Nonviolent Communication in Christian Context: A Review of Transforming Church Conflict: Compassionate Leadership in Action – Russell Haitch

It is rare to find a book in practical theology that is both so practical and so theological.  I want to thank the authors for explaining Nonviolent Communication and helping me see its huge potential for church ministry.

I might otherwise have avoided NVC indefinitely.  NVC is a program with trainers and trainees and a trademarked acronym.  NVC has a headquarters in New Mexico and a central guru, Marshall Rosenberg, to whom the trainers and trainees refer reverentially.  Rosenberg is spiritual but not religious, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.  He makes large claims about the essence of human nature and the essence of human violence, calling the latter an “evolutionary blip.”

If you tend to think programs in general are for the desperate or the gullible, then why care about this one in particular?  The answer will come from an hour or two spent reading Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication or watching a YouTube clip of him doing a seminar.  Alternatively, you can just skip these intros, since Latini and Hunsinger give an excellent primer in their book.

Rosenberg has a small but astoundingly shrewd set of psychological ideas that he plies to maximum benefit.  He has an impressive range of experience helping people transform destructive conflict, from the interpersonal to the geopolitical, and in fact he makes a good case that it is all interpersonal.  His four-step procedure involves observing behaviors and finding the feelings behind them, but these first two steps are preliminary to the higher aim of identifying needs—the unmet needs of oneself and of the other person.  Embracing these needs is the crux, whether the need is for security or spontaneity, for closeness or for space.  Once people can see their needs in all their beauty, then (as the fourth step) they can work together to find strategies that make everyone happy.  They can do so with alacrity, according to multiple anecdotes of success.

One may sneer at the simplicity or mechanical feel of this approach, but the extent of conflict in churches and in families today makes it worth trying.  At some point, we are all desperate. Further, the approach is not as narcissistic as it sounds, with its talk of getting needs met. As one central insight, Rosenberg notes the human need to give to others.  (It is more blessed to give, Jesus said.)  With his guitar he sings an earnest poem by Ruth Bebermeyer that goes, “I never feel more given to/than when you take from me.”  Further, this approach is not as self-abasing as it sounds.  As another central insight, Rosenberg notes that giving should be joyful and non-coercive.  Please don’t give to me, he says, unless you can do it with the joy of a small child feeding hungry ducks.   Size of the child and appetite of the ducks aside, the point is poignant, and one recalls again the words of Jesus: Freely you have received, freely give.

Rosenberg does not actually quote Christ but the fact that one can do so indicates something important about NVC.  It becomes surprisingly easy to lift its psychological insights from their metaphysical underpinnings and to reposition them upon a foundation of classic Christian theology.  Here we come to the brilliance of the book by Latini and Hunsinger.  Their book is good in untold ways, but I can tell you four good reasons I am recommending it to colleagues and planning on assigning it to students.

The first reason is that this is the first book, to my knowledge, that says how the ideas of NVC apply to church conflict.  NVC people talk about a lot of settings, but rarely, if ever, church settings.  In this book, everything pertains to the church.  Church people talk a lot about the peace of Christ, but do not always deal well with discord in the body of Christ.  Regarding this discord, we know that fights about the new carpeting are not just about color, and even that fights about doctrine are not just about principles.  Still, it is not enough to recognize that people have an emotional investment; after all, what are we supposed to do about it?  Connecting emotions to needs turns out to be a vital pragmatic step toward answering that question.  Other steps are needed as well, needed first.  Here the authors discuss nonjudgmental observing and empathetic listening, and in doing so they are not merely restating the obvious; they are showing, by explanation and illustration, how to create an atmosphere where church members desire to love and not strangle each other.

A second reason I appreciate this book so much is that Latini and Hunsinger are able to provide a theological framework to support their psychological ideas and practical guidance.  They do not shirk from testing the principles of NVC against the verses of Scripture.  They examine things from the perspective of Karl Barth and other theologians.  They honor theological complexity; for example, when talking about judging, they recognize that the waters are deep.  In a more simplistic rendering of NVC, you always observe behaviors, you never evaluate, you never criticize or find fault, and you always censure those who do.  While it is good to recognize that criticizing is a frequent vice in interpersonal relationships, the authors are scholars who grasp that critical thinking is still a virtue in the realm of ideas.

A third and related virtue of this book is the way it aptly critiques some aspects of NVC.  Overall, they present a very positive reading of its principles and techniques, but appreciation does not devolve into panegyric.  For instance, they question the way that NVC adherents sometimes bifurcate thoughts and feelings, in order to elevate emotions and denigrate the intellect.  This questioning turns into an interesting discussion of the limbic system and the one hundred billion neurons that make the brain the most complex structure anyone can think of.  The discussion has little direct relevance to the techniques of NVC—and yet one cannot help thinking and feeling that an admiration for how humans are created has some bearing on how humans decide to treat other humans.

A fourth virtue of the book is its psychological amplitude.  They connect ideas to the wider conversation.  When the topic is needs, we hear from Abraham Maslow; when it is empathy, we hear from Carl Rogers, obviously.  At several places they expand on Rosenberg’s understandings by drawing on NVC trainers such as Robert Gonzales and Susan Skye, who are new to me but known personally by the authors.  In this way, they take the NVC discussion to a depth I had never encountered or thought possible.  Most of the deep ideas are not too difficult.  Clarity of communication, a hallmark of the NVC movement, is also a nice feature of this book.

For over ten years, I have been teaching in a seminary that serves a denomination classified as an “historic peace church.”  Along with Quakers and Mennonites, the Brethren have an ethos of nonviolence.  It has inspired them to seek ways to transform conflict.  They went to war-torn Europe in the last century to start things like the Heifer Project, and recently they were working in North Korea and other places where conflict is severe.  However, in listening to youth, we hear them talk about conflict closer to home, in families and in churches and in their denomination as a whole.  They ask, where is our “peace witness” when it comes to our own parents or our brothers and sisters in the church?

For this reason, when I was asked to lead a retreat for young people on peace, I did the standard discussion of conscientious objection to war, but I also took along a bunch of ideas and exercises based on NVC and a manuscript of this book.  It was not coals to Newcastle.  The material was fresh and stimulating for both youth and older adults.  Pastors and other church leaders who are dealing with conflict—in other words, all of us—will benefit tremendously from reading this book immediately.

Russell Haitch (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) is Professor in Practical Theology and Christian Education at Bethany Theological Seminary.  His research and writings focus on the relationship between theology, popular culture and Christian ministry, including the textbook From Exorcism to Ecstasy: Eight Views of Baptism (Westminster John Knox).