I’ve seen hundreds of terribly damaged relationships restored over the years.

Whether the break was caused by adultery, embezzlement, broken contracts, wrongful termination or even physical or sexual abuse, I’ve seen God bring about amazing reconciliations again and again.

But there’s one relationship that I’ve seldom seen restored.

When pastors’ relationships with their leadership teams are badly damaged, in my experience they rarely regain a truly respectful, trusting and productive ministry relationship ever again. I’m not saying this is impossible, but I am saying that it is extremely difficult to repair these kinds of relationships.

This is why leadership tensions need to be recognized and addressed immediately and rigorously, the same way that we address a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer. There is not a minute to lose when serious leadership tensions arise. There is no time for denial, self-pity, blame-shifting or political maneuvering. These responses only pour gasoline on the fire.

Later in this post, I will describe six ways to address serious leadership conflicts. Before doing so, however, it will be helpful to understand why these kinds of conflicts are so difficult to resolve.

Six Factors that Make Leadership Conflicts Difficult to Resolve

One reason pastoral relationships are difficult to repair is because we tend to put our pastors “up on a pedestal,” and once they’ve fallen down in a significant way, we find it difficult to respect and trust them the way we used to. Sometimes pastors put themselves up on a pedestal. Once they stumble and know that we no longer view them as being examples of advanced spiritual maturity, they may feel they no longer command sufficient respect and admiration to lead. Both of these attitudes are in error because they focus on a pastor’s image instead of resting on his identity as a dearly loved child of God who still struggles with sin, as we all do, and yet is being steadily sanctified through the power and love of Christ.

Many church leaders have weak relational and peacemaking skills. As one seminary leader once told me, “Seminaries often attract intellectual introverts who are relationally challenged.” This is certainly not true of all pastors, but it is true of some. Pastoral ministry is inherently relational and frequently involves conflict resolution. If a pastor is weak in these areas and has never taken the time to learn biblical relational skills and teach them to his leadership team, their responses to conflict will often involve defensiveness, blame-shifting and power plays, which inevitably make conflict worse.

In other situations, healing is blocked by a consuming battle for control. Power and control are two of the most seductive forces in the human heart, and church leaders—both pastors and elders—can easily blind themselves to how they are using the Bible to justify a sinful craving to control a church. In some churches, a clique of members, often related by blood or marriage, may go to great lengths to hold onto control. Whoever the players may be, a consuming battle for control will inevitably wound if not destroy a church (see Gal. 5:15).

Pride and unforgiveness often play a major role in leadership conflicts. Pride can make it difficult for church leaders to ask for help and to humbly and honestly face their own sins and failures. Therefore, they often waste weeks or months blaming others for their problems or engaging in political maneuvering instead of seeking God’s grace to get to the root of their problems and change themselves. Even if a pastor or other leaders sincerely seek to change, others may refuse to model Christ’s forgiveness and support a gracious rebuilding of their relationship. As new wounds are inflicted and trauma increases, respect and trust are steadily drained away. Eventually the desire to work together is killed altogether, and everyone decides it’s better to simply part ways.

Trauma can also be a major barrier to reconciliation. Few things are more devastating to a man than losing his job and his livelihood. When that job was viewed as a calling from God, the traumatic effect of this loss is far, far greater. Trauma alters the brain’s alarm system and nervous system, leaving individuals trapped in survival mode. This causes fundamental shifts in how they interact with the world, manifesting primarily through hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, avoidance behaviors, diminished trust and unpredictable memory processing. When a pastor feels threatened with the loss of his pulpit, these trauma responses will steadily undermine reasonable engagement and reconciliation.

Finally, it must be recognized that in some cases the failure to achieve restoration is because the pastor was not truly called to pastoral ministry in the first place. Just because a man is a gifted expositor and speaker and finds pleasure standing in front of people to preach God’s word, that doesn’t mean he is actually called to pastoral ministry. A genuine pastoral call will include, among other things, the gifting to be an imitator of Christ (1 Cor. 11:1), which reveals itself in the pastoral ability to model humility, read other people’s emotions and needs, show genuine compassion, forgive quickly and completely, bear with others’ weaknesses and model the fruit of the Holy Spirit. No man displays these qualities perfectly, but if this is not the usual inclination of a pastor, ongoing relational conflict will often drive him from his pulpit.

Whatever the cause, in my experience the pattern is sadly consistent: badly damaged relationships between pastors and their leadership teams are extremely difficult to repair.

Therefore, this is certainly one relationship where “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Six Ways to Prevent or Heal Leadership Conflicts

Here are six practical ways to prevent this kind of relational breakdown.

First, draw on the wisdom in books like Dangerous Calling, Pastors at Risk and Make Smart Choices, which provide invaluable insights and practical suggestions on how to avoid many of the attitudes and behaviors that damage leadership relationships.

Second, encourage your entire church leadership team (pastors, elders, deacons, ministry leaders, etc.) to go through our online course, Discovering Relational Wisdom. If this training resonates with your team, encourage your leaders to take their relational and peacemaking skills to a deeper level through our RW Shepherd course. To strengthen the relational and peacemaking skills of your entire congregation, implement the action plan set forth in Bringing Relational Wisdom into Your Church. As your leadership team and your entire congregation study and practice these biblical relational skills, you can protect your church from becoming one of the tragic statistics described in Strike the Shepherd).

Third, schedule regular leadership retreats where you focus on deepening personal relationships, celebrating God’s work through your team, and candidly addressing any disappointments or tensions that are creeping into your relationships. If you sense tensions developing with one of your fellow elders, arrange a “mini-personal-retreat” by asking him out to lunch where you can connect at a personal level, find areas of common interest and encourage one another in the Lord. You will often leave such a meeting thinking, “We’ve had our differences, but it was good to be reminded of how much we share in Christ.”

Fourth, trust the wisdom of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7:3-5 by being the first leader in your group to “get the log out of your own eye” by humbly confessing the ways you have contributed to the tensions in your leadership team. Even if other leaders are contributing greatly to the tension, one leader’s humble willingness to focus first on his contribution will sometimes trigger the “Golden Result” (people usually treat us the way we treat them). God can use your example to inspire other leaders to take responsibility for their own actions, which could start a wave of healing confession and repentance. There is no guarantee that this approach will result in genuine reconciliation, but it will certainly do less harm than self-righteousness, denial and blame-shifting.

Fifth, move quickly to counter the ways that trauma may be distorting your attitudes and behavior. Read again what I wrote above – Trauma alters the brain’s alarm system and nervous system, leaving individuals trapped in survival mode. This causes fundamental shifts in how they interact with the world, manifesting primarily through hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, avoidance behaviors, diminished trust and unpredictable memory processing. If you are going through a serious leadership conflict, your mind is being altered day by day to put up new defensive systems. Some of the systems will only make your reactions less constructive. At the very least, read the information on trauma that is easily available on the web. Go deeper by reading relevant books, such as Understanding Trauma: A Biblical Introduction for Church Care. Wisest of all: work with a trauma-aware counselor to understand how trauma has impacted you and how you can learn to counter it’s negative effects.

Sixth, when serious conflicts continue on your team, seek professional conciliation assistance. Professional conciliation takes takes time, effort and money, but it can help your team fully reconcile, regain ministry vigor and display the redeeming power of the gospel, as described in Leadership Meltdown Leads to Amazing Reconciliation. As this story illustrates, conciliation can not only restore personal relationships but also help a leadership team resolve substantive issues that triggered their tensions, such as theological differences, missional priorities, staff responsibilities and matters of personal preference, such as communication or worship styles. For more information on RW360’s professional conciliation services, click here.

It will be hard for busy leaders to take these kinds of proactive steps. The tyranny of urgent tends to keep us from seeing future dangers and taking steps to avoid them.

But wise leaders (and the loving people who surround them) see these kinds of dangers and move to protect themselves and their congregations from the pain and damage of fatally damaged leadership relationships (see Prov. 22:3).

– Ken Sande

PS – If you would like to see a vivid example of how the “Golden Result” (people usually treat us how we treat them) can heal a church leadership conflict, see A Wave of Confessions Saves a Church.

PPS – If you were forced to leave ministry as a result of relational conflict and still believe that God has called you to ministry, there is still hope. Our God is a God of redemption. When you read Three Ways to Overcome a Crippling Ministry Loss, you may discover that like Jacob you have actually been wrestling with God and that he is giving you a “limp” that can set the stage for a whole new season of ministry.

Reflection Questions

• Why do you think pastors and leadership teams are rarely reconciled after experiencing serious conflict?
• Have you ever been in a church where the pastor had a serious falling out with the leadership team? How did they handle it? How did it turn out for them? How did it impact the church?
• Have you ever been in a church were the pastor and the leadership team successfully resolve some serious differences? What was the key to their success? Were they able to continue working together?  How did it impact the church?
• Which of the three steps above will you encourage in your church today?

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© 2026 Ken Sande

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