LEADERSHIP FORUM
Leadership Forum
January 1, 1986
Referees shoulder the brunt of opposition from both sides. Interjected into the contest to keep peace, they have a job not many envy. Pastors regularly find they, too, must blow the whistle and make an uncompromising call-but not on sports fields. Pastors end up in the middle of volatile domestic squabbles, where emotions run high and outsiders fear to tread. Sometimes standard counseling procedures may be impossible to apply. How do pastors best intervene in family problems, which so many professionals consider no-win situations? Are there effective approaches to these delicate dilemmas? To find out, LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Jim Berkley met with four Ohio pastors who know the peril of refereeing domestic problems: -Don Engram of Church of the Open Door in the Cleveland suburb of Elyria -Joel Hempel of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Cincinnati's inner city -Jerry Kirk of College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati -Paul Tropf of Armstrong Chapel United Methodist Church in the Cincinnati suburb of Indian Hill. Leadership: Police officers rue getting enmeshed in "domestic disturbances." With such supercharged emotions on both sides, anyone stepping into the middle can get shot. Yet when they do intervene, the abused person will often drop the complaint the next day. It's frustrating because it's only a matter of time until the phone rings again. Do you, as pastors, ever share their feelings? Joel Hempel: Like the police, I have gone to quite a few volatile situations-usually involving an alcoholic husband and a battered wife who refuses to press charges-and I get frustrated, too. Parent-child conflict can be messy as well. One girl in her late teens was being physically abused by her parents, and I asked her how ...
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