When you sign up for church leadership, you sign up for critics.
The only other profession that deals with Chatty Cathies on a regular basis are comedians.
Understanding how an improviser handles hecklers is helpful to keeping your sanity as a leader.
Now, comedians have two choices: Ignore or Confront.
Ignore Tips for Chronic Critics:
- Set-up an email filtering system. When an email arrives from a chronic critic, it automatically ends up in a folder you don't read.
- You don't have to respond. Make the delete button your friend.
- If something comes in the mail, you don't have to read it. Simply write, "Return to Sender." Out of sight, out of mind. And sets up a strong boundary to the chronic critic.
Have an automatic default system for dealing with criticism.
Nehemiah 6 and 13
Jesus did both...
Confronting the Heckler is high risk/high reward.
Second City lore tells of how a young Bill Murray once broke a heckler's arm after dragging him out into the side alley.
Believe it or not, Nehemiah was not a passive leader; he got confrontational when he had to:
And I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair.
Dang! My boy Nehemiah was beating the ever-livin' CRUD out of people! His confrontations ended with black eyes and bald spots! Now that's the biblical confrontation I never learned about in seminary!!
Now listen, I am not advocating physical confrontation. Instead, verbal ninjutsu is in order. Ninjustu is the tactic of unconventional warfare. Seizing the heckler's words and turning them around on them publicly is a tool in the comedian's and leader's belt.
A recent high-profile example involves one of my former teachers, Tina Fey:
Again, confronting hecklers is high risk/high reward.
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