Review: Managing Conflict in the Church

Managing Conflict in the Church by David W. Kale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is well-researched and packed with information that is sometimes cited from other authors in the Church Conflict circles. Kale and McCullough make an attempt to provide reenactments of real-life church conflicts to illustrate the substantives but often fall short of the believability factor that Dan Allender, for example, is a master of. Sometimes, the stories drag on for way too long; a dose of brevity would be much welcomed. Each chapter closes with a short story in a segment titled "from the pastor's desk" that is similarly unimpressive. One such uninspiring example would be Chapter 8's mentioning of Charles Swindoll's irritation with an unruly cow that led him to threaten to sell her to a Presbyterian who could strike her (he as a Quaker apparently could not) but then it did not lead well into the substantive thereafter.

The content is relatively insightful, although the book's formatting made it lose some lustre in terms of readability. Much can also be improved with regards to how engaging the material is - avoiding walls after walls of text by providing quotation blocks of notable concepts and by adding pictures/comics. Overall the book is so-so - it has some sparks of great content but other times the material is clearly off the mark. For readers who would like to learn more about manging church conflict, I'd instead recommend the excellent If You Bite & Devour One Another: Biblical Principles for Handling Conflict by Alexander Strauch (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2619174098).

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