Here’s a leadership skill we don’t speak of very often: how to shut someone down who’s trying to take over your meeting or church service. Everyone in ministry who has tried to lead meetings has seen the need for this ability at least once or twice. A participant has their own agenda, and whether its conscious or not, they are going to assert themselves and try to overrule the leadership’s plans for this particular gathering. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the smaller your church, the easier this can be to do. When this happens, it’s a particular test of both the leader’s wisdom and spine.
I’ve seen some pastors who are very gifted at this. Some divisive brother stands up in a member’s meeting and the leader knows he’s going to try to platform something he’s been arguing about with the pastors. So, the pastor issues a quick rebuke and command to sit down. And amazingly, the man obeys.
Needless to say, I do not have this particular manifestation of the Spirit. I lack the force of personality and charisma to respond in this way. Yet I have still faced my own share of others trying to hijack meetings I’m supposed to be leading. One week, a visiting Central Asian believer started a heated debate in our church service, claiming that we were unfaithful for serving grape juice instead of wine for communion – and this in an Islamic context. Another man aggressively tried to change the language of our Bible study mid-meeting to one that served him better. Never mind it was the weaker language for everyone else in the group. Yet another man (a visiting leader no less) forcefully coopted the man with the guitar and made our church vigorously sing several more worship songs at the end of the service because “that was what would please Jesus.”
We learned the hard way to never mention a church picnic until the very end of our meetings because the ensuing heated discussion about where to go, what food to prep, how to buy such food, and who should be invited would inevitably get out of hand. If you are new to this blog, you need to understand one thing about our Central Asians. They take their picnics very seriously.
As I said, I’m not very gifted in publicly shutting down disruptive people and getting the meeting back on track. But as with any act of service to the church, sometimes you need to do it anyway, regardless of gifting. In all of the situations above, I did my best to muddle through it, trying to balance gentleness and respect on the one hand, and firmness and authority on the other. Knowing that I lack natural authority in these settings, I’ve learned that much of the work needs to done outside of the meetings to build spiritual authority – via grace-based respect, trust, and loyalty with the other believers. This is so that they will follow a gentle leader in a tense moment when a strong charismatic leader would seem to be more effective. It’s also very helpful to have established the purpose and agenda of the meeting clearly and publicly beforehand so that you can more easily head off any unexpected attempt to take over.
Sometimes attempted hijackings are unintentional, and simply come from the toddling faith of new believers. My wife and I were laughing about one of these situations just the other day, a situation that involved (of all things) a song by the late Canadian singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen.
Our church plant had gathered in a nearby cabin to hold a Christmas service. Gathering like this allowed us to have an “indoor picnic” as it were, even though the weather outside was frigid. As part of this half-day gathering, we also held our weekly service, in which we would take the Lord’s supper.
My teammate and fellow temporary elder had preached, focusing on the Magi’s visit to Jesus, so that meant it was my week to lead the service. As I introduced the communion time, and walked through our three conditions for participation (faith, baptism, a heart ready to repent), one of the ladies from our team and one of the local ladies got up, getting ready to distribute the torn flatbread and chai cups containing grape juice.
Sitting to my right was Timothy*, one of the believers who only gathered with us once a month or so due to security fears. He and his wife had been regular attenders during their first year, but after the church had been visited by the security police, they had come around a lot less. However, they could almost always come to any sort of picnic event we held, since they felt that these kinds of social events gave them greater cover if questioned by their Islamic cleric relatives.
Timothy and his wife were still pretty young in their faith, certainly lacking in discernment, but the genuineness of their faith and affections was apparent. One time we visited them only to find out that Timothy’s wife was very excited because some kind of a local spiritualist woman had told her that she could discern that Timothy’s wife had been a Christian in a previous life. She was thrilled, feeling that this was a validation of her faith now in Jesus. We of course had to tell her that reincarnation is not biblical. Thankfully, she accepted this correction with humility in spite of her previous excitement.
When we practiced communion at this church plant, we would first explain it, then pass out the elements, then take a minute of silent prayer together. This time of silence was so that we would all have a chance to examine our hearts and confess sin to God as necessary. This was often followed by believers getting up and quietly repenting to one another before they then partook of the bread and juice. Most weeks, whether that was taking place or not, whoever was leading the service would end the time of silence by praying out loud, then lead the group in eating the bread and remembering Christ’s body broken for us, and drinking the juice and remembering Christ’s blood shed for us.
During this Christmas service, I remember being encouraged by how things were progressing. “Fencing the table,” excluding some present from communion, had been so hard for the local believers in the beginning. But they were truly taking ownership of it now, skillfully explaining in hushed tones to nonbelievers present and unbaptized believers why it was better for them wait to partake in communion until they could meet all three of the conditions I had laid out.
The elements were distributed and the time came for the minute of silent prayer. As I bowed my head I suddenly heard a song playing loudly from a smartphone. I peeked to my right. It was coming from Timothy’s phone. His head was bowed, but he was holding his phone up, clearly playing it for the benefit of the group in this moment of self-examination. Right away, I realized I knew those guitar chords. I knew those lyrics “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift.” I had known them ever since the movie Shrek had popularized the song for my generation. It was Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
In spite of its hauntingly beautiful melody and use of the term Hallelujah, this song is not a spiritual one. It is, at best, about the dark side of love. But it also contains lyrics that hint at darker sexual themes. The tricky thing is that it’s written with clear allusions to the biblical stories of David and Samson. So, many in the West play it at weddings and funerals, hearing these biblical allusions and Hallelujah repeated over and over and think that it must be some kind of spiritual love song. Timothy, with his intermediate English, had made the same mistake. And through him, Leonard Cohen was hijacking the service, taking it in a direction it did not need to go.
Timothy, to his credit, was just trying to serve the body in this simple way. He had found a beautiful song that he thought was a Christian one. But I knew that one of those “save the meeting” moments was upon us. Here we were, in the middle of communion, and I realized that we were about to be serenaded by “You saw her bathing on the roof; her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you” – and other lyrics that get even more awkward. Even if most of the locals would miss it, at least a third of our group were native English-speaking teammates and kids.
It was time to pivot. Bold leadership was called for. So, our silent prayer ended extra early that night. I’m sure it wasn’t this bad, but I remember awkwardly clearing my throat and belting out an extra loud prayer right before the whole roof-bathing part of the song. The group seemed to jolt awake, interrupted in the middle of their prayers of confession by a service leader who seemed unusually twitchy. An intentional glance from me at Timothy’s phone meant he got the message, and duly tapped off the music mid Hallelu–
Hijacking averted.
The rest of the evening went well. The fellowship was sweet, the food was celebratory, the gospel was shared, the electricity stayed on. Timothy did come over at one point to see if he had made some kind of mistake with the song. I assured him that I knew his heart was to serve the other believers as they were praying, and not to worry about it. I knew he was sensitive enough to not try that again without talking about it beforehand.
My wife and I laugh whenever we remember this incident. You really can’t predict the kind of things you’re going to face in the messiness of local church or church planting ministry. But meeting hijackings are not always this innocent, nor always so easily averted. Paul speaks of the importance of order in the church service and calls for quick action against the divisive man (1 Cor 14:40, Titus 3:10). Jesus models this as well with a number of his sharp, public rebukes and redirections (Luke 13:15, Luke 11:27-28, Matt 16:23). Faithful leaders need to do likewise.
For those who are leaders or who aspire to be so, we need to be ready to intervene against hijackers. Some of them will be wolves, dangerously trying to mislead the flock. Some will merely be misguided believers with good intentions. Wise leadership will be willing to guard against any and all attempts to take over – even if they come from dead Canadian musicians on a Central Asian’s smartphone.
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*Names changed for security
Photos are from Unsplash.com
Entrusted to the Dirt 
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