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.
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