The Divine Nonconformist

I've doing some planning work for an adult education class this Fall, one in which I'm going to be exploring familial conflict and dysfunction through the lens of Scripture. Meaning, go into the Torah and the Writings and the Gospels, and surface pungent archetypal tales of Folks Not Getting Along.

The challenge, of course, isn't finding such stories. Lord have mercy, is that not a problem. The challenge is picking and choosing from the great groaning table of human mess woven into our Holy Book of Books, so's it ain't a one hundred and fifty seven week study. I mean, we get one opening chapter in which it's all good, and by the end of the second chapter, Adam's shaming and Eve's blaming and then it’s the healthy sibling dynamics of Cain and Abel and we're off to the races.

As part of that, I went searching for an old book on family systems that I'd read years ago, one called How Your Church Family Works, which somehow had made its way from the pastor's office into the parlor of the manse. 

Bowen/Friedman Family Systems work isn't cutting edge these days, as the therapeutic herd has moved on to trauma-centering approaches, but I still find some of the core concepts useful. The operating assumption of family systems therapy is this: we're part of organic systems and networks of relationship that shape our reactions and responses to others in ways that we frequently struggle to understand. That has always made sense to me, and it can be quite useful as a therapeutic process, but digging back into those concepts reminded me of a couple of things that never worked for me about that approach.

First, one of the core ideas behind Family Systems work is the concept of the triad. Meaning, it's not just your binary relationship with your mother, but your relationship with your mother and your father. It's not just your relationship with your mother, but your relationship between you, her and your younger brother. You talk about her to him, he talks about you to her, and you talk to him about her, and everything is emotional triangles and triangulation, as the trifold energies of interrelationship play out. There, the challenge I have isn't that this is too complex. It's that it's far too simple. Most of us are connected intimately to more than just two other people, I would hope, and that means our true relational connections aren't a two dimensional shape. They're more like energies playing across an ever evolving four-dimensional neural network than anything crudely Pythagorean.

Second...and this is a nontrivial problem I have with secular therapy-speak generally...it can get too centered on the dynamics of dysfunction. Everything is seen through the lens of dysfunction. As part of my family systems counseling coursework years ago, one central class assignment was to chart our emotional genealogy. We created actual charts of our family history going back as many generations as we could remember. Then, we had to use a set of labels to indicate the triangulated dysfunctions...the divorces, the addictions, the estrangements, the co-dependencies. That left us with a dark genealogy, a familial tapestry of wreck and ruin. And on that chart, there was no way to indicate the places of health. No mutual care, or faithfulness, or honor, or nurturing, or love.  It felt both jaundiced and a weensy bit counterproductive.

There’s a rule in motorcycling, and it’s a simple one: you go where you’re looking. If you anxiously target-fixate on a hazard in the road, you’re going to go right into it. Without a hopeful vision, a clear sense of the good, or anything to orient one’s faithful action towards, things stay broken.

The Apostle Paul describes a very different approach to life in his letter to the Church at Rome. In the twelfth chapter of Romans, Paul talks about how we live our lives. That represents a shift from the tone of Romans up to this point, which has been mostly diving deep into the theology of salvation by grace through faith.

As the letter ends, Paul takes a step back, and starts grounding all his theologizing in what it actually means to walk the Way of Christ. Here is what that actually looks like, Paul says.

In the first verses of Romans 12, Paul is once again talking about the body as a deep metaphor for the nature of how we participate in Christ, with each of us contributing our gifts towards the good of the church. Our purpose as Christians is to serve the good of one another, just as every part of the body serves the good of the whole. Some lead, some praise, some give, some show mercy and kindness. But all Christians have as their purpose the business of contributing to the joy of all, each part of the other, each serving in their own way as agents of God’s love. This is an important image for Paul, because he presents exactly the same image of the church as the body of Christ for two whole chapters of another letter, in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.

Before we reach Romans 12:4-8, the Apostle makes another statement about the body. He suggests that we need to present ourselves as “living sacrifices,” giving ourselves over to the reason for which God created us. Our minds are to be transformed, and the purpose given to our lives is not one that comes from the pattern of this world, but from the pattern of the love that is the Holy Spirit of the living God.

This is a significant part of our reality right now, as our culture stumbles through thickets of violence, chaos and turmoil. The world is on fire, there are unprecedented storms and the spreading blight of war, and none of that is metaphorical. In all of that, we’re obsessed with dysfunction, focused on dysfunction, because that’s what our culture wants us to look at.  Obsessing over what is broken is the primary business model of commodified media, eh?  And where does that get us?  Just deeper into the mess.

What is our task, as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, in such a time?

It is not to be conformed to that world. We are not to yield to the disorder that comes from the human hunger for control. We are not to hunger for power, spread fear, or expect others to serve us. We are not to succumb to slander and innuendo, eagerly passing along gossip and misinformation. That does not mean “the gossip and misinformation spread by the people we disagree with.” It means our gossip and misinformation. It means the lie we tell ourselves about others to reinforce our bias against them.

As the apostle Paul writes elsewhere, true followers of Jesus do not seek to tear down, but to build up. They do not deconstruct, but construct. We are children of the God who brings order from nothingness. If we wish to build or rebuild, that creative act rises from having developed a deep sense of the gifts and graces God has given you, and knowing what makes the world good. Know what is broken and why, sure. But it requires grace and wisdom to heal that broken thing.

For all of the wisdom in that family systems book about church as a family...and let it be said, there are very valuable sections in there...there was a third thing that I found challenging.  The last part of that "triad," so to speak.

There was a minor missing piece on the church front: God.

Oh, the concept of God was present.  Scripture was cited.  Here and there God would be included as one of the persons in a dysfunctional triangle, like some absent uncle or neglectful parent. 

But God at work among us, as the one that stands above our mess, and that can transform our mess? That was entirely missing. All we got is systems on systems on systems, and no sense of engagement with the higher power and startling grace that heals and transforms the wreck we make of things.

So, sure, we must accurately observe the things that don’t work, the shredded quiltwork of the pain we inflict on one another. There are good uses for family systems thinking, as there are for so many of the myriad other approaches to surfacing our brokenness. Being aware of how we sustain and maintain our pain is a vital step in that process.

But what heals?  What transforms?  That comes from knowing that God is above that dysfunction, and that Christ’s path leads us to something very, very blessedly different.

Triangles

Today, during a generally productive day discussing congregational dynamics and the processes of change, we got into some family systems conversations.  I'd expected this, given how much the readings I needed to do played off of family systems therapy ideas.

Honestly, I like the idea of looking at a congregation through a systems lens.  That means considering it as not just a mishmosh of individuals, but as a dynamic and living system, in which the reactions of individuals don't just reflect them as existentially isolated beings, but reflect the array of relational inputs that form them.

That floats my boat, and it mirrors my theology of church.  You know, church being the Body of Christ and whatnot.

But today, we were talking about "triangles," one of the central concepts of family systems.  Meaning, A talks to B about C.  C talks with A about B.  Power shifts depending on the nature of alliances between the three.  The idea presented, and it was all over the books I read, is that human relationship dynamics are fundamentally triangular.  Or triads.  Or something like that.  And I just can't bring myself to glom on to it.

I've seen that sort of simplistic relationship dynamic, of course.  The little girls in my older son's four-year old preschool class related to each other in triangles.  Two girls would klatch, and exclude a third.  Five minutes later, four year old attention spans being what they are, the triangle would have shifted, and another girl would be sulking off in a corner.  It was a bit like the crap high school girls put each other through, only at the fluttery 20X fast forward speed at which preschoolers interact with the world.

Of course triangles can be found.  You can see triangles anywhere you go looking for them.  But ultimately, I find the idea that all human relationships can be understood through this lens to be too neat and tidy.  I tend to view human social systems as complex latticeworks of interrelationship.  Social networks are more like a neural network, in which the interconnections go deep and are many and varied.

This is, of course, far more complicated, and nearly impossible to present in chart or graph form.  Within that system, there are triangular formations, sure.  But if I and another person exist in relationship to a third, each of us bring into that relationship an entire array of other relations.  Those can be with mutual acquaintances, or with family, or with outside systems.  All of those impact how we will respond.  Getting all Pythagorean about human relationships just seems inadequate.

But as the class struggled to make this framework fit, I just kind of sat there and looked pensive.  I wasn't leading.  Let it go.  Sometimes, it's better to keep your own counsel. 

And blog about it later, of course.

The Hidden Lives of Congregations

With my interim training program just a week away, I've finished up the last of my assigned "churchybook" readings.  The book I just completed, The Hidden Lives of Congregations, by Israel Galindo, was far and away the most comprehensive.  A few reflections:

Minus Side:  It's really quite dense.  This is not light reading.  Not at all.  It is leavened by the occasional anecdotal story about congregational life, but it's mostly meat, written in language that tends towards the academic.  It goes hard and heavy into some of the most significant findings of congregational researchers, occasionally to the point of being a bit inaccessible.  For a well educated layperson, this might work...but it feels very much like a text that speaks at the graduate level.  It isn't a book you can rush through in one sitting.  Or two.  Or five.  I liked it, but for some, that might make this inaccessible.

Minus Side:  It can feel a bit cluttered.  As it reviews and presents most of the literature on congregational life and dynamics, it sometimes gets a bit overwhelming.  With multiple typologies of church types and dynamics, it presents faith communities in such a multivalent way that establishing a clear set of metrics for measuring congregational health can get a bit challenging.  It comes at congregational life from so many different directions that it can be a bit dizzying.  There's intentionality in the structure of the book, but sometimes it feels a bit like drinking from a churchybook firehose. 

Plus Side:  It is thorough.  On the flip side to the above, it really does provide a complete review of congregational research.  Typologies that lay out the impacts of organizational size, internal structure, congregational self-image, and spiritual style are all presented.  Of all of the books that I've gone through for my interim training prep, this one has felt the most useful.  It really does open up the breadth and depth of congregational life.

Plus Side:  It resonates with reality.   Many academic works feel like just that...academic works, full of theories and concepts that exist in the Platonic realm of church forms, but have no connection to how things are.  With this book, I lost track of the number of times I scribbled things like "Yes!" and "Exactly!" and "That's so true!" in the margins.  The ways that Galindo opens up church decision-making, organizational stumbling blocks, and other elements of how congregations function (or don't) is profoundly grounded in the actuality of church life.  Having grown up in a large church, and having served both mid-sized and small congregations, I see a tremendous amount of truth in Galindo's research-based insights.

Plus Side:  It's not just for interims.  Though referencing much of the same literature as the other interim books I read, The Hidden Lives of Congregations approaches congregational life in a way that does not assume you're only there to facilitate a transition.  It's more of a generalists book, something that is designed to be broadly useable by anyone in a position of congregational leadership.

Huge, Huge Plus:  It gets the theology right.  Many churchy books smother the spiritual element of congregational life under therapeutic or academic language, or have Christianity as a light gloss over top of a basically secular approach to organizational life.   While Galindo does a good, full job of exploring family systems theory and the broader organizational research on congregations, when it comes time to get to the heart of church, he sets aside that sort of language, and to my eyes nails it.  As he puts it, no matter what the size and context and systems dynamics of a church as a human entity:

All congregations have the same mission: to be the body of Christ in the world, participating with God in the redemptive work of restoring the people to unity with God and each other in Christ.  (p.42)

This is repeated, reiterated, and restated as the primary and governing purpose of congregations.  Which is good, because it is. 

Not sure why it is that Galindo seems better at this than others I've read.  Maybe...um...because he's Baptist?  Hmmm.

Creating a Healthier Church

The first of the four churchy books that I've been assigned to read as part of a Presbytery-required Interim Pastor Training session is Creating a Healthier Church, by Ronald W. Richardson.

Written in 1996, it approaches congregational life through the lens of a pastoral counselor, and particularly through the application of family systems theory to church dynamics.   The gist of family systems theory is that human beings are radically formed by their interpersonal connections, and in particular by the deep emotional bonds they have with their families.  The responses of a particular individual can't be assessed by approaching them as a free-standing self.  To really "get" them, you need to understand the network of relationships that form them.  More or less. 

It's not a bad read, and there's some good practical learnin' in it.  Of course, it tain't all daisies and butterflies, neither, so here are some of my reactions to it.

Plus Side:  It's quite practical.  Understanding a church requires that you come to terms with the dynamics and relationships that form it.  In both the anecdotal framing narratives Richardson uses and the processes of congregational assessment he presents, there's the potential of some real learning about the messes that can impact congregations, and some solid ways out of those messes.

Plus Side:  It pegs Congregational Anxiety as a major issue.  In my experience in my own congregation, and from what I've witnessed elsewhere, communities of faith can be driven totally batty by anxiety about what might happen.  In the absence of trust within the community, or the presence of real distrust of those viewed as "outside," a church can become just one big mess of rumors and infighting. 

Plus Side:  It identifies the need for congregational leaders to be non-anxious presences.  If you get all riled up whenever conflict or disagreement arises, and don't try to remain graciously positive and objective, you'll make an absolutely poopy pastor.  That doesn't mean moping about apathetically and/or distancing yourself from your community.  But it does mean that you aren't deep in the fray.  You need to be able to constructively differentiate yourself from conflict if you're going to be a healing force within the church. True dat, thought I.

Negative Side:  It gets a bit chartish and jargony.  Apparently, whenever two people talk about another person or concern, they are "triangulating."  So there are triangles.  And everyone has a network of influences, so there are these sample matrix thingys that map out their social networks and relative connection.  Yeah, some people are visual thinkers, and they need this.  But human interaction and the formative power of our relationships are just too complicated and dynamic to effectively map out this way.  The maps would constantly change and flux...so I'm not quite sure, from a practical standpoint, why it's even worth bothering including them.  The language used also and inevitably reflects the jargon of that particular strain of therapy.  A healthy community, for instance, is supposed to avoid being "fused," which means we're supposed to be emotionally differentiated from each other.  I get the point being made, but sometimes the language becomes a bit clumsy.

Negative Side: God isn't really a factor.   This tends to be one of the major sticking points I have with books that approach congregations primarily as human networks or organizations, and this book is no exception.  The frame of reference is family systems, and the paradigm from which institutional dysfunction is addressed is fundamentally that of psychotherapy.  I appreciate the tools of secular counseling, and can see their value in a wholistic approach to church life.  But I found myself consistently and repeatedly reading this and wondering where in the Sam Hill the role of the Holy Spirit was in this approach.  Mention of God is made intermittently, and once it is suggested, you know, that prayer might be helpful sometimes.  Bible stories and verses are smattered about, with varying degrees of exegetical depth.

But the focus remains primarily organizational dynamics and family systems.  The tools of faith, and the idea that God is active and present in the life of the church, well...that's secondary, sometimes to the point of seeming invisible.

Overall, this was worth my while.  There were plenty of tools and teachings that really do speak to the sprawling messes that can overtake low-functioning congregations.  My only and primary issue is the tendency to be so immersed in the professional language of the secular field from which it springs that it doesn't couch congregational health in terms of the Paraclete. 

That's a non-trivial variance in emphasis.  Still, the insights here are good ones.