**7.4 Principles focused on powers and privileges**

The CCGHP is focused on values based on authority and freedom. As is often the case in AFM, a senior person such as the pastor, overseer or church president is responsible for coping with conflict in the power-based relationships. The attribution of seniority to dispute resolution is characteristic of the African approach to conflict.

As mentioned above, it is believed in traditional cultures that a senior individual has developed the capacity to deal with disputes over time. In addition, seniority is linked to wisdom to deal with any emerging dispute [19]. This seems to be the case with the AFM in Zimbabwe, in which the responsibility for presiding over certain disputes, especially those involving pastors, is provided to senior pastors or supervisors.

The distinction is that the relationship oriented African approach to conflict is driven by the desire to strengthen relationships or reconcile the contending groups as opposed to an approach that seeks to decide who is right or wrong, as is the case with the rights-based approach. There are several commonalities, but the rights based approach varies greatly from the conventional dispute resolution process. In the rights-based system, decision making authority is vested in the hands of a senior person, which suggests that the power to determine the outcome of the dispute is based on rank or position. Usually, in this situation, the most powerful party wins while the less powerful loses. This kind of conflict solution typically produces winners and losers in a real world, which ensures that the conflict will reappear because it remains unresolved [12].

A dispute resolution is assured only by a mutually satisfying outcome of a conflict. The management (in this case, the Provincial Committee or the Apostolic Council) relies heavily on laws, rules and regulations to decide the outcome of a dispute in the rights-based approach. Under this model, management ensures that laws are respected and that sanctions are imposed if not adhered to. The perpetrator is also not consulted in the process of imposing punishments, and the ultimate objective in most situations is to win over the perceived opponent or offender at this stage, thereby producing a winner-loser outcome. The dispute may seem to have vanished in some way, but since there is a winner and loser, it may come again, but at a higher cost [12]. The solution focused on rights does not really allow reconciliation between the perpetrator and the offended.

It should be understood that the settlement of disputes is focused on mediation between the parties to the conflict. It allows the parties to work together cooperatively (offender and victim, in this case the pastor and the aggrieved assembly or vice versa) by listening to each other, not with the intention of winning a debate, but to consider the situation, desires and needs of each other. Dialogue includes skills such as empathy, which is "to listen with your opponent's ears, see with your opponent's eyes, and feel with your opponent's heart. Lack of empathy allows the parties to the dispute to get swept up and confused in the competition for "dog-eatdog… [20].

Open communication is another important skill that sustains dialogue, as someone said: "People don't get along because they fear each other. Since they don't know each other, people dislike each other. They do not know each other and they have not interacted with each other properly" [20]. As a central element of dispute resolution, mediation between the parties (offender and victim) can also theoretically produce win-win results.

#### *Organizational Conflict - New Insights*

To this end, both leadership and follow-up in the church of the AFM in Zimbabwe will need to accept that the existing internal conflict management processes do not always yield win/win results, and possible reasons for this are that they are neither derived from the model of criminal law nor the model of African Ubuntu Restoration.
