I was talking with a group of 6 other pastors 35 and under about issues/conflicts/etc we had faced in our churches and without any effort on my part, EVERY ONE of their stories involved someone who was using email in some passive aggressive form that they had had to respond to as pastors.

I have had to tell our secretary and the head of our church board to STOP EMAILING EACH OTHER because they both have unfortunate”tone of voice” via email and each one cannot “read” the other person correctly.

My decision to leave my first church was prompted, in part, by “anonymous” email that I was getting through a webform on my personal website telling me I was wasting my time on this web stuff when I should have been spending all of my time on the church (I was only working about 12 hour days).

Funnily enough, the “anonymous” web form did tell me the IP address of the person who sent it, which traceroute’d back to a small company in town where one of my key volunteers worked.

He signed his email “mad@righteous-anger.com” so I setup Apache to automatically redirect connections from his IP address to www.righteous-anger.com (which was, at that time, a website for a hard rock band, IIRC) which led him to send me another anonymous email from a different computer/IP (I assume his home computer) telling me he was going to try to get me fired, which I replied-to at his regular email address, asking if he would like to get together and talk about it (he never did).

It is now my official work policy that if you raise an issue with me via email, I am going to respond on the phone, and I work hard not to give my work email address to anyone who does not need it for what it does well (one way distribution of information). Obviously this won’t work in every job, but I believe that that insanity (or at least rampant passive aggressiveness) email leads to is actively harmful in most churches.

Your idea elsewhere about turning off blog comments (and, I would add, group emails) after midnight would have avoided another messy situation where someone blurted out a rumor that he had heard and CC’d everyone related to the church in his email address book. Fortunately he didn’t use BCC so I knew who I had to go and talk to afterwards, but it took months to fix the damage he did saying something at home late at night all alone that he never would have said in the light of day, or would have said differently.