"Leave your offering and go and be reconciled with your brother." Conflict is a part of every community and family, whether in Haiti or the US. Several times we have had to help our regional committees resolve conflicts. In one case, one of the committee members had a long-standing conflict with his pastor that we didn’t know about until we visited the church. Ronald William, one of our board members, visited the church affiliated with one of the schools where we planted an evangelistic soccer team. He noticed that one of the regional committee members did not even enter the church, but sat outside the church for the whole service with his arms crossed looking angry. When Ronald questioned him about this, he went into a long story about all the ways this pastor had hurt him ever since he had become pastor a few years ago. It turns out Jean (not his real name) had been a top leader in the church before this new pastor took over, and one reason he was upset was because he not a part of the leadership team anymore.
We realized that the regional committee was not going to function well unless this dispute was resolved so Ronald and I made a special trip to talk with the regional committee about this. We met with the pastor first and he explained his side of the story. Then we met with the whole regional committee. God worked it out that “Jean” was able to explain why he felt the way he did and he and the pastor were able to reconcile their differences.
All this is very ironic since the curriculum we are using with our players is “Living in peace with each other” How can our leaders teach the players under them how to do this if they are not at peace with each other?
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