New Brighton, Minn. ? The two dozen people gathered around the conference tables don’t look wounded. They laugh knowingly at one another’s stories. They relish a day away from the office. They speak freely of their faith and spirituality.

But the seminar they are attending is a kind of group therapy. They are clergy, leaders of churches and synagogues, and for a few hours they talk freely about what might be hush-hush back home: How to deal with “difficult people” in the congregation.

The difficult person might be the head usher caught changing the attendance numbers after the service. The retired pastor who exerts an uncomfortable influence on a previous congregation. The disenchanted church treasurer who refuses to pay the pastor.

Or any number of parishioners who are routinely demeaning, threatening, aggressive, intimidating or just plain impolite.

Mark Sundby has seen them all. More accurately, he has heard about them all, as a licensed psychologist and ordained pastor who works as a sort of theological career counselor in New Brighton.

“From the first time I heard about the treasurer who refused to write a check out to the pastor, I began hearing recurring patterns,” Sundby said. “I’d hear these stories again and again.”

He was able to generalize about some common types of difficult behavior in the congregation, such as the hostile-aggressive intimidator, the eternal board member with a bent toward control and even those who are “Christian nice” never complaining or saying “no” but masking their true feelings and avoiding anything that might lead to conflict.

One big family

Sundby organized a recent seminar at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities that allowed participants to tell how they feel when they encounter difficult people in the parish. They described powerful emotions: anger, hurt, defeat, confusion, betrayal, shock and fear.

It just as easily could have been a seminar for business people or government employees. All organizations must deal with difficult internal behavior.

But in the congregation, people are supposed to love everybody. You can’t fire the troublemakers. And no matter who is involved in conflict, the pastor still is supposed to pastor everyone, and the parishioners are to be in ministry to one another.

In that way, the parish may resemble a family more than a business organization.

“I think it’s a very fair comparison of the church to a family system,” Sundby said. “There certainly are generational issues, parental figures, testing of limits and the like.

“Like families, congregational systems wish to maintain the status quo and will transfer their anxiety onto something else often the pastor rather than deal with the real issue. If we’re all focused on the pastor or the controversy over the color of the carpet, we avoid having to deal with the real issues between ourselves as congregational members.”

The seminar identified common sources of conflict in a congregations. They include:

Transference. People responding to the pastor or rabbi in ways that really reflect other relationships or issues in their lives.

Expectations. The congregation expecting leaders to be omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent, or clergy expecting the congregation to be just like (or unlike) their last one.

Idealism. Leaders or parishioners becoming discouraged when parish life doesn’t match their hopes and dreams.

Among a host of coping strategies he offered was the need to bring clarity to any conflict. Determine the exact nature of the complaint, Sundby suggested. Is it really what the person initially presents, or is it something else? A person may complain about the pastor being “incompetent” when the real concern is a perceived lack of recognition or appreciation.