After the Storm: Rebuilding Trust in Post-Change Congregations

By W.J de Kock, ThD
Educational Consultant to Partners in Ministry
Professor of Practical Theology at Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University
12-minute read.

Growing up on the Highveld just outside Johannesburg, I learned early that storms don't linger.

They build in the afternoon, enormous, operatic, the kind of thunderheads that make you feel small in the best possible way. They arrive with full theatrical intent: lightning over the horizon, rain that doesn't fall so much as arrive, the smell of wet red earth and something electrical in the air. And then, almost before you've adjusted to them, they're gone. The sky clears. The light turns gold,  that particular Highveld gold, that makes the whole world look freshly rinsed and worth staying in. You step outside, breathe it in, and think: perhaps it's going to be alright.

Melbourne does the same thing. Different sky, different smell, wet eucalyptus instead of red earth, and the thunder is less convinced of its own importance,  but the light afterwards is the same. That gold. That exhale.

I thought of those Highveld storms a few years ago, standing in a church car park after a difficult congregational season, breathing in the Melbourne version of that post-storm air and wanting very much to believe the feeling.

The big change had gone through. The restructure, the strategic shift, the staff transition — whatever it was — and technically it had been won. The motion passed. The logic was sound. But the car park conversations told a different story. Familiar faces were missing on Sundays. Emails had a chill. Someone who used to bring biscuits to every meeting hadn't been seen in weeks.

The storm had passed, but the emotional debris was everywhere.

Now what?

I was not alone. Seven in ten Protestant churches in Australia are currently declining,  not plateauing, declining by ten per cent of attendance or more. The NCLS research that produced that figure described it as "sobering." Sobering is one word for it.[i] A congregation that once gathered 150 people now gathers 105 — and in the forty-five who are no longer there is a story about change, conflict, and trust that the leadership report did not include.

International research sharpens the picture even more. In the FACT 2000 survey of 14,301 American congregations — the largest study of its kind — three-quarters reported some level of conflict in the prior five years. Of those, 69 percent recalled the loss of members, and a quarter saw their pastor resign, retire, or be removed. The data is blunter still about worship change: congregations that changed their worship practices significantly were twice as likely to experience serious conflict as those that stayed the course. And the most common source of all that conflict? Not theology. Not money. Control, cited by 85 percent of pastors surveyed. These are the weather system that comes with the territory of leading change.[ii]

And yet we keep being surprised by the debris.

The reason, I suspect, is that we misread what conflict in a congregation actually is. We treat it as disagreement, a problem of information, logic, or communication. Fix the communication, repeat the vision, improve the process, and the conflict resolves. If only. George Thompson calls the deeper reality the alligators in the swamp: the unwritten assumptions about power, space, money, and identity that lurk beneath the surface of every congregation, perfectly invisible until something disturbs the water.[iii] Those alligators were never about the chairs, or the service time, or the worship style. They were always about something older, something that cannot be resolved with a better slide deck.

Here's a thought that might rearrange your thinking: most church conflict isn't really about what it appears to be about. The presenting issue, the rosters, the building project, the new worship style, the colour of the carpet (always the carpet), is rarely the actual conflict. It's the visible fin above the waterline. The rest of the shark is made of assumptions.

Speed Leas, one of the most clear-eyed researchers of congregational conflict to ever survive a vestry meeting, identified six escalating levels, and his diagnostic is almost embarrassingly simple: it is revealed in the language that people use.[iv]

•              Level 1, assumptions are generous :”let's figure this out together." 

•              Level 2, assumptions begun to curdle:  "some people are saying..." — vague, third-person, guarded.

•              Level 3, assumed motive has turned malicious: "you always," "you never." 

•              Level 4 assumptions harden: "it's a matter of principle." When someone says that, they are no longer arguing about an issue. They are defending a self — and their assumption that their identity is on the line is probably correct.

•              Level 5 assumptions are unspoken: "there's no point." 

•              Level 6 assumptions go under ground:"everything's fine," while the passive-aggressive behaviour does the actual work underground.

Beneath every level, Jaco Hamman reminds us, is a wound. When a congregation's identity has fused with a leader, a programme, or a way of doing things, any significant change dislodges something people cannot quite name — a sense of who they are, of whether they still belong here. The assumption driving their resistance isn't stubbornness. It's grief. And grief, as anyone who has sat in a hospital corridor knows, does not behave politely.[v]

Which means the most important assumption you need to interrogate isn't theirs. It's yours — the assumption that resistance means rebellion. It almost never does.

So how do you interrogate an assumption? You do what Jesus did. You ask a question.

Martin Copenhaver, in his quietly devastating study of Jesus's teaching method, counted the questions Jesus asked across the four Gospels. The tally: 307 questions.[vi]He was asked 183 in return, and answered — directly — three of them.[vii]Three. The Son of God, the Word made flesh, the one who is the answer, spent the overwhelming majority of his ministry not giving answers but asking questions. Curiosity was not incidental to Jesus's method. It was his method.

Which raises an uncomfortable implication for leaders who are very good at explaining things. The most powerful tool in the post-conflict toolkit is not a better explanation. It is a better question. Not "let me help you understand why this was the right decision" but "help me understand what you've been carrying." Not "here's what we learned" but "what did this cost you?" The shift is small. The difference is enormous.

Then, in what must have been the most painfully luminous conversation in all of Scripture, Jesus asked the same question three times, once for each denial.

Notice what he did not do. He did not assume. He had every right to. He had been there in the courtyard, after all. He knew exactly what Peter had said: the denials, the cursing, the bravado collapsing into something small and afraid by a fire that looked very much like this one. He could have walked up the beach with his conclusions already drawn, his verdict already written. You failed. I know it. You know it. We both know it.

But he didn't. He asked.

Douglas Estes, in his forensic study of Jesus's use of questions in John's Gospel, makes a point that should reorder how we read this scene: Jesus's questions, even when he appears to already know the answer, are not rhetorical.[viii] They are genuine. They seek a real response. They hold space open rather than closing it down. He asked anyway. Because asking is not a sign of ignorance. It is a sign of respect. It is the refusal to let your assumption stand in for another person's reality.

So on the beach, Jesus interrogated his own assumption — do I actually know what is in this man's heart right now? — before he interrogated Peter's. And in doing so, he did the one thing that makes repair possible: he created a space he did not try to fill. He asked. He waited. He let Peter answer.

That is the move. Not the vision statement. Not the strategic pivot. Not the well-crafted email to the congregation. The move is the question held open long enough for a real answer to emerge — the willingness to not-know for long enough to actually find out.

Which means the conditions for trust to regrow are not primarily structural. They are not created by better processes or cleaner governance, though those things matter. They are created by leaders who are willing to ask rather than assume, to wait rather than manage, to hold space rather than fill it.

Australian bushland after fire does not recover on a schedule. It recovers on its own terms — stubbornly, slowly, more beautifully than anyone predicted — putting down roots in soil that was scorched only months before. The ecologists call it resprouting. The theologians call it resurrection. While the language differs, the phenomenon is identical.

God is in the regrowth. God has always been in the regrowth.

Your job is not to manufacture it. Your job is to tend the conditions that make it possible — and to trust the One who has been raising things from the dead considerably longer than you have been trying to manage change.

[i] Ruth Powell (NCLS Research), presented at Exponential Australia National Conference, cited in "600 Pastors and Teachers Learn about Church Growth, Decline and Planting," NCLS Research, ncls.org.au, 2022; Tim O'Neill quoted in same report. Decline defined as attendance falling by 10% or more between 2016 and 2021. There are signs of recovery, see  NCLS Research, Australian Church Pulse Check 2021–2024 (Sydney: NCLS Research, 2025), cited in "Australian Church Pulse Check: Signs of Recovery and Hope from 2021–2024," NLife, December 2025.

[ii] Carl S. Dudley and David A. Roozen, Faith Communities Today: A Report on Religion in the United States Today (Hartford: Hartford Institute for Religion Research, 2001); and "Insights into Congregational Conflict," FACT 2000 analysis report, faithcommunitiestoday.org. The 85% "control issues" figure is drawn from a companion Christianity Today survey of pastors (2004), cited within the FACT conflict report

[iii] George B. Thompson Jr., ed., Alligators in the Swamp: Power, Ministry, and Leadership (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005). Thompson uses the "alligators in the swamp" metaphor to describe the unexamined assumptions about power, territory, and identity that lurk beneath the surface of congregational life and surface ferociously during change.

[iv] Speed B. Leas, Moving Your Church Through Conflict (Washington, DC: The Alban Institute, 1985; updated ed., 2002). For a concise overview of the six levels, see also Congregational Consulting Group, "Levels of Conflict," based on Leas, congregationalconsulting.org.

[v] Jaco J. Hamman, When Steeples Cry: Leading Congregations Through Loss and Change (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005). Hamman frames congregational resistance to change as a manifestation of communal grief, arguing that loss of identity, programme, or leadership style functions as bereavement requiring pastoral facilitation, not managerial override

[vi]  Martin B. Copenhaver, Jesus Is the Question: The 307 Questions Jesus Asked and the 3 He Answered (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014). Copenhaver, former president of Andover Newton Theological School, argues that asking questions was not merely a pedagogical device for Jesus but the very form of his relational presence — an invitation to wrestle rather than simply receive.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Douglas Estes, The Questions of Jesus in John: Logic, Rhetoric, and Persuasive Discourse (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 78. Estes argues that Jesus's questions in the Fourth Gospel "very much seek an answer" and function as genuine information-seeking speech acts, not rhetorical devices — even when the narrator indicates Jesus already knew the answer.