The choice of music, an essential element of worship and church life, mustbe addressed in cross-cultural church planting contexts. As culturesevolve, church planters are faced with choices about musical styles thatmay lead to interpersonal conflicts within the church. The purpose of thisstudy is to empirically examine factors that may enable cross-culturalchurch planters to constructively manage music-related conflicts when theyarise. Members of church plants, like all people, have various goals whenentering into such conflicts. They are concerned about the content of theconflict (i.e., the musical style) and thus have content goals. They arealso concerned about social elements of the conflict (e.g., theirrelationships, their identity and values, and the process used to resolvethe conflict) and thus have social goals. The results of this study of 276evangelical Christians indicate that achieving both content goals andsocial goals contributes to overall satisfaction across various conflictoutcomes. Moreover, the evidence indicates that achieving only a socialgoal leads to greater satisfaction with the conflict outcome than achievingonly the content goal in music related conflict. This implies that churchplanters, when faced with music-related conflict, should strive to meet thegospel-congruent social goals of people with whom they are in conflict inorder to maximize satisfaction with the conflict outcome._______________________David R. Dunaetz, PhDAssistant Professor, Leadership and Organizational PsychologyAzusa Pacific University
Mission in Evolving Cultures: Constructively Managing Music-Related Conflict in Cross-Cultural Church Planting Contexts