.html.
9 Hirschfield, 248.
10 For more explanation of these descriptions, see Norma Cook Everist, Church Conflict: From Contention to Collaboration (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004).
11 Adapted from S. Rice, Non-violent conflict management: Conflict resolution, dealing with anger, and negotiation and mediation (Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, California Social Work Education Center: 2002).
2
Covenant, Conflict, and the Common Good
When I meet with parents who want their children to receive baptism, I frame the ritual in terms of covenant. God calls us. We respond. The congregation witnesses, affirms, and supports the vows that are made. As we prepare, I ask parents to tell me what they think the word “covenant” means. Answers range from confused shrugs to “a place where nuns live.” Some will state that a covenant is like a legal contract. Most do not think about a set of mutual promises that call us to faithful accountability while being sustained by God’s grace. The metaphor of covenant can also provide a framework and vocabulary for spiritual activists to understand what it means to be faithful to God through active contemplation and contemplative action.
The Protestant Reformed tradition reminds us that God’s covenant with Israel expressed God’s love and offered an invitation to serve and love God in faithfulness.12 Hebrew Scripture scholar Walter Eichrodt claimed that covenant provided Israel’s life with a goal and its history with a meaning. In covenant, God created an atmosphere of trust and security in which called people could find the strength to willingly surrender to the aims of God. When God summoned Israel into a covenant relationship, the notion of an arbitrary and capricious God changed. People would now know exactly where they stood with the God of Israel. From that came the joyful courage to grapple with the problems of life.13
When it comes to spiritual activism, we also remember that covenant has a political dimension. Liberation Theology reminds us that God takes sides in the struggle for justice. As Gustavo Gutierrez says,
The God of the Exodus is the God of history and of political liberation more than he is the God of nature … Yahweh is the Liberator … The covenant gives full meaning to the liberation from Egypt; one makes no sense without the other.14
Covenant is a response to grace. God chooses a people so that the people might choose God. Even when the people fail to follow their side of the covenant, they are never without the promise of reestablishment and renewal. God gives identity to the people. God defends and establishes them, and invites them to grow in their ability to hear and obey.15 Some of us get tense when we hear the word “obedience.” Maybe it is because we tend to associate obedience with perfection, punishment, following rules, and even words like “shame” and “belittling.” While an element of compliance and threat certainly exists in Levitical law, covenant invites people to obey God’s prophetic call to compassionate justice, even imperfectly, as a way to claim that we belong to God and want God’s love to be known in the ways we relate to one another.
Covenant can also bring unity. The covenant spoken by the God of Israel to Moses had formative power in that it unified disparate and loosely associated tribes around faithfulness to the will of God. Admission to the covenant was not based on kinship but the readiness to submit and vow oneself to the God of Israel.16 Covenant secures a state of shalom. Through faithfulness to God, people experience a state of intactness that brings vitality in matters affecting the life of God’s people.
The metaphor of covenant points beyond itself to the liberation and re-creation of new people. Covenant expresses the best we can be. God calls us into covenant community. God personally interacts with us as a community. God’s aims for the community are expressed in norms like righteousness, devotion, and love. A community that learns the art of covenanting makes room for the diversity of God’s many gifts and graces. Spiritual activists begin the work of reconciliation through talking, cajoling, praying, forgiving, crying, and laughing together in covenant community.17
Living in covenant community does not preclude conflict. Healthy conflict, defined as exploring our differences responsibly, brings creativity, energy and new alternatives to faith communities where once there might have been one triumphalistic rule of faith and practice. Healthy conflict offers an opportunity for growth only if the differences of the participants are valued and if people learn to practice civil and patient boundaries with one another.18 Being human means that we will face times when we are angry, confused, or blind. Faithfulness to God can lead us into a narrative of gratitude — an ability to focus on the good things God does in our midst and not just on the ways we pull away from one another. As the Apostle Paul writes,
Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.19
We tell plenty of stories that blame others for our problems. Paul calls us to another conversation. Narratives of covenant and community can lift us out of our ruts by allowing us to participate with God and one another in bearing our living traditions into the future.
The New Testament expresses the Church’s understanding of covenant. Through Jesus Christ, God covenants with the Church. Christians acclaim God does not reject an old covenant in favor of a new one, but engrafts the Church onto the olive tree of Israel so that all may also be part of the covenant people of faith.20 God’s initiative calls us into community. God’s expresses divine aims for the community in norms like righteousness, devotion, and love.21
But here is the thing about covenants; the promises are often so intense that it can feel impossible to consistently live up to them. We will fall short of our promises. What happens when we break covenant? Breaking a covenant is different than violating a contract. In a contract, if one party breaks the agreement it can be voided. Sometimes the offending party is penalized, but both sides may
