Navigating Hard Conversations in Ministry: 3 Essential Tools for Healthy Team Relationships

Based on Eddie Hoagland’s Conference Talk

Ministry is messy. Church involves people, and people bring complexity, assumptions, and yes—conflict. If you’ve ever found yourself dreading a difficult conversation with a team member, volunteer, or leader, you’re not alone.

Eddie Hoagland opens his talk with a vivid memory: a Good Friday rehearsal where tension escalated to the point that a leader threw a coffee cup against the wall in rage, shattering it into pieces with coffee dripping down the wall. While your ministry conflicts might not involve flying coffee cups, we’ve all experienced those moments where relationships feel strained and conversations feel impossible.

Why Hard Conversations Matter

Hard conversations are part of healthy relationships. If you’re leading or serving on a team where everything must always be positive, you’re actually missing out on the depth that comes with authentic relationship. Avoiding difficult conversations doesn’t preserve unity—it undermines it.

Here’s the truth: So much damage is done in churches when people believe something based on an assumption and then act accordingly. The only way to clear up these assumptions is to sit down and talk with people. When you commit to having uncomfortable, awkward, tense conversations because you’re fighting for healthy relationships, you’re essentially saying, “We value unity here.”

And why does this matter? You want the presence of the Holy Spirit showing up in your services, and you have to prioritize unity. The unity is of the Spirit, and God blesses what aligns with His heart for His people.

Tool #1: Practice Self-Awareness

Understanding the Threat Response

The reason difficult conversations feel terrifying is because when you enter those spaces, you’re feeling emotions that may be hidden in the dark places of your heart. A counselor once told Eddie that anxiety is your body’s response to a threat—and that’s not always unhealthy.

If a bear walked into your meeting room right now, your anxiety would be completely appropriate and helpful. Your body would give you exactly what you need to respond. The same system activates when facing emotional threats, but the problem comes when it doesn’t turn off.

Listen to Your Body

Your human limitations are God’s gift to you. If you didn’t have physical limits, you’d think you could do everything on your own and lose what it means to be human. Medical research shows that stress is as much physical as it is emotional—your body responds the same way to emotional threats as it would to physical ones.

Pay attention to how anxiety shows up in your body:

• Waking up at 3-4 AM with a racing mind
• Lower back pain during stressful periods
• Tension in shoulders, stomach issues, headaches

Your body is sounding an alarm, and that alarm system isn’t bad—it’s healthy. But you need to pay attention to what it’s telling you.

Identify the Threat

When you know you need to have a hard conversation but feel anxious about it, ask yourself: What exactly is threatening me?

Three common threats in difficult conversations:

1. The outcome of the conversation – You need it to go one way, but the other person might want it to go another way
2. How the other person will respond – Will they yell? Will they shut down? The unknown response creates anxiety because you don’t know what’s about to happen
3. What the conversation could do to your relationship – Some people avoid hard conversations because they think healthy relationships should never have negative interactions (this is actually unhealthy)

Practical Steps

Once you’ve identified the threat:

1. Tell God what you’re threatened by – “God, I’m about to have this meeting. I don’t want to have it, but I believe I’m fighting for health here. Here’s what I’m threatened by…” Put it in His hands.
2. Speak the threat early in the meeting – “I want you to know I’m actually really nervous about this conversation, and here’s why… If you could be gentle with me, that would be helpful.” Nine times out of ten, decent people will respond with grace when you’re vulnerable.

Tool #2: Clarify Your Objectives

If you don’t know what you’d like to happen, what chance does the other person have? It’s not their job to figure out what you want. You need to walk in knowing what you desire as the outcome.

Questions to Clarify Your Objectives

Am I seeking validation? Sometimes your objective isn’t to change something practically—you just need to be heard, seen, and have someone hold this struggle with you. That’s worth a conversation.

Am I communicating a wound? If there’s pain in your heart that no one knows about, you may need to speak up. People can’t always see wounds, and if you want healthy relationships, sometimes you have to share that there’s pain in a particular area.

Initiating the Conversation

Jesus teaches us an incredible standard: “Leave your offering… if you know your brother has something against you, go make it right.” Notice that Jesus doesn’t specify who the guilty party is. In the kingdom of God, if you know something is severed between you and a sibling in Christ, you’re supposed to do something about it.

Practical tips for calling the meeting:

• Don’t be ambiguous about the topic – Don’t say “Can we talk about something next week?” and leave them hanging. Instead: “I need to talk to you about my role on this team.”
• Use neutral language – Instead of “I’m massively underpaid,” try “I’d like to have a conversation about my compensation.”
• Consider the timing – Not three years from now, not right this second, but find the right balance. Maybe Tuesday instead of Monday.

Tool #3: Position Yourself in Reliance

There is no strategy that will create a miraculous conversation where there’s breakthrough between you and a brother or sister in Christ. What you’re looking for isn’t strategy—you’re looking for the presence of God to show up in your meeting.

Walking in the Spirit

From the moment you sense something stirring in your heart, rely upon God. Don’t view God as a bonus if He shows up—walk every step asking for the Holy Spirit to be your guide.

Practical reliance:

• When you can’t identify the threat: “Jesus, I am anxious. There is something troubling my heart. Could you help me see it?”
• When your body’s alarm system goes off: Get up, go pray, ask “Jesus, what is happening?”
• When you don’t know your objectives: “I think what you’re after is this…”

The greatest gift God gives us is Himself. He wants to step into these conversations, and breakthrough happens through the power of the Holy Spirit, not through skill alone.

The Cost and the Reward

Hard conversations come with a cost—they’re emotionally draining and relationally risky. But when approached with these tools, they become more fruitful and helpful. Relationships get stronger because love prevails, love covers the difficulty, and the relationship grows.

The goal isn’t to make hard conversations easy—it’s to make them healthy. When you fight for unity through difficult conversations, you create space for the Holy Spirit to move, for Jesus to be exalted, and for genuine community to flourish in your ministry context.

Your team can become a family where hard conversations happen, love prevails, and relationships grow stronger because of it. That’s worth fighting for.

“Father, I pray for the unity of the spirit to grow in your church. I pray that there would be a new zeal, a new passion for fighting for healthy relationships, so that as the unity of the Spirit fills the room, so can Jesus be exalted in that place.”