The Hostile

He came to argue, or to mock, or to disrupt — and he is good at it. He waits for the moment someone says something sincere and then says the thing that makes two people laugh and one person go quiet. Every week you drive home composing the message that would ask him not to come back.

This chapter is the hardest one to accept, so let us be precise about what it does and does not ask of you.

Two different jobs, and only one of them is yours

Managing behavior is your job. You can and should say “let’s hear from someone who hasn’t spoken yet.” You can talk to him privately, outside the meeting, about how he is treating people — plainly, without a speech. You can protect the woman he interrupts every week. A facilitator who lets one member run over everyone is not being gracious, just absent. None of that is in tension with anything in this class.

Judging the heart is not your job. Deciding that he is bad soil, that he will never come to anything, that the group would be better without him — that is a different act entirely, and it uses knowledge you do not have.

Address the behavior. Leave the soil to God.

Why the sorting is postponed on purpose

No, lest while you gather up the weeds, you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. — Matthew 13:29-30 (OTB)

The servants in that parable were not wrong that weeds were present. The landowner does not deny it. He refuses anyway — because their sorting would have destroyed wheat along with the weeds.

That is a startling thing to have on record. God’s stated preference is to tolerate real weeds rather than risk real wheat, and the reason is that the sorting itself is not safe in our hands. The harvest is a real event with a real separation, and we are not running it.

What usually happens

Mockery needs a reaction to live on. A facilitator who neither argues nor flinches — who simply asks him the same question as everyone else, again, next week — removes most of what he came for. Some of them leave. Some of them get quieter. And some, over months, turn out to have been arguing with something they were also unable to stop thinking about.

Recite this

I will address the behavior. I will not judge the soil.

Try it this week

If someone is disrupting, have the private, plain, unangry conversation about behavior this week — and go into it having already decided you are not asking them to leave.

I will talk with ________________ about behavior, not about their heart, before ________________.