Update from Pastor Nate - January 2022

Hello, friends!

I write bearing greetings from the wider United Church of Christ. As many of you know, I spent a week away earlier in January attending an annual training with the Next Generation Leadership Initiative (NGLI). Of course, what was supposed to be a week-long seminar in sunny Phoenix was turned into a Zoom meeting in the cave of my home office because of the Omicron variant, but, such are the times we live in.

Remember NGLI? This program, sponsored by the United Church of Christ Pension Board, is a heavy-duty formation program for young clergy, still fresh in their calling. The goal is to equip them with the transformative leadership skills necessary to help congregations cultivate vibrancy and vitality in their communities for the sake of making the world more just for all.

That wash of corporate-sounding jingo sounds nice, doesn’t it? Yes, it’s all true—but how does it actually impact us here in Battle Creek?

Well, our first-year training was a crash course in Bowen Family Systems Theory. The psychologist Dr. Murray Bowen articulated this theory in in the mid-20th century, and it serves as a roadmap for exploring the flow of attention and anxiety within human relationships.

Further, the theory offers useful insight into the ways our unspoken, and even unconscious, patterns of relating shape our behaviors. Our behaviors in any kind of social system mirror those unconscious patterns, which emerge from the relational patterns we encountered growing up in our families of origin. It should come as no surprise that these patterns play out within our church family as well.

The idea is that learning the roadmap of the theory helps us wake up to these patterns, becoming conscious of them as they unfold within the networks of our families, friend groups, workplaces, and congregations, so that we can respond consciously and skillfully to those moments and seasons that produce anxiety within us—such as the times of change and difficulty and discernment and wonder that we’ve been slogging through since I got here in March of 2020 and well before that.

(Can you believe it’s been almost two years since I got here!?)

Because the theory is all about increasing our awareness of—or, you might say, “waking up” to—our unconscious patterns of reacting to anxiety, right out of the box here we’ve got some handy dovetails with our current teaching series on spiritual practices. The idea behind Systems Theory, namely, waking up to our unconscious patterns and consciously changing how we behave within the context of our systems, is not far off from the suggestion that the Christian contemplative tradition has held on to for centuries: “if you want to change the world around you, change the world within you.”

And this newfound awareness has gotten my own wheels turning as I think about where we’re at as a congregation right now.

Of course, it’s no secret that we’ve been through the “eye of the needle” in more ways than one over the last couple of years. But to be completely honest, I suspect that this has been a warm-up for what the rest of the 2020s has in store for us. And as global anxiety increases, and as those currents of anxiety course through the relationships that hold us together as a community of faith walking on the Jesus path, it’s more important than ever that we pay attention to our automatic reactions to change, difference, newness, and the anxieties they bear with them like gifts from unwelcome visitors.

How we hold and respond to anxiety is not just a mark of where we’re at in terms of maturity; it’s also a “field ripe for the harvest” of our own transformation into living icons of Christ.

(Good stuff, huh?)

But what does that look like? Well, as Bowen Theory maps out, when anxiety comes knocking, there are several predictable patterns we fall into. None of these are “bad” or “evil,” but they can cause harm if left to run unattended.

Some of us have a tendency to fight it out as our anxiety comes out sideways. Some of us have a tendency to step back and let others do all the work in the community, or vice versa, stepping forward to take on more than we need in order to feel some sense of control. Some of us take up a pet issue and focus all of our energies on that as though solving that particular problem will make all of our anxiety go away. Others of us decide that simply checking out and absenting ourselves from relationship and the life of our community will fix the problem, so that we don’t have to deal with anyone else’s anxiety.

Do you recognize yourself in any of these patterns? I know I do. These patterns help us survive and manage anxiety, but like I said, when left unchecked, they can cause harm in a community through miscommunication, isolation, disempowerment, and separation. What do we do about it?

Part of our work is simply to wake up to the patterns themselves. This is a great opportunity to put the refined awareness we’re cultivating in our spiritual practices to work in the everyday world: take notice, observe, and consciously decide to show up differently.

But that’s a process that cannot be done in isolation; it has to be done in the context of our relationships. If you notice that your tendency has been to absent yourself from community in the midst of all this anxiety, I would gently suggest that might not be the best course of action, neither for you as an individual nor for our community of faith.

The reason for this is the other key element that Bowen recognized at play within family systems (which, I might add, spiritual traditions around the world have already known about for millennia): reciprocity. The part affects the whole and vice versa. These patterns emerge between individuals in the community. And that means the entire community can be impacted simply by individuals becoming aware of the patterns and consciously choosing to show up in the system differently. Just as pulling on one thread of a spider web can shift and stretch the entire edifice, so one conscious decision can have ripple effects across the entire web of our relationships.

Again, what the contemplatives always knew before Dr. Bowen “figured it out” for himself: if you want to change the world around you, change the world inside you.

I’m thankful to you all for supporting my participation in NGLI, and for your willingness to dig in to learning new ways of showing up in the community and in our world through refining our spiritual practice through this season’s teaching series. It’s an exciting time to be doing this work, and I’m convinced that, far from decaying into irrelevance and anomie as the institutional narratives of yesteryear might suggest, we are in a season of transformative grace. I believe God is refining us, through this school of love and wisdom we call “church,” into a people who are increasingly able to hold the anxieties of this age in a way that allows healing and justice to spring forth in our midst.

And that, my friends, is very good news.

Peace and all good,

Nate