How Family Really Works (1)

Previously we have noted that we are social (or more precisely familial) beings as opposed to autonomous, isolated individuals. What is common to all humans is that we come from mothers. Yes, I know, a rather obvious observation. However, what is not so obvious, is that, given this fact, there may be something so basic to human existence that most of us miss it until someone points it out. I hope I'm helping with making the "obvious" visible.

We are born into families and we grow up in the context of family. So it should follow that what we learn in our family, how we function in that family, and who we believe ourselves to be in the context of the family will presage who and what we do in the context of our church family. If it is true that each of us came from a mother, it may also be true that there are some common behaviors of families that can inform us about life in the church as well.

Friedman (Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue) identified five of these commonalities. 

• Homeostasis
• Extended Family Field
• Identified Patient
• Differentiation of Self
• Emotional Triangles

Far from being just intellectual notions, these realities will impinge on every challenge a minister or church leader will face in the lived reality of church life. In what follows, I seek to give a brief description of each concept and also to give some examples of how it bears on church leadership.

Homeostasis. This technical-looking word just means "balance." All families seek to maintain balance. Watching families maintain balance is a bit like watching a husband and wife secretly battle over the thermostat. The wife wants the house cooler so she sets the thermostat to 68º. Later the husband, who is now too cold, moves the thermostat up to 75º. This can go on for weeks without the husband and wife having a confrontation. The balance is maintained by each spouse playing his or her part. Then one day, one of them sees the other moving the thermostat and begins to question why the other must have their favorite temperature. After the ensuing argument, the couple will resume the game.

What must be understood is that families will make whatever move is necessary to maintain their sense of balance. Furthermore, if a family's balance is dysfunctional to begin with it, the family will seek to maintain that awkward balance regardless of how outsiders try to help them. This phenomenon is a bit like watching a one-legged person get use to using a prosthetic leg. While the person may long to use the new limb, the one-legged situation feels more natural. In some cases, such a person may decide that the effort in getting accustom to the new leg is just not worth it.

Since churches are family of families, it again follows that what is true of families in general would also be true of church family. Here is a good example of how homeostasis plays out in church life.

A minister of two years has been successful in reshaping the Sunday evening service. Instead of a traditional repeat of the Sunday morning service, the minister has led the church into a more interactive time together. The church now sings a few devotional songs, there might be a brief presentation and the rest of the evening is spent in small group conversation. Everyone seems to like the new format. However, the minister suddenly resigns. The very first Sunday the minister is gone the congregation reverts to the Sunday evening format that was in place before the minister changed it.

In church life, we can all probably think of things that "almost everyone" believes need to be fix, yet nothing ever seems to change. One of the reasons for this inertia is that families desire homeostasis, sometimes disguised as "peace." 

Extended Family Field refers to the fact that families have families. As mentioned in a previous post, our extended families form a field around its members. Families are a bit like amoebae. They are enormously flexible. They have boundaries that can keep out foreign invaders while maintaining enough integrity to hold the system together. But like an amoeba, a family can stretch far enough to keep everyone in the loop.

In terms of family and church life, a change anywhere in the extended family field can create disturbances in any of the other families connected to the field. A death in California can immobilize an elder in Oklahoma then permeates his anxiety throughout the congregation he leads. When I lived in Canada, I could be sure that a major event in the life of the church in Regina where I lived would be reported in Vancouver, Yellowknife, and Winnipeg that same day. That is how tight the extended family field was among the Canadian churches I knew.

In church life, then, this extended family field accounts for the peer pressure churches feel when they want to experiment with some practice out of the norm but don't because they are afraid of the reaction among their sister churches.

I'm interested in watching how extended family field changes as churches give less attention to traditional boundary markers, such as distinct practices, denominational loyalties, and brand name. These are all signs that the extended family field within churches is changing.

In the next blog, I will deal with the last three items in Friedman's list.

Getting Family Right

Before I get us too deep in Family Systems stuff, I think it is important to state that church is primarily a theological enterprise. What I mean by "theological" is that it deals with encountering and connecting with God. Church should be about finding the meaning of God and the implication of that meaning for our lives. By the way after this series on the church family, I would like to give some focussed attention on the church's theological quest.

Right now though, I want to help the ministers, elders, and church leaders who are in the thick of it discover a very important set of tools for their leadership tool kit. As important as studying the Bible is, leaders soon discover they wish they had the missing manual for leading in the midst of real, lived church life. There are many practical matters to which church leaders must give attention that are not mentioned at all in the Bible. Church leaders soon discover that their time can become consumed with things other than for what they thought they were signing up.

I think Family Systems Theory (FST) can serve as the missing manual to church leadership. However, because we are dealing with real families, I can't give you ten simple rules that will always work in every and all circumstances. What FST can do though is give you a way of thinking about family that will help you think more clearly how your next step will play out and will affect that family. As your vision sharpens you will begin to see that the "random" things that happen in church life are not so random after all. So the place to begin is to try to understand how families really work (which is only one step removed for learning how church really work relationally).

The idea of being an "individual" is over-rated. While, we can speak of individuals in concept, the truth is closer to the fact that we don't really exist as individuals but as interconnected units. Individualism is both a fairly new concept and a not very useful one for understanding how we live together in groups. We are born into families and from the beginning are in a communal relationship with our parents, and especially our mothers. Our earliest experience is that of being connected to another who had life-and-death power over us. We learn early that our fortunes depending on these others' well-being. In our families, we learn the "rules" for getting what we want.

So from the beginning of our lives, we are "interconnected" beings and do not exist as lonely individuals, (though that is not to say that we don't feel lonely sometimes). Those most important to us usually make up our nuclear family, which for our purposes include those with whom we grew up. They were the people who were part of our formative years. However, not far removed from any of these people are those extended family members who were important to the various members of your nuclear family. This is good to keep in mind because changes in our extended family often reverberates in our nuclear family and changes in our nuclear family can affect people far removed.

Keeping these two families in mind can help you understand what is going in the life of the church. For example, you are in a leadership meeting and one of the members explodes over the issue of the expense involved in getting the teens to an event. The explosion was unexpected and the level of emotionality far exceeded the seriousness of the issue. (You have probably seen similar behaviors in other church meetings dealing with other issues). You may find out later that the "real" issue was the fact that the member's aunt—the one that "practically raised the member"—has recently died and the member did not have the funds to attend the service—but yet the church had funds to get the teens a fun event. By the way, when anyone explodes beyond the seriousness of an issue, you might want to find out what is going on in his or her nuclear or extended family.

While these two families are usually the most important to us, we also belong to other "families." We have work families—amazing how folks who work in offices take on family roles in that work setting. We also have church families, and we may have other surrogate families in the other groups to which we belong. Changes in any of our families can show up in any of our other families. More therapeutically, changes in any of our families can produce symptoms in any of the other families to which we are connected.

When I first heard this concept, I thought it was too fanciful to be true; but having watched families over the years, I know it is true. For example, changes in my brother-'s-in-law situation can have an immediate affect on my life because of my wife's relationship to her brother. Another implication of this concept is that simplistic explanations of what is going on are usually wrong and when right, very superficial. Simplistic explanations can prevent us from fixing something that has gone awry in church life even through we have given it serious time and effort—yet it just won't seem to go away. In fact, the more time and effort spent on it only seems to polarize people more.

We will have occasion to speak more about the interconnections between our families, but for now, I want to impress on the reader the importance that we belong to families, are defined by families, and function in families. Ministers, for example will often have five families: nuclear, extended, church staff, church congregation, and the larger denominational family to which the church belongs. Members of the congregation will often have a work family instead of a church staff.

While some of what I have written here has an element of being self-evident, that we exist in families is often the forgotten insight because we have been strongly conditioned to think of ourselves as isolated individuals—autonomous, self-directed, and independent! The deeper truth is that we are families—dependent, other-directed, and interdependent, if not co-dependent. We are very much concerned with what our families think of us.

The next time you read Genesis, note the role that family plays in the story of the patriarchs in making each person who they will be become.

How Deep is the Rabbit's Hole?

Somewhere along the way it strikes you that your ministry efforts are being neutralized. You are not sure how it happens, but every new initiative hits a wall, or runs out of steam, or become something very different than you intended. Everything seems to be much harder than you expected.

Sometimes the subversion is subtle, even imperceptible, but gradually the VBS that was designed to reach neighborhood kids only serves the church's children. At other times, the response is hostility: "Don't you know we are the _________ Church, and we don't do that." Again, sometimes, it is underhanded, "Preacher, brother Jones, our previous preacher, always visited me every Thursday." Again, it can be passive-aggressive: "When you confronted me about my wild life, you offended me." Or, it might look like this: Q: "Why are we supporting Tony though he is capable of working?" A: "We always have; that is what this church does."

There are times in the life of the church when the anxiety is palpable and you can almost hear the people repositioning to decrease the tension—which usually backfires. It is hard to keep a clear head during these times because it feels as if the very air around you is distorted. Every sounding you send out makes you even more certain you are clueless about what is really going on in the church. You can sometimes watch the chain-reaction: this family gets mad, that family leaves, that family assumes more leadership in the vacuum, that family's attendance falls off, and the list of reactions can go on. Do any of these experiences ring true with you?

Years ago I was in such an anxious church and I thought I was going to lose my mind. The congregation was at first a "very close-knit, friendly group." As I got to know them better, I began to sense the secret alliances and the corresponding secret rules of the group. And, of course, because they were secret, you did know that you had broken the unexpressed expectation until it was too late. Though the church claimed it was friendly, and did friendly things together, the truth was they were a very entangled, enmeshed family that mirrored their leaders' families.

In addition to increasing a leader's self-differentiation in the midst of such a church family, it is also important to understand how the church mimics its families. The church is, after all, a family of families and so we should not be surprised that churches themselves act and function like the families who make them up.

When I was serving the very anxious church I mentioned above, I met Edwin H. Friedman's book, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (New York: Guildford Press, 1985). Next to the Bible, it was this book that has helped me the most in gaining a sense of location in the midst of a church family. It is a hard read. Most people will read it three times before they have the eureka moment. But Friedman is almost seer-like in his ability to help ministers, elders, and other leaders gain a "radar-screen" that allows them to weigh what they see happening in the life of the church.

In the next several blogs, I would like to lay out for you some Family System Theory that I have found "life-saving" for both me and the churches I have been blessed to serve. I learned most of it from Friedman.

So how deep is the rabbit's hole? As deep as the unfinished business of the families who make up and lead your congregation.

No Quick Fixes

When seeking to help a dysfunctional, or even a dying, church, the first and last thing to do is pray. Because, if you are the one God has called to help such a church, you will need all the power God will give you. (For sake of this conversation, I'm assuming I'm talking to the minister of a congregation; elders, and other leaders, can also benefit from the orientation and practices mentioned in this entry). Having prayed, and remaining in prayer throughout, church leaders need to understand that there will be no quick fixes in turning a church around.

I can think of several reasons why this is true. First, it has probably taken years for the church to get to where it is now and like a family with years of life together, it will not unwind overnight. Second, whatever is going on in the life of the church will be complex. While there may be only one real issue (and there always is and it is the same issue [see below]) at the heart of what is causing the church to be dis-eased, it will be layered over, like an onion, with lesser issues, concerns, and distractions. The third, and one of the most perplexing problems, is that church will have a hard time telling the truth about itself to itself. The last reason I mention now is that there will be key players in the life of the church who are rewarded by the status quo and will make counter moves to keep it so. As you will learn, sabotage is simply a part of the cloth of leadership.

Several years ago, I read Peter Wagner's The Healthy Church (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1996). Wagner made up some playful names for church pathologies found often enough in most churches today. These diseases included

1. Ethnikitis
2. Ghost-town Disease
3. People-Blindness
4. Sociological strangulation
5. Koinonitis
6. Hyper-Cooperativism
7. Arrested Development
8. St. John's Syndrome (lukewarmness)
9. Hypopneumia

Wagner was useful in calling certain experiences in the life of the church sickness. However, diagnosis is one thing, the cure another.

Having served a variety of congregations over the years, I have come to see that there is usually one major malady from which churches suffer. The lack of self-differentiation (I will define this more as we explore the nature of leadership in the life of the church) on the part of the leaders, whether the minister, the board of elders, or lay leaders. This means that leaders in sick churches have lost the ability to take clearly defined stands and they wave like a flag in the wind. To take a stand threatens to rock the boat and the sicker the church, the more it avoids rocking the boat and furthermore the more important it seems not to rock the boat. (This, of course, is just the opposite from the truth).

In this context, it is hard for any leader to be a self. If God has called you to serve in a hurting church, and you really desire to help that church, then understand that it's recovery will be closely tied to your ability to take unpopular positions without pushing people into agreeing with you but at the same time without giving ground either. My thesis, then, assuming that you are the one God has called to work within the context of a needy church, is that your success or failure will be depend on your ability to take clearly defined stands without becoming reactive. Remember, there are no quick fixes because it took a long time for the church to get here and it will take time for your "non-anxious" presence to begin to affect (hopefully, infect) those around you.

It takes a lot of courage for a church to confess it needs help, and for the record, a church will not if the leaders lack the courage to confess their own participation in the church's current situation. While a bit of an overstatement, but not much of one: a sick church will have a sick leadership (team or individual). Edwin Friedman (Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, Guildford Press, 1985) has well stated that the health of a church (or any organization for that matter) will depend on the two or three leaders at the top. This means that if the two or three most influential members do not work hard at having an open, honest, and transparent relationships, then you are not likely to find open, honest, and transparent relationships in the church.

As a turnaround leader, your primary job will be to facilitate that open, honest, and transparent conversation the church desperately needs. You will do that best by stating clearly where you stand while remaining connected to the body.

Church Doctor: To Do No Harm

Church Doctor. Are you kidding me? How dare you be so presumptuous?

If that is your response to anyone claiming to be a church doctor, you are not alone. However, a closer look at what it means to be a "doctor" in the church might set your mind at ease—a bit. To be a "doctor" is to be a teacher. We have long since lost the association between doctor and doctrine. In that sense, then, I seek to teach in the church and to the church as needed.

My aim is to provide the best teaching for those seeking to make sense of living Jesus's way in the midst of institutional church life. Most of the ministers I know serve older, more established churches in which the minister is required by the nature of the job to be a champion of the institution. However, because of the deeper calling God has made on the live of those who pastor, ministers often feel the distance between what the institution has become vs. what they read of the church of God's dream in Scripture.

Ministers, elders, and other church leaders really do live between these two worlds. Sometimes we can go weeks having only given attention to institutional maintenance. When this happens, it is easy to become dried up, empty, resentful, and lonely. I have come to accept some of this as the way God shapes leaders. Those dry spells lay a foundation for those times when we do experience God in dramatic ways.

So as your church doctor, if you will, I will seek to do no harm to the patient but I will seek a level of honesty necessary if the church in North America can find healing and new capacity for rapidly changing territory of our mission.

So I hope you will follow this blog and comment from time to time.