Airport Musings on My Study Leave
Its six thirty on Friday evening and I am sitting in the terminal of the Cincinnati airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Manchester. I’ve just completed a week-long training event at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginian. Thirty pastors from Presbyterian churches across the United States and Canada gathered to think together about how to lead their congregations faithfully through times of transition and transformation.
One of the central concepts we considered was understanding the congregation as a complex system. Systems theory was developed about fifty years ago as a tool for thinking about relationships and behaviors in families. Since then, systems theory has been applied to a variety of organizations including churches.
In essence, we understand that a church is a complex web of interconnecting and interdependent relationships. No individual in a church acts is isolation from the others, and the behavior of one affects all. Therefore, if an individual church member is behaving in a certain way, it is necessary to look at the entire system, the entire church, in order to discover the motivations and implications of that behavior.
Additionally, every person in the church system is also a part of other systems that are impacting upon him or her. Each one of us belongs to a family (of some sort), a network of friends, a group in the workplace or at school and so on. Each of these systems affects us and so affects the church system as well. We all understand this to a certain extent. When someone is impatient or rude at church, we may, for example, hear someone say something like, “Oh, he’s acting that way because he’s been having a problem at work lately.”
One powerful dynamic of a system of relationships is triangulation. Triangulation is a relationship of three persons where one of the three is not present. For instance, Ms Jones, a member of the evangelism committee has a disagreement with Mr. Smith the chairperson of the committee. In the parking lot following a meeting, Ms. Jones takes Mrs. Gray, another committee member, aside and begins to share her frustrations about Mr. Smith. A relational triangle with one person at each point of the triangle and one person not present has now been formed. Several things can happen, most of them not good. Ms. Jones may enlist Mrs. Gray in a kind of alliance over against Mr. Smith resulting in an unnecessary disruption in the relationship between Mr. Smith and Mrs. Gray. Or it is possible that Mrs. Gray will resent that Ms. Jones’ attempted to enlist her against Mr. Smith and the relationship between Mrs. Gray and Ms. Jones is injured. In both these instances, nothing constructive has been done to resolve the disagreement between Ms. Jones and Mr. Smith.
You get the point. The idea is to avoid triangulation when possible and to encourage people to deal directly with each other in a loving and mutually respectful way.
One of the aims of our group of pastors was to make some of these kinds of systems connections more explicit so that we may best know how to offer appropriate support and care to people in our churches. In doing this we make take steps toward a healthier system which is a more joyful and fruitful environment for everyone.
Systems theory was just one of the areas we focused on in our week of study and reflection. I’ll be sharing more in the weeks ahead. God bless.
Pastor Steve Quinlan
