Christians Need Relational Skills Too

Kymberli Cook: 

Welcome to the Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to the everyday life. My name is Kymberli Cook, and I'm the assistant director of the Hendricks Center. And we are so glad that you have joined us today as we chat through why Christians need relational skills too. And we are joined by Ken Sande, co-founder of Peacemaker Ministries and current founder and president of Relational Wisdom 360, who is more than qualified to walk us through not only why Christians need relational skills, but how to develop these skills. So thank you Ken, for taking the time to join us and sit at the table today. 

Ken Sande: 

Well, you're welcome, Kymberli. It's always a joy to be here with you. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So if you don't mind, you've actually been on our podcast at least one other time, right? We talked about broken families and broken marriages and that kind of thing, but we haven't actually taken the full on relational conversation like you have in some of your materials. So if you don't mind sharing a little bit with our listener, how did you end up dedicating your life to helping people with their relationships? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, I started off actually as an engineer managing a medical research and development team and learned you can have great technical skills, but what makes or breaks you is relational skills, even in something like engineering. So I went on to law school and learned that even more so, that even though you need a lot of technical skills in that profession, what makes or breaks attorneys is relational skills. 

And shortly out of law school, God called me into a ministry of biblical mediation and arbitration, settling lawsuits between Christians outside of court, something we call Christian conciliation. And I worked at that for about 30 years and saw the Lord do some astonishing things, situations that seemed absolutely impossible with dramatic restorations. But after about 30 years of putting out the fires of conflict, divorces, church splits, abuse cases, lawsuits, you name it, I thought, I think I'd rather spend the next season of my life helping people to prevent conflict. 

So in 2012, launched a new ministry called Relational Wisdom 360, or just RW360. And what we've done, is developed some material. It's basically merging all of the good neurology of emotional intelligence, understanding how the brain works, how our emotions impact our lives with good theology. What does the Bible say about emotions, and relationships, and all those things? And so we developed a training paradigm called Relational Wisdom, which is a God-centered biblically-grounded, gospel-driven form of emotional intelligence. And one of our main goals is to help people learn better relational skills, not just emotional, but just lots of other things go into relationships, that ideally would prevent the misunderstandings and the offenses, the trigger conflict like a church split, divorce, lawsuit. 

But also these skills are useful if a conflict does come upon us, and life it's just going to happen, that we would more quickly harness the power of our emotions instead of getting angry, defensive, proud, bitter to realize those things will push us over the cliff. And really just pray for God to help us to take captive, not just our thoughts, but our emotions, our words, and our actions as well, and move toward reconciliation more quickly. So you could call it a CPR system at this point, Kymberli. Conflict prevention and resolution is what we're dealing today, both prevention and resolution. But I would far prefer to prevent a major conflict than I would to get involved in cleaning up the mess. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So how did that happen, or where were you? Do you remember the point where you were like, "I don't want to do..." I mean I know you still do a lot of conciliation and mediation and that kind of thing, but where you said, "We've got to get upstream of this." What was the point where that happened? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, it wasn't one single thing, but it was just sort of sitting back and just realizing, I mean, a big part of our mediation process, we want to know how people got to where they are in a divorce, church split, lawsuit, what have you. And so we'd want to know how did you meet? How did your relationship develop? What's it been like over the years? What brought you to this point? So it's sort of like hitting the rewind on a video and playing it forward. And again, and again, and again, these relationships started out wonderfully. Two men working together found a church, and it grows, and people are coming to Christ and all this is going great. And then some things start to happen in their relationship. And then there's often one meeting where one of them says or does something or one email someone sends. 

And as soon as I hear it, I go, "You did what? Didn't you understand how that was going to land on the other person's heart and ears?" So often Kymberli, people are going, "Oh yeah, I guess I can see that now." I just realize that people come to a fork in the road very often in relationships, and if they take the right turn and go in the right direction, which is the character of Christ, biblical wisdom, living out the incredibly wise principle God gives us on really, they can navigate those things and come out on the other side with an even stronger relationship. 

But if they make a foolish decision, which usually is not a matter of malice or wickedness, it's what I would call in many cases, clumsiness, especially in the church. Church leaders often, almost always are trying to do what they think is good and right, occasionally run into people that are malicious, but that's pretty rare. Most church leaders are really trying to do what they think is the right thing to do, but they are what I call, clueless and clumsy. They're just not thinking. And we get pastors who come to us, Kymberli, and they say, "My elders have told me they love my preaching, but if I don't improve my relational skills in the next six months, I'm losing my pulpit." 

And as one very prominent church leader told me about his denomination, he said, "Our denomination tends to attract men who are intellectual introverts, who are relationally challenged." And so they've got great intellect. They can do Old Testament, New Testament, Greek and Hebrew, but when they try to engage people, they have often never learned empathy, reading body language, putting yourself in the other person's shoes. A great preacher is primarily a sender of information. He's mostly concerned about how he's going to send the information. A highly relational person is concerned mostly on how that other person is going to receive the information. The focus is on the receiver, not the sender. That one shift can make all the difference in saving someone's career, all the difference in the world. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Or their marriage or their- 

Ken Sande: 

Or their marriage. 

Kymberli Cook: 

... job. 

Ken Sande: 

I'm dealing with some people right now, they haven't seen their grandchildren in about six months, and they have been estranged from their daughter-in-Law. And frankly, the grandparents are saying, "All we did was this." And I went, "Did you not understand how that would come across to your daughter-in-law?" And they go, "Oh, okay, now I can see it." So we just really want to help people learn things. Even just listening to a tone of voice, getting probably a little bit ahead of this, but an example. If you're talking to somebody, say you see them at church or in a coffee shop and you say, Hey, how you doing today? And they go, "Oh, I'm fine." That's one answer. But they might sometimes say, "Oh, I'm fine." 

Kymberli Cook: 

Mm-hmm. 

Ken Sande: 

Most people don't realize the second one is a completely different answer. That pause in there, "Oh, I'm fine," actually means "I'm not fine, but I'm not sure you care enough about me or have the time to get engaged. So I don't really want to tell you I'm having a big problem and have you just walk away, because that would hurt too much. So I'll give you a little hint and see if you pick up on it." And too often we've never trained our ear or our eyes to pick up on those little hints that people drop all the time hoping we will catch them and respond to them constructively. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Or training our schedule too, right? Allowing ourselves to have- 

Ken Sande: 

Yep. 

Kymberli Cook: 

... the margin to be able to stop and hear that in a coffee shop. 

Ken Sande: 

Well, one of the greatest ways to build passport with somebody is when you do get that answer. This happened to me one time in a coffee shop and a guy did give that hint, and I asked him a few more questions and he slowly put more cards on the table, so to speak. And after about three or four questions, I picked up my phone and called my secretary, said, Chris, "Would you please move that executive meeting this morning? Something important has come up. I'll be in a little while." And boy, that sent a message to this other guy. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Of course. 

Ken Sande: 

I care enough about you to change my schedule. And that's what made it safe for him to share some really fine China in his life. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So you outlined for us just the ways in which your program is thinking theologically through these things and biblically and character of Christ. There's the theology and all the way through. So the title of this podcast is a little cheeky in that of course Christians need relational skills too. We all recognize that. I really do think we all recognize that. Like you said, "We see the clumsiness in the church and in different kinds of our own relationships and in family, even Christian families. We recognize that all of that happens. But I think that there is a little bit of, I'll put air quotes, "a family conversation," amongst believers as to how we develop those relational skills. I think there's a camp that says if we do follow the image of Christ, if we do what the Bible says, then that all I should expect it to come in line, and all of these things are going to happen for me. 

And then I think there's another camp that might say, yes, we do recognize the transformational power of Christ and the power of the word of God, but there's also some intention that needs to be there. And it might be a little bit more complicated than just expecting it to kind of, I don't want to be pejorative. I was going to say wave a magic wand over it all and it works, but to expect that it's a little bit more complicated. Being familiar with your work, I am pretty sure that you would fall in the second camp of saying, "No, there's some intention that needs to be applied." So why is that? Why would you fall in that camp? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, I guess one thing you could do, you could talk about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. And knowledge is the acquisition of information. And so a lot of pastors especially go to a rigorous seminary like DTS, they're going to spend a lot of time acquiring information, systematic theology, organizing it, thinking it through, synthesizing it, etc. Very valuable necessary thing to do for pastoral ministry. But wisdom is knowing how to live out that knowledge in real life. Definition I often use is wisdom is responding to life God's way. The key word there, well, always God's way, but responding. It's actually putting that information into practice. 

One of the biggest pastoral train wrecks I've ever seen was with a brilliant pastor who actually taught seminars on relational skills. He was a brilliant teacher. He could organize the theology. He could explain the concepts, and yet he was stepping on toes right and left in his congregation, and eventually he lost his pulpit. So he had the knowledge, but he had never learned to really live that knowledge out, not only sadly with his parishioners, but in his family. And so there is this thing, Kymberli where we certainly want to know what the Bible says about things like forgiveness, and confronting, and rebuke, and negotiation. There's a huge amount of information in the Bible, which is a huge part of what our ministry is all about, is teaching that information. But we also want to give people practical illustrations and examples. I think frankly, it's one of the reasons among many others, I'm sure that there's so much narrative in the Bible. 

You can give these imperatives, "Do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not murder." But when you read the story of David, there's living color evidence of a man who in the early part of his life lived out those principles beautifully. And the people were delighted to have him be the king. And then he forgot about it and he turned away from the knowledge. He knew those principles, he had the knowledge. But in the middle of some passionate, emotional, uncontrolled, undisciplined things, he commits adultery and commits murder and brings incredible devastation on his people. So I am a strong believer that we do have to have the knowledge and the Bible has got a wealth of information for us we should be very well versed in. 

But what we try to do through our ministry is say, okay, what does it actually mean? How do you actually develop and enhance this God-given capacity for empathy? And one of the booklets I wrote is called Seven Steps to Empathy. How can you specifically deliberately cultivate it the same way you would learning how to play the piano? I could sit down a piano and just sort of go clunk, clunk, clunk, but I would need to practice to learn how to make a melody. And ideally I'd have an instructor helping me to accelerate that growth curve. So the same thing with relational skills. It takes practice and that's one of the things Paul tells Timothy, practice these things. Practice these things that others might see your example and follow you. That's the other big part of this is the most important way that church leaders actually teach this. It's not didactically from the pulpit or in the Sunday school class. It's how their people see them living it out day to day. 

Kymberli Cook: 

In going through some of the relational wisdom materials, I remember a point where, because of all of the intention that you're talking about, these specific steps toward empathy and that kind of thing, and maybe this tells more about me than I would like to technically share. But I remember thinking that is just so much work. Every interaction with a person, I have to think through all of these things and try to be doing all of these things. And then it hit me or somebody said it in a seminar or something. But that is one way the gospel can be applied in my life. 

And there's this part of me that is carved away and carved more into the image of the Christ who didn't consider equality with God something to be grasped, but laid himself down and humbled himself. And put other people ahead of himself even. And so something as simple as being intentional about how I have conversations, it is difficult. It is hard, it is taxing, but I'm doing it because this is part of how the gospel is applied in my life. And it is how I am shaped into his image, like you're saying, it has to be something that I actually do. Yes, I can be very aware of that need, and of the verse, and all of those things, and of what Jesus did, but it's different when I actually make myself do it. 

Ken Sande: 

Absolutely. And you hit the key word there. It's the gospel. The gospel gives us, number one, the motive to change when we realize all that God has done for us through Christ. Our motive is to respond to that. And for example in Paul says that to when you remember what God has done for you in Christ, then you respond to your brother without malice and you attend to heart, you're kind, you're compassionate. 

It starts with recognizing what God did for me in Christ, and that motivates me to want to be transformed into his image, to imitate him, to serve others, bring people to him. So the gospel is the motivation, but it's also the power for change. We have to say, "Lord, I can't make this change in my own. I need your help." And that's the power, the transforming power of the gospel in us, that we actually can change. We can actually grow. The other thing I want to emphasize, Kymberli is think about when you first learned to ride a bicycle. You had to really focus. You had to really work all of your attention and all of your... It took work to do that. But once you get that muscle memory, what happens? You're not even thinking about it. You're riding your bike down the street and you're thinking about something else going on. It's now become muscle memory. You've got I think a couple little girls. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yes. 

Ken Sande: 

Okay. Think about the early phase of parenting. You're thinking deliberately about everything you do. I mean, do I do this? Do I do this? Do I buy this? Do I change this diaper? Do I do this? Very deliberate. But after you've been doing it for a while, what happens? You're on autopilot. You're doing all of that, getting your girls up and dressed and ready while you're also thinking about going to work and doing a podcast because it's become a habit. 

Most of the decisions we make every day are habit. They're not deliberate. It's like when you're thinking you're going to go down to the grocery store, you get in your car, something's on your mind. You don't even remember making the left turn here and the right turn there and the thing there. You're just on autopilot. So a big part of our training methodology is we give people some very simple acrostics like SOG, self-aware that we're God aware. Read, recognize an emotion, evaluate its source, anticipate the consequences, direct it constructively. Simple acrostics. We say just practice that every day for 30 days. Just put a little card in your dash or a little note on your computer, and as you go to work, just, "Lord, help me to read myself today and everything I'm doing." So you just maybe half a dozen times you're thinking about it during the day, guess what happens in 30 days? 

You're not thinking consciously about it. You're just interacting with somebody without even deliberately consciously telling yourself. You're asking, "What am I feeling right now? I'm a little bit anxious. Why am I anxious?" Well, I'm going to be late for a meeting. If I break off this conversation right now, what will that do? Well, I could really tell this person, I don't care. What's the better thing to do to say could I possibly, "Just a minute. I want to let my assistant know I'll be a little bit late for the meeting." And it just becomes an automatic process. And I think part of this is what it means to be conformed to the life of Christ. We no longer have to think, "Okay, now what would Jesus do right now?" We just start doing it. And that's the transforming power of the spirit. All our training does is assist tools to assist that transforming process. But you're right, it does take work up front. But I'll tell you one thing, it takes a lot more work to go through a divorce down the road. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, it's worth it. Yeah. Please don't hear me saying it's not worth the while. 

Ken Sande: 

I know you're not. 

Kymberli Cook: 

But yeah, absolutely. 

Ken Sande: 

But I appreciate you saying that because I always tell people you get out of our training what you put into it. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, well, as you're talking about things becoming a habit, it makes me think of some of the things that we even say about giftedness here, where once you quote, unquote, master, and please, none of us on this side of eternity and maybe even not on the next, are fully going to master these things. But once we take a step in familiarity and habit and that kind of thing, then we're also able to move on to another layer or another level of sophistication. So then you're able to perhaps walk into a situation of conflict that previously you wouldn't have been able to handle well. But having had a couple of these disciplines drilled into you all of a sudden, "Oh no, I am thinking through the other person's perspective here and I'm trying to serve them here, that kind of thing." And that's something automatic that will serve you in more sophisticated situations as well. 

Ken Sande: 

It's so true. Getting back to those two groups of people you described, it's sort of funny. Over the years, we've really tried to work with a lot of seminaries and we've done seminars that were hosted by seminaries. And I was always surprised how few students would come to those. And I know they're busy, they've got a heavy caseload, they don't have a lot of time. But very often when I was able to talk to some students, the attitude was, I know there's other guys out there that have problems, but in my church, we're going to preach Jesus, we're going to love each other, we're going to grow." 

And they just have this optimistic, and I would sadly say naive attitude toward what it's going to be like to lead a church. And those are the guys that call me back about two years later and say, "Hey, you know that training you did down at whatever, whatever, and I wasn't able to attend that. Where could I get it now? They've been in the trenches, they found out that sheep bite and now they're realizing those relational skills we try to teach them can really make the difference. And not only there, once they get into ministry, they start to realize the strain ministry puts on their families. Ministry is a very stressful career. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Absolutely. 

Ken Sande: 

And if you're not mindful of the impact it's having on your wife and kids, man, it can take a toll. So I'd much rather teach these skills to people right there in the seminary, so they hit the ground running with them. But I also know sometimes it's after they've been in the trenches a year or two that they finally realize how important they are. 

Kymberli Cook: 

For those who would say, "I'm there, I see the importance," or, "You've convinced me. I don't necessarily have a pain point right now, but you've convinced me that I need to be thinking through this." What are some ways or some tools that you could share for how Christians can develop? You mentioned read. What are a couple of the other acrostics? Can you walk us through those to help people think through how they might strengthen their relation or their relational muscles? 

Ken Sande: 

Good. First, I would say, Kymberli, there's a lot of free information on our website people can just go and download. And including if they go to what's called our RW Academy. They just go to RW360.org, or RW360 dot O-R-G. And they click on the training tab and go down to online training. There's a free two-hour course, and I give this course all over the country to pastors conferences, and it's called the Relationally Wise Leader. The Relationally Wise Leader. And it gives a 30-minute introduction to the concept of relational wisdom, biblical emotional intelligence, 30-minute introduction to Biblical Peacemaking, and then an hour applying those concepts to just some real practical, real-life pastoral shepherding situations. And there's about 25 links there to articles. You've got a divisive congregational meeting coming up, how can you keep this thing from exploding and destroying your church? So a lot of the issues we deal with, all that information is free. 

And so I would encourage a pastor to start with that. Those 30-minute introductions are appetizers, if you will, for our eight-hour online courses on those topics, but they can get a taste of what they're like. The other thing that I would encourage pastors to do or seminary students is if they go to our website, click on the Peacemaking tab and they go down to the Christian Conciliation drop-down menu. On that page, they can download a free 70-page e-booklet called Guiding People Through Conflict. And it is a summary of all the key peacemaking mediation arbitration principles we've developed over the years. It's a complete free summary of all those things. That alone, if a church leadership team went through that together, man could they turn a lot of situations away from the cliff and actually back toward restoration. So just want to let you know there's a lot... And in fact, one other free booklet on the website is Seven Steps to Empathy. Pastors should be the most empathetic people in the world, if we're going to imitate Jesus. 

And so there's seven practical little disciplines you can learn that when people approach you at church, you've got this brief window every week before the service and after the service to pick up on a look in someone's eye, tone of someone's voice. They're dropping hints, "I need help, I need help, I need help." And if you pick up on them, you can save a marriage. So those are all free resources. Beyond that though, in all of our courses in the Peacemaker, we've got quite a few acrostics like the Seven A's of forgiveness, Four Promises. So I always like to reduce... I'm an engineer and a lawyer, so I like to reduce things down. I like to understand the very complex background data and information, but then I know you've got to distill it down to something people can easily memorize and practice in day-to-day life. 

So in relational wisdom, for example, we've got four acrostics that we encourage people to work on. And just to give you one of those, I've mentioned the read across. If you want to get better at reading your own emotions and managing your own emotions, learn to read yourself, R-E-A-D. Recognize and name the emotion even mentally. You don't have to verbally name it. Something happens neurologically when you attach a name. Like if a pastor is in a meeting with his elders, he's feeling criticized and he's getting defensive. He starts to feel his stomach tighten up. He doesn't like having these people critique him the way he is. He's feeling threatened. If he doesn't realize that, and read that, and name that "I'm feeling threatened, I'm feeling fearful, I'm feeling proud and defensive right now." If he doesn't realize, that's like three big giants standing behind him, pushing him over a cliff. 

If he can read that and name it neurologically, what happens when you name it, your language skills are located in your neocortex. That's the part of the brain that has impulse control, reasoning, and logic. When you turn that on, you can say, okay, the next step is to evaluate why do I feel this way? "Well, I've never liked being criticized. My dad always told me, I never amount to anything. I'm too sensitive to criticism in life. And so I just don't like criticism. I still wrestle with pride." 

Anticipate, A. What happens if I give into this emotion? I'm going to get defensive. I'm going to raise my voice. I'm going to start shifting blame, and it's going to end up actually causing me to lose credibility with these people. They're going to think less of me if that's my response. That's my instinctive response. It's what I feel like doing. But if I do it, I'm going to lose the respect of these elders. This could go from bad to worse. 

D, how do I direct the power of that emotion? And it's like taking a sailor, harnessing the power of the wind. How do I take this power of these emotions in a constructive direction? What that pastor could do, and I'm actually recounting to you, advice I gave to a pastor struggle this very issue. And he had just said, when you're in those meetings and you start to feel questioned and somewhat criticized, and you feel your body tensing up, your heart starts to pound more and you just feel that tension. Just go, guys, time out just a second. 

I'm still a man struggling with sin. And right now I can just feel that my simple nature is feeling defensive. My pride is rearing its head, my self-righteousness, and I don't want to go there, because that's not going to be good for this meeting. It's certainly not good for the church. "Can we just take about a five-minute break? I need to just walk around the block, talk to Jesus for a few minutes and I'll be back in here about five minutes. I think I can respond more constructively." So he is taking the power. He's going to channel it in a good direction and time and time. And that pastor, I gave him that advice. He called me up a week later. He was so ecstatic. He said, "We just had the greatest meeting and they shared some things and I would've just exploded before, but I did exactly what you said. I walked around the block, I came back. I was actually humble. And I said, Now guys, I understand." 

Kymberli Cook: 

I was shocked, I was humble. 

Ken Sande: 

"And they just said, 'Wow, that's really cool, pastor. What a good example.' And we had the greatest conversation," because he was actually allowing time for the Holy Spirit to work and do it. So recognize a name, evaluate, anticipate, direct. R-E-A-D. It's a simple, simple process, but it actually takes into account some very, very complex neurology. A process called amygdala hijacking is what's going on when our emotions take control. It's operating in awareness of that phenomenon, the amygdala hijacking. But it's also bringing in good theology. God opposes the proud. He gives grace to the humble. A hasty or angry word stirs up strife. There's so much wisdom in the Bible. So that's what we do in our training is we marry what we learned about how God designed our brain with what God's Bibles, the Bible says about how He designed us as well. Put those things together. 

Kymberli Cook: 

That's wonderful. Okay, so if you are listening and you are a believer, we are here to encourage you that you need to intentionally work on your relational skills, no matter where you are. The Lord may have gifted you to be fantastic with individual relationships and socially and that kind of thing. And you navigate these waters like an expert. You still have been given a gift, quite frankly, that can be further harnessed to greater elements of sophistication. And we would highly encourage everybody listening to think really intentionally about that because like we said in the title, Christians need relational skills too. So thank you, Ken for being here. We really appreciate your time and all of the work that you've done in taking all of these complex topics and distilling them down for people to be able to try to live out in the middle of a tense situation and they can actually remember, okay, READ. What am I supposed to do, because I'm really mad right now? There we go. I just did the first one, that kind of thing. So thank you for your work. We really appreciate it. 

Ken Sande: 

You are so welcome, Kymberli. The neat thing, I'll just close with this. These skills are not things that people can not only apply in their work as a church leader, a shepherd, whether it's a women's ministry leader, or a pastor, an elder or deacon, what have you. But what's really wonderful is these are skills you take home at night. And you use them in your marriage. You use them with your children. Quick closing example, one of our acrostics called Self-aware, other-aware, God-aware, SOG. It changed my relationship with my wife when I finally came to grips with how much I was stressing her out when I made left-hand turns with another car coming at us in the other lane. I always thought that car was plenty far away to be safe. And yet my wife read that data differently and she got stressed out again and again. 

And when I just simply started practicing what I believe self-aware, other-aware, God-aware was stressing her out, I was just being proud and selfish. And God tells me to love my wife the way Christ loved the church. And I don't see anything in the Bible says Jesus says, get over it. And when I just live that out and take more time driving, I'm not as close to cars on the highway, I pay more attention. It's changed our marriage. It's changed our marriage. And I use that story often at Pastor Seminars. I get seventy-year-old pastors walking up to me with their wives, with the pastors, with their tears coming down their cheeks and said, "You just put your finger on the biggest problem in our marriage for the last 40 years." It's amazing how often our driving, not to mention all the other aspects. So I just share that with you, that these are skills that can not only really enrich your ministry, but they can also enable you to love your spouse the way Christ loved the church. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Absolutely, and establish his kingdom here. 

Ken Sande: 

Amen. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And we want to thank you, who are listening, for being with us. If you like our show, please be sure to leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app so that others can discover us. And we hope that you will join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life.