Six years ago, while I was working at a church, a powerful, high-influence parent (Lauren1)complained to me about a volunteer leader who happened to be a friend of mine. The parent told me to remove the volunteer from working with her child, or she and her husband (chair of the multi-million-dollar trustees committee) would leave. After several pastoral follow-up calls about the nature of her concern, it became clear that this parent just didn’t like this volunteer. I brought all of this to my boss, and he made it clear that this was not my choice to make, and told me to fire the volunteer.
I called her and, full of rage at being asked to do it, made up flimsy excuses to tell the volunteer why she was being removed. She knew me well enough to push back, and as I tried to defend my half-hearted reasons, I could tell she was getting confused and overwhelmed. She was my friend, and she felt like it must be personal, that there must be some reason I was suddenly firing her from a role she really liked. Frustrated, I snapped, “It’s Lauren, ok. She doesn’t like you and doesn’t want you here, and my boss said I have to fire you so her family doesn’t leave.”
I immediately felt a wave of regret; I couldn’t believe I had told her all of that. After a moment of awkward silence, she laughed.
“Wait, this is just because Lauren doesn’t like me? You don’t think I did anything wrong; you’re not mad at me?”
“No, I’m not, and you didn’t.”
She laughed again. “Why didn’t you just say so! I was out here believing all kinds of things, worrying that we weren’t going to be friends anymore! I’ll step out of the role, but give your boss a hard time for me ok? Make sure he feels bad for this.”
Eli Harwood, an attachment therapist, explains that “the primary experience of being abused is not being hurt; it’s being confused.”2 The questions that truly gnaw at people are often “What happened?” and “Was I wrong?” Even outside of abuse, I think we can all relate to the way that an unanswered question can gnaw at us even more deeply than a devastating answer.
There are times that we in church work obscure feedback, soften language, and avoid confrontation in order to protect the people on our teams and in our congregation. We simply ask a different volunteer, stop inviting someone to join committees, or perhaps most commonly, allow a person to keep the trappings of influence while quietly deciding that their input is no longer under consideration. I believe that we believe, in our deepest hearts, that we are being nice. That we are being humble, kind leaders, following well-trodden paths before us. It does avoid having to directly hurt people. But it also leaves them confused. And that confusion hurts too. It leaves them asking themselves,
What did I do wrong?
Why does this feel so different?
What changed?
When confronted, I often see leaders double down, ostensibly to protect those they are speaking to, but inadvertently making the confusion worse,
Of course we still value you.
No, we definitely still want you in the room for that meeting.
Nothing is wrong; you didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just…
Not every disagreement, conflict, rearrangement of committee chairs needs to come with a public airing of grievances, but I do think that the confusion we create trying to avoid harm is harm in itself. What would it look like to be more honest in our feedback, more transparent in our work, and to give people the mercy of a real answer to their questions?
This week, pay attention to where you may have been sowing confusion in an effort to avoid hurting someone, and look for one opportunity to give more honest feedback to someone who may need it. I think we owe people that, and I think it can make a real difference.
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