Something Every Coven Leader (And Probably Every Pagan) Can Benefit From

[dr_pretentious]

Thanks to a link from lindalee and ingridsummers, I've spent the afternoon completely absorbed by Eran's online book, Trollspotting. Eran draws on Kenneth Haugk's Antagonists in the Church, which explains what to do when compulsively destructive people turn up in your congregation, and then adapts Haugk's basic insights and methods so that Pagans can apply them in our very different congregational structures and theological frameworks. Some of the terms he uses are particular to Wicca, but I think he's right that his work applies to most of the Pagan groups on the American scene. Great stuff.

If Braided Stream Coven had had access to this material in 1997, we could have spared ourselves a whole lot of woe. We survived our troll, but I can easily see why many groups don't survive that kind of disruption. The irony is, I had a copy of Antagonists in the Church sitting unread on my shelf the whole time I needed it, but I didn't make a priority of it because I could see that the useful bits would require a lot of rethinking for application in my context.

If I ever take up teaching the Craft again, Trollspotting will be on the reading list I give my students. I urge those of you who are training to be Pagan clergy right now to put some time into reading it. I wonder if I can interest my fellow members of Clover Coven in hosting a discussion of it for the local Groves in the Blue Star tradition, maybe sometime this fall or winter.

I've dropped Eran a comment at his website urging him to publish, through Lulu.com at the very least. Maybe if he gets enough comments to that effect, he might take the plunge. The whole Pagan community would benefit from having this text available in multiple formats.

Comments

[persipone.livejournal.com]

I'm delighted to see that someone's written a Pagan-accessible take on the ideas from Antagonists in the Church. I've seen that book come up in a lot of discussions, and always wanted to read it. But, I've also got to say that I *sometimes* think the emphasis on "trolls" in Pagan group dynamics misses a deeper truth. Sometimes, chaos is caused by one or a few deliberately destructive individuals. But, a lot of the time, it's just the usual opinionated people misunderstanding each other, and everything gets blown out of proportion. In that case, everybody starts accusing each other of being the "troll", and nobody tries to step back, de-escalate, and examine their own behavior.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

One of the things I like about Trollspotting is its acknowledgement that normally reasonable people are capable of having unreasonable moments, or whole issues they can't cope with reasonably, or the odd bad habit. Having strategies for coping with trolls is only useful if you have a fairly narrow definition of what a troll is.