The Leader's Journey

Accepting the Call to Personal and Congregational Transformation

Herrington, Jim, Taylor, Trisha, Creech, R. Robert

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781493422128
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book helps pastors and church leaders understand the role their personal transformation as Jesus's disciples plays in effective congregational leadership. It shifts the focus of leadership from techniques and charisma to spiritual transformation and developing emotional maturity so leaders can effectively lead congregations to embrace change. End-of-chapter discussion questions are included. The first edition sold more than 20, 000 copies and has been regularly used as a textbook over the past fifteen years. The second edition has been revised throughout and includes a greater emphasis on Bowen Family Systems Theory.

Part Two: Leading Living Systems

3
Understanding the System

You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said goodbye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything.

—St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 12:12–13 (Message)

Systems theory focuses on what man does and not on his verbal explanations about why he does it.

—Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice

We’ve used the term “living system” several times in the first two chapters. By now, you may be wondering just what we’re talking about. Whenever we engage in relationships that are long-term, intense, and significant, we become emotionally connected to one another in an “emotional system,” or a “living system.” Each person who is part of this interaction begins to affect, and be affected by, the anxiety and behaviors of the others. The better we understand the functioning and implications of a living system, the more effectively we undergo personal transformation and learn to lead with integrity.

In this chapter, we introduce a systems approach for understanding our interconnected lives. Understanding how people connect to each other in a living system and how that connection affects us and our congregations is vital to transformational leadership. The reason for this is simple: leadership always takes place in the context of a living system, and the system plays by a set of observable rules. If we are to lead in that context, we need to understand the rules.

Our “Wired-Togetherness”

Our culture’s focus on the autonomy of the individual easily blinds us to the reality of our emotional connection to one another as human beings. Although we believe that we are acting autonomously most of the time, we are far more often reacting to one another, almost instinctively. We do not even think about it; we just do it. We do it because we live our entire lives as parts of living systems.

A flock of blackbirds flies across a rice field at full speed without any organized formation, without any clearly discernible leader. Yet, in a fraction of a second, the entire flock can turn ninety degrees without one bird crashing into another. Then, within another few seconds, the flock can make a U-turn and not leave behind a single bird. Just as suddenly, the whole flock can “decide” to settle on a power line and then, in unison, decide it is time to fly again, all in the same direction. How do they do that?

If we can see these creatures as “wired together” in a living system—their flock—then we can better understand their behavior, and ours. The living connectedness of these animals is vital for their survival. If they do not behave in just that way, they perish. A straggler could easily become dinner for a hawk. So their Creator has endowed them with a high sensitivity to one another that allows them to respond instantaneously to a threat perceived by any one of them. This is a living system.

We human beings do not possess the same high level of sensitivity to one another. We are, however, also emotionally wired together in systems such that we react to one another, often without even being aware that we are doing so. Michael Kerr describes the human family as an “emotional field.”1 The term “field” is apt, as it suggests the complexity of emotional stimuli that family members are contributing and responding to on many levels. The emotionally determined functioning of the family members generates a family emotional “atmosphere” or “field” that, in turn, influences the emotional functioning of each person. It is analogous to the gravitational field of the solar system, where each planet and the sun, because of their mass, contribute gravity to the field and are, in turn, regulated by the field they each help create. One cannot “see” gravity, nor can one “see” the emotional field. We can infer the presence of both gravity and the emotional field, however, by the predictable ways planets and people behave in reaction to one another.

We can observe human wired-togetherness in a family, workplace, or church. When anxiety rises, we become rather predictable. Our thinking becomes less clear and more reactive. Some of us withdraw; others engage in conflict. We begin to place or accept blame to avoid taking responsibility for making personal changes. We begin to see ourselves as the victim of others’ actions. We assign motives to others’ behavior, or we take it personally. Demand for conformity in thinking and behavior increases. We look for a quick fix to the symptoms that develop. The least mature members among us begin to attract most of our attention. Leaders feel a tug in many directions and find it increasingly difficult to think for themselves. The gravitational pull of relationships has its effect on the behavior and response of each person in the group; the behavior and response of each person affects the emotional gravity of the system.

Understanding this fact furnishes a helpful perspective as we attempt to lead a congregation. To say that we are part of a living system is to say that there are forces at work among us that transcend a naive focus on the cause of a problem (as though we could label any one person as “the problem”). Whenever a problem in a living system is chronic, just about everyone has a part to play in keeping it going.

A Personal Example

I (Robert) frequently encounter the need to learn about the system and my part in it the hard way. As a thirtysomething pastor of a growing urban congregation, I was practicing the best I knew of leadership toward change—which, at that time, was not much. I knew some things had to change if the church was to pursue its mission most effectively. I believed I could identify what some of those changes ought to be. As best I could, I led toward those changes by engaging congregational leaders in conversation about the changes, sharing both my sense of urgency and the rationality of the proposed solution.

I had never heard of the systems approach, and I did not appreciate the level of anxiety created in the congregation by the series of changes we made. The anxiety surfaced in the life of Henry, a leader in the church whose own family system was in turmoil.

Henry was a corporate executive. He had two grown children. One, a daughter, struggled with substance abuse; in and out of relationships, she left two small children for Henry and his wife to raise. His son, a navy pilot, had deployed to Iraq for Operation Desert Storm. At work, economic conditions forced Henry to lay off dozens of employees. He had undergone open-heart surgery twice.

As a young pastor, I did my best to be present with him and his wife during those crises, and I thought I had done a good job. News that Henry was calling a meeting of disgruntled older church members in his home stunned me. As soon as I got word of the meeting, I reacted in my own instinctive way. Angry and nervous, I gave him a call. He was surprised that I knew of the gathering. I insisted on an invitation, believing I could deal with their complaints, answer their questions, and all would be well.

With fear and some bravado, I arrived at his home that Sunday evening and went in prepared to face a hundred angry parishioners. I found only eight. I listened to their complaints and offered responses. What I could not hear was the expression of fear and anxiety these members of my congregation were attempting to communicate. I was not aware of how much my own fear and anxiety drove my behavior. Instead of being a calmer presence, I reacted emotionally, as did they. The result was that everyone’s emotions escalated and the emotional system became even more volatile.

Eventually, Henry, his wife, and four of the others left our church. At the time, I piously regarded that as a healthy loss, since “they” obviously did not share the vision “we” were pursuing. I have since come to regard the experience as a nearly predictable series of emotional reactions. With so many changes in a relatively short time, anxiety and tension had increased in the congregation. That a symptom of anxiety arose ought not to have been surprising. Although there was no way to predict that Henry would be the focus, the tension in his own family life left him susceptible to the growing anxiety among some of his fellow church members. His “immunity” to the anxiety was low, and he came down with the symptom. But Henry was not the problem.

Our congregations are living systems. Christ has emotionally wired us together with our brothers and sisters in the family of God (Rom. 12:3–21). Our behavior and choices affect each other in ways of which we are often unaware. What are some of the roots and components of a living system? Let’s begin with two key variables: emotional maturity and anxiety.

Emotional Maturity and Anxiety

According to systems theory, two variables work in tandem in every emotional system, governing its function. One is the level of emotional maturity of the people in the system and of their leaders. The other is the level of anxiety and tension to which the system is subject. The greater the level of emotional maturity in a system, the better equipped it is to handle a spike in the level of anxiety when one comes. The higher the level of emotional maturity, the lower the level of constant and chronic anxiety.

You might think of the level of emotional maturity as a reservoir and of anxiety as the water level. The larger the reservoir (that is, the greater the degree of emotional maturity), the more anxiety it can contain without spilling over and producing a problem for the system. The higher the level of water (anxiety), regardless of the size of the reservoir, the closer the system is to overflowing.

Emotional Maturity: It All Starts in the Family

God has lovingly and wisely placed us in families. This is God’s intended means of caring for us and launching us into life. The most immediate experience of family, of course, is our nuclear family—our parents and siblings. But we also step into this world as part of a larger system: a river that has flowed through history as our multigenerational family. We are both a genetic and an emotional product of the system. In this system we learn about who we are, how to relate, and how to survive. Family also teaches us that the world is a safe place or a fearful place. We gain from family a perspective that leaves us either more or less secure or anxious.

As we grow up in our family, we also develop some degree of emotional maturity. We express that maturity through emotional separation from our parents. To the degree that separation occurs, we gain a level of “differentiation of self,” determining our capacity to offer a thoughtful response rather than react emotionally, the ability to remain connected to important people in our lives without having our behavior and reactions determined by them. The nuclear family is the fire in which we forge our level of emotional maturity. Eventually we leave that family to seek out life on our own. We leave with a level of differentiation close to that of our parents. Murray Bowen observed that when we leave the family of origin and find a spouse, we are likely to marry a person whose degree of emotional maturity matches our own. We then form a new nuclear family, rear children, and send them out. That is the plan.

God told the children of Israel that their behavior would produce either a blessing or a curse on future generations (Exod. 20:5–6). The genealogies of the Bible, though frequently skipped over in reading, are rich with the truth that God works through the generations of a family to accomplish a divine purpose and to raise up leaders. The book of Genesis organizes around ten genealogies. Realistic family stories fill its pages (Gen. 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10, 27; 25:12, 19; 36:1, 9; 37:2). Even the New Testament opens with a description of Jesus’s genealogy and a story about the family into which God sent Jesus, the Son (Matt. 1–2).

A family operates in a pattern consistent with a few observable principles. Since we learn from our family how to relate, we carry these same behaviors directly into the work system and congregation of which we are part. So does everyone else who is part of the system. Understanding these principles and developing a capacity to observe them in action is an important first step on this transformational journey of learning to lead calmly and thoughtfully rather than reactively and emotionally. It is easier to know and do the right thing if we can be clear on what is going on emotionally for us and for the people God has called us to lead.

Anxiety: Blessing and Curse

Anxiety, most simply described, is our response to threat, whether real or perceived. The response is physiological; it is chemical. It occurs because of brain activity that is outside our awareness; we never even have to think about it. Thankfully, we can respond to threat in the blink of an eye. Our Creator has hardwired this capacity into our brains and bodies.

We experience anxiety in two forms: acute and chronic. Acute anxiety is our reaction to a threat that is real and time limited. We react to the threat, respond to it, and then eventually return to a normal state of mind and body. At its most basic level, our response to a perceived threat prepares us either to fight for our lives or to run for our lives. In a critical moment when the threat is real, the anxious response can be lifesaving.

When we are experiencing chronic anxiety, however, we merely imagine or distort the threat. It is not real. Consequently, it is not time limited either; it does not simply go away.

Consider the importance of acute anxiety. When a child steps from between two parked cars into the pathway of your automobile, very little thinking takes place. Instinctively your foot moves to the brake with the full weight of your body. You quickly check your side mirror and jerk the steering wheel to the left, steering away from the child. Your heart pounds; your breath becomes shallow. You may even have to pull over to the side and compose yourself afterward. But soon, your body and mind return to normal, and you go on. This is a response to acute anxiety.

If you trace the actual physiology of this response, the interaction of hormones and neurotransmitters, you will be amazed by the design evident in your mind and body. So much happens within you in a matter of a split second. When you feel threatened, your muscle cells instantaneously receive additional energy. Your heart rate increases, your sensitivity heightens, and your digestive process shuts down so that blood can flow to the large muscles. Your thinking becomes focused on the threat in a kind of tunnel vision. The threatening event is immediately stored in your long-term memory so that whenever you encounter another like it, you will be prepared to respond even more rapidly. Your Creator has programmed these lightning-quick responses into you for your survival.

Clearly, these ...