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Part One: The Call to Personal Transformation
The Need for Personal Transformation
In their roles as pastor, professor, counselor, coach, and friend, the authors have discovered that far too many are fighting fatigue and spiritual emptiness. The day-to-day stress of managing an institutional church—small or large—in the face of changes in their ministry context, occurring at breakneck speed, robs them of their personal spiritual vitality. The slow but unmistakable death of Christendom and the continuously accelerating pace of change have become almost paralyzing to congregations.
Tod Bolsinger writes, “We are in uncharted terrain trying to lead dying churches into a post-Christian culture that now considers the church an optional, out of touch, and irrelevant relic of the past.” Due to the growing pace of change, congregations of all sizes increasingly face the alternatives of deep change or slow death.
Like the human body that is one whole system comprising several subsystems (cardiovascular, skeletal, nervous systems), the human spirit has at least four parts that make up the whole—thoughts, feelings, will, and desires. The intersection of these four is the “soul.”
Personal transformation—as reflected in and modeled by the life of Jesus—happens best as an inside-out process of committing to obey biblical teachings and in the context of a loving community that extends grace and truth.
What if knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, as important as that is, is still not enough? What if a process of internal transformation must occur in order to learn obedience?
First formation describes the set of experiences we had in childhood and adolescence that shaped how we first learned to see ourselves and the world. What gives our first formation so much power is that the habits we developed happened mostly outside our conscious awareness. As children our brains had not yet developed the capacity to think abstractly, so every experience was concrete. We began to develop a patterned way of dealing with pain in our relationships that shaped our thoughts, our feelings, our will, and our desires. This is the way we are. This is the way the world is.
Many pastors carry an unspoken plea in their hearts. The world in which they minister continually places unrealistic expectations on them. They are vulnerable people who experience pain and struggle. Yet they suffer in silence, for fear of others perceiving them as weak or unqualified for their calling.
Change becomes possible only when we face the truth. Doing the best they can with their wounds, pastors long for a safe place in which they can get wise counsel, encouragement, and accountability. Deep change does not come without all those things.
Personal transformation happens best in the context of a reflective lifestyle. The classic disciplines of the Christian faith—worship, solitude, fasting, prayer, silence, and study—are essential to the formation of Jesus’s character in our lives. Rather than living a reflective life characterized by the classic spiritual disciplines, far too often we live a frantically busy life that has the disciplines assigned to the “spiritual” or “Sunday” part of our lives rather than permeating all that we do. We have a prayer life (like our love life, work life, leisure life) rather than a life of prayer.
When the authors talk about personal transformation, they are talking about disrupting patterns of disobedience and developing patterns of obedience that allow you to increasingly embody the gospel in your life. The way that we live becomes the evidence that draws others to Jesus.
The transformation journey includes some things that only God can do. It also involves some things that God won’t do unless we do some things. Our part is to bring our whole self to these three interdependent processes—a commitment to obedience in a community of grace and truth where we learn to live the reflective life.
Following Jesus on the Leadership Journey
Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat—I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you?
Jesus, Luke 9:23–25 (Message)
Personal transformation is the foundation on which we construct effective leadership. Before we can lead our congregation to change so that it might be available to God for the transformation of our community, leaders need to experience God’s transformation of their own lives into greater spiritual, emotional, and relational maturity.
Dr. Murray Bowen, a pioneer in the study of family systems, described this ability to know who we are apart from others as “differentiation of self.” Differentiation deals with the effort to define oneself, to control oneself, to become a more responsible person, and to permit others to be themselves as well. Differentiation is the ability to remain connected in relationship to significant people in our lives and yet not have our reactions and behavior determined by them.
Henri Nouwen observes how the temptations of Jesus remain the essential temptations of men and women in positions of spiritual leadership: the temptation to be relevant (turning stones to bread), to be spectacular (jumping from the pinnacle of the temple), and to be powerful (compromising in order to rule). The antidote, Nouwen suggests, is a life that practices such spiritual disciplines as prayer, confession, forgiveness, and theological reflection.
Leaders need not make the journey of personal transformation alone. We have apprenticed our lives to Jesus to follow him. He is our teacher, our coach, and our guide on the journey.
Dallas Willard points out the futility of attempting to direct our lives by asking the question, “What would Jesus do?” when we are not practicing spiritual disciplines as Jesus practiced them regularly in his life. Attempting to “perform” as Jesus did when we are under pressure to compromise only frustrates most of us.
Part Two: Leading Living Systems
Understanding the System
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
Leadership always takes place in the context of a living system, and the system plays by a set of observable 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. We can observe human wired-togetherness in a family, workplace, or church. 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).
Some congregations see the world as a safe place to be and are much freer to take a risk, pursue a goal, and respond calmly to crisis. Others see and feel the world as threatening and dangerous; anxiety dominates that congregation. The higher the level of chronic anxiety in a system, the more difficult it is for that system to function in a healthy way.
The Calming Effect of a Calm Leader
Leaders who want to understand the context in which they carry out their role learn to pay attention to the presence of anxiety in their system. It is one of the two key variables that determine how well the relationships in a congregation are functioning.
On the surface, relationships look smooth and calm, which is the leader’s driving goal. The organization, however, operates without the benefit of vision. Moreover, people are so highly dependent on each other emotionally that they cannot engage in the healthy conflict that is essential for any group of people to identify and pursue a shared vision (Acts 6:15).
Effective leadership comes from someone with enough emotional maturity to call a congregation to discern and pursue a shared vision, to remain connected with those who differ with the leader or the majority, and to remain a calm presence when the anxiety rises.
If you want to harness the power inherent in a living system, if you desire to grow in the capacity to lead without compromising your principles, you must learn to see your world anew—with a systems paradigm.
Thinking Systems, Watching Process
Then the People of Israel violated the holy curse. Achan . . . took some of the cursed things. GOD became angry with the People of Israel.
Joshua 7:1 (Message)
Learning to think systems means learning to ask and answer two questions: What is my role in keeping this problem in place? and How can I change my role?
Responding differently to problems requires leaders to see what is happening with clarity.
Emotional triangles are the “molecules” of an emotional system. A two-person relationship is notoriously unstable. If the relationship is calm, things remain steady. But all it takes is for one person to begin to feel uncomfortable with something about the other for the relationship to move toward instability.
Jesus called our attention to emotional triangles, and he encouraged us to use them to advantage in maintaining healthy relationships. He said that if our relationship with a brother or sister becomes unstable, we ought first to attempt to restore it on our own (Matt. 5:23–24; 18:15). Should the attempt fail, however, he instructed us to bring others into the matter (form a triangle) with the goal of restoring the stability of the original relationship (Matt. 18:16–17).
The effort to detriangle is an effort to “differentiate” ourselves from the emotionality of the other two, not an effort to distance ourselves from them. Jesus’s simple response to an anxious Martha effectively removed him from the triangle she was forming to change her sister’s behavior (Luke 10:41–42). He called her to examine her own priorities and to allow Mary her choices. The most strategic role in the system is that of the calm observer. Someone needs to be in the position of being able to see what is going on. Shouldn’t it be you, the leader?
Conflict is perhaps the most obvious of the symptoms in a living system. Conflict emerges during the time of anxiety when togetherness forces combine with all-or-nothing thinking. People begin to insist on their way as the only way. As others disagree, the level of anxiety rises, and the conflict spirals upward.
Our cultural paradigm says that there is an individual or group of people in whom the problem resides. Systems theory predicts, however, that if we eliminate the conflict without dealing with the anxiety that produces it, the symptom is sure to recycle itself and show up in one of the other forms discussed here.
What does a highly anxious system look like? We have all been there. Ed Friedman focuses on five central traits of a chronically anxious system: heightened reactivity, herding, blame displacement, demand for a quick fix, and poor leadership.
God values both unity and diversity; anxious congregations often find themselves dealing with the choice between uniformity or division. The greater the level of anxiety, the more we pressure one another to be the same, to think the same, to conform. One characteristic of a highly anxious system is that it lacks a leader who operates with clear vision and thoughtfully held principles. Friedman states, “The fact that chronically anxious families always lack well-differentiated leadership is absolutely universal. I have never seen an exception to this rule.”
Bowen wrote that “when any key member of an emotional system can control his own emotional reactiveness and accurately observe the functioning of the system and his part in it, and he can avoid counterattacking when he is provoked, and when he can maintain an active relationship with the other key members without withdrawing or becoming silent, the entire system will change in a series of predictable steps.”
Becoming a Calm Leader
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
St. Paul, Romans 12:2 (Message)
It is easier to appear calm than it is to be calm. Even though we might learn to master the art of appearing calm, real transformation happens when personal reflection follows our actions, especially when that reflection can occur in a community of grace and truth or in conversation with a good coach. We must continue to repeat this cycle, because transformation is a lifelong journey.
The concept of leadership, defined as staying true to your core values and guiding principles despite the system’s anxiety, and the concept of differentiation of self.
Ronald Richardson writes, “The leader’s main job, through his or her way of being in the congregation, is to create an emotional atmosphere in which greater calmness exists—to be a less anxious presence. ‘Knowing everything’ is not necessary to be a healthy, competent leader. When you can be a less anxious presence, there is often enough experience and wisdom in the group for the group itself to figure out its own solutions to the challenges it faces. When a leader cannot contribute to this kind of atmosphere, the thinking processes in the group short-circuit, and people become more anxious and more emotionally reactive and make poorer decisions.”
How can we who lead participate in creating such an emotional atmosphere? We do this by managing our own anxiety. As one pastor put it, “I don’t have to be non-anxious. I just try to be less anxious than anyone else in the room.”
Jesus is the supreme example of the behavior we are describing. Although pressed in on every side from family, friends, religious leaders, and enemies to respond to their anxiety, in each case he did the right thing. Imagine the intensity of the anxiety in the very public encounter with the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3–11). Yet Jesus listened.
Consider what Jesus must have felt as the rich young man walked away from his invitation to life (Matt. 19:16–22). Yet Jesus resisted the temptation to persuade or convince.
Inside-out change is first about being and then about doing. Learning to receive feedback is the second component of the self-awareness skill set. This skill is about allowing others in your life to share with you how your behavior impacts them.
In the authors’ “Faithwalking” work, participants take on the assignment to ask others in their lives, “What can you usually count on me for, and what can you rarely count on me for?”
Manage Your Feelings
Paul says, “Go ahead and be angry. You do well to be angry—but don’t use your anger as fuel for revenge. And don’t stay angry. Don’t go to bed angry. Don’t give the Devil that kind of foothold in your life” (Eph. 4:26–27 Message).
Anxiety intensifies when leaders cannot reflect on their own inner lives and on the life of the system around them. Slowing the pace helps reduce the leader’s anxiety. One way to slow the pace is by building spiritual disciplines into daily life. Prayer, fasting, solitude, silence, and worship are but a few disciplines that, when engaged, allow the leader to reflect on his or her life.
Leading in Uncertain Times
The idea that crisis will forge a leader, that he or she will rise to the occasion and display a depth of skill that was previously unseen, is a uniquely romantic Western notion.
Col. Gene Klann, US Army, Crisis Leadership
Less-anxious leaders and less-reactive congregations make better, more thoughtful decisions as they bear witness to the gospel, conduct their business, and care for one another.
Like the two hundred chiefs of the tribe of Issachar who served King David, congregational leaders need to be people who have “understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” (1 Chron. 12:32 NRSV).
FOCUS RESPONSIBLY ON SELF RATHER THAN BLAMING OTHERS
Effective leaders in such times will focus on their own lives, their own thinking, their own roles and responsibilities, their own part to play, and the log in their own eye rather than on the failures of others. They will learn to manage their own reactivity to the anxiety of society and to the anxiety of the people they lead.
THOUGHTFULLY CLARIFY YOUR PRINCIPLES AND BELIEFS
We naturally focus anxiously on symptoms rather than on the emotional process at work. That response is not helpful, however, since when we do so we simply recycle our problems.
Leaders need the capacity to separate themselves from the surrounding emotional process, the discipline to be clear about their own principles and vision, the willingness to take risks, the persistence to face inertial resistance, and the self-regulation to stand in the face of reactive sabotage.
DEEPEN YOUR CONNECTION TO GOD’S CREATION
Bowen claimed that pulling out of this regression will require “a human being who can live in better harmony with nature.”
Peter Steinke reminds us, “Anxiety alone will not harm or endanger a system. How anxiety is addressed will determine outcome more than anything else. Your responsible and enlightened behavior will influence the situation more than any other action.”
During a crisis, leaders need to make an extra effort to calm ourselves so that we can respond rather than react to the crisis. As the volume on feeling processes is amplified, leaders must intensify their efforts to make sure that clear thinking takes place. All leaders need people outside of their work system to help bring clarity about what is happening and to discern how to define themselves.
During a crisis, we must share information broadly. Because the togetherness force will be at work, we will want to encourage individual thinking to flourish as well. The temptation will be for people to yield to the loudest voice—usually that of the least mature—even if doing so violates their best thinking. During crises calm leaders stay focused on mission.
As Tod Bolsinger says, “The mission trumps. Always. Every time. In every conflict. Not the pastor. Not the members of the church who pay the bills. Not those who scream the loudest or who are most in pain. No. In a healthy Christian ministry, the mission wins every argument.”
Conflict happens when the intensity of the togetherness forces—the pressure to conform or to agree—combine with polarizing right/wrong thinking in an anxious system. Conflict is what is sometimes called a “causeaquence” of chronic anxiety—it simultaneously emerges from and creates more anxiety.
David Rock has identified five core motivators other than financial gain: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness (SCARF). We can certainly see all of these at work in the conflicts that flare up in our churches.
If the leader can maintain a position of calm neutrality in the face of conflict, new patterns can emerge and people can find their way to a more peaceful place. If the ability to manage our emotional reactivity is not already present when the crisis arrives, it is too late to develop it. In a critical moment we will always work with the character and capabilities we have grown to that point.
Part Three: Family Patterns
Going Home Again
When one can understand and alter one’s own reactivity to past generations, there is far more choice in life.
Roberta M. Gilbert, Connecting with Our Children
Ed Friedman, writing about the multigenerational impact of our families on our “destiny,” asks the provocative question, “Which of your ancestors really ordained you?”
There is a funny saying: “My family knows how to push all my buttons—they installed them!” This is true for all of us.
Prayer is a good way to ask questions in a dialogue with God, imagining our situation from God’s perspective. Rather than running away from the family, we bring it and ourselves into dialogue with Another.
The Nuclear Family
Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife. They become one flesh.
Genesis 2:24 (Message)
The Barna Group discovered that more than a quarter of Protestant pastors have faced significant marital problems and about that same percentage have faced significant problems in parenting. Almost half of pastors surveyed said that their current church position has a negative impact on their family, which in turn correlates with lower ministry satisfaction and higher ministry burnout risk.
Like all others, clergy couples struggle with finding time to spend together, financial difficulties, poor communication, and sexual problems.
The 1996 hit movie Jerry Maguire, starring Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger, depicts Jerry as a self-absorbed but vulnerable man pursuing a woman who realizes that he does not truly love her. However, he eventually tells her what she has longed to hear: “You complete me.” Since 1996, romantics everywhere have quoted that line to describe what they yearn for in their relationships. The problem with this idea of love and devotion is that over time it is likely not to work so well. Mathematics aside, intimate relationships are the one place where one half plus one half does not—and never will—make a whole. In the highest-functioning marriage, two mature and complete people unite to form an even greater whole, a relationship that transcends the sum of the parts.
When a couple learns to focus not only on their drive toward togetherness but also on their mutual need for individuality, they are free to be two whole people. This increases the likelihood of their becoming partners united by loyalty, commitment, and common purpose rather than two incomplete people dependent on each other for their emotional survival. Surely this is what it means to be “one flesh” in the richest sense. Such a couple can move freely between intimacy and autonomy.
After years of clinical work with families, Murray Bowen concluded that human beings consistently exhibit only a handful of basic emotional responses to rising anxiety. When we feel stressed, anxious, or threatened, we automatically revert to reactions that thousands of years of experience have embedded in our brains. We have a small repertoire: we fight, we flee, we over/underfunction, or we engage emotional triangles. In his theory, Bowen labeled this concept the “family emotional process” or the “nuclear family emotional system.”
When a marriage is anxious and fused, couples become very attentive to each other—in all the wrong ways. Each partner fixates on the other’s weaknesses and negative characteristics and loses sight of their partner’s strengths, seeing them only through a lens of disappointment or frustration. Each becomes focused on changing the partner—explaining to them (sometimes at high volume) how they are wrong and why they should change and then heaping on the shame and blame when they don’t. At the same time, we give ourselves a pass. We exaggerate our positive contributions to the relationship and minimize our negative ones.
It may seem counterintuitive, but if I want to improve my marriage, I need to shift my focus to myself. There are two important ways to practice this shifting of responsibility. First, go to the balcony. This means learning to take a perspective from above the situation, becoming an observer of self and others.
Jesus said that the only thing more important than our love for the people in our lives is our love for God (Matt. 22:37–40). God placed relationships at the center of the spiritual universe. Unfortunately, daily life works against forming and nurturing deep, loving relationships.
A necessary ingredient of a connected relationship is time—quality time and quantity time, and both in abundance. The notion of quality time being enough for our family is a myth. We should make every effort to make our time with our spouses and children high quality, but nothing can make up for the importance of just being present. Reflecting on his life in his memoir Just As I Am, the late Billy Graham wrote, “I have many regrets… I would do many things differently. For one thing, I would speak less and study more, and I would spend more time with my family… Every day I was absent from my family is gone forever.”
There is a difference between telling people what we think and what to think. Defining self means that we consistently and calmly tell others what we think and choose, without demanding that they think and choose the same way. In a well-functioning family, each person relates to every other person as a separate, distinct individual.
Develop a “Pause Button”
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl described the lessons he learned in a Nazi concentration camp. His most important realization was that although we cannot choose what happens to us, we can always choose how we respond to what happens to us. Drawing from his own painful experience, Frankl asserts that even when circumstances threaten our lives, we can choose how we will face death. No one, he says, not even a Nazi thug, can take that freedom to respond away from us.
We must develop the ability to think before we speak and to pause before we act. Stephen Covey applies this idea to our interaction with family members. He writes, “Obviously, family life would be a whole lot better if people acted based on their deepest values instead of reacting to the emotion or circumstance of the moment. What we all need is a ‘pause button’—something that enables us to stop between what happens to us and our response to it, and to choose our response.”
Part Four: The Spirit and the Journey
The Spiritual Life and the Path to Transformation
Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline
None of us took on the sacrificial demands of leadership expecting to be buried in endless meetings and administrative details. We wanted meaningful ministry, supported by a rich and purposeful life, full of significance. Instead, we sometimes find ourselves busier than ever but going through the motions, with an emptiness clinging to our best efforts.
In his book SoulShaping, Douglas Rumford captures the essence of our dilemma: “Our search for something more out of life usually begins with externals… We’ve confused activity with effectiveness, holding certain positions or titles with personal prestige, accumulating money with security, and sexual encounter with genuine intimacy. We’ve been so caught up in these pursuits that we haven’t really considered what goals we are chasing—and what will happen when we actually catch them!”
Many leaders say they are too busy to practice the spiritual disciplines regularly. Some choose one or two with which they feel comfortable, without giving a passing thought to the others. The disciplines help us train to live the kind of life we truly want to live. Regular practice of a variety of spiritual disciplines also helps us be the kind of leader we want to be: mature, well-differentiated, and focused.
Through a time of intentional quiet, solitude, and contemplation, we remember that we are more interested in pleasing God than in pleasing others and that we desire to conform to God’s will for our lives even if this means disappointing those close to us. We allow God to remind us of our utter dependence on divine grace, minimizing our tendency to relate to others as if we were dependent on them for approval or acceptance.
A commitment to celebration (also a spiritual discipline!) is a meaningful way to cultivate playfulness, which is another valuable antidote to chronic anxiety. These and other practices help us to turn down the volume on anxiety so that we can live more thoughtfully and intentionally. The psalms often show us the journey from anxiety to peace that unfolds when we offer ourselves to God in prayer. In Psalm 73, for example, the psalmist challenges God with the unfairness of a world in which the wicked prosper.
In his classic book Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster reminds us that the spiritual disciplines are uniquely designed by God to help us to receive grace by allowing “us to place ourselves before God so that He can transform us… We must always remember that the path does not produce the change; it only puts us in the place where the change can occur.”
Often, successful pursuit of spiritual discipline begins with a journal. Writing things down helps us to pay attention to our thinking amid the pressures of our emotional systems, giving us a chance to sort through our feelings and name them, getting them out of our heads, where they swirl in confusion, and onto the paper, where we can examine them and think about them. Helen Cepero connects this process to our spiritual practices: “One of the best gifts of a journal is that it gives you a place to show up. As you write, you may discover where you actually are.”
Mark Buchanan writes, “The problem is not that God is distant and needs to be wooed or badgered into coming near; the problem is that God is ever present, ever near, and that some of us seek ways of escape… God does not need to be invoked, we do. We need to be called to our senses, to be as present to God as God is to us.” This is why we practice the spiritual disciplines.
We must resist the temptation to take on the spiritual disciplines in cookie-cutter fashion, trying to conform to the experiences of others. Some leaders find it easy to fast, while others cannot imagine even trying. Some find solitude to be soothing and comfortable; some find their stride as they serve the practical needs of others. The spiritual disciplines offer us a variety of paths to enlarge our spiritual lives and heighten our experiences of God’s grace. Although the disciplines require that we regularly take on activities that are neither easy nor comfortable for us, we do not all need to travel the same path.
The spiritual disciplines are meant to lead us out into the unknown, away from the predictable life of committee meetings and building campaigns and membership goals. They beckon us into the unfamiliar and lead us on a solitary voyage toward the heart of God. We are tempted to use them to help us master our lives; in fact, they are intended to help us relinquish control to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit within our lives.
Learning to Learn Again
We now live in a time when consumer Christianity has become the accepted norm, and all-out engagement with and in Jesus’ kingdom among us is regarded as somewhat “overdoing it.” By contrast, the biblical pattern is, from beginning to end, “Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.”
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy
Honesty requires us to acknowledge that nothing is more difficult than changing lifelong habits. Learning to know and do the right things more consistently is an enormous goal for a leader, and it requires a lifetime.
How we approach learning for personal change often contributes to our failure. One approach assumes that mastering content is the equivalent of learning. Dallas Willard suggests that we should “at least consider the possibility that this poor result is not in spite of what we teach and how we teach, but precisely because of it.”
In the modern, Western way of learning, the student is often passive, merely absorbing information. Jesus practiced a way of learning in which his disciples followed him around, doing what their master did and learning along the way. It was an action-oriented approach to learning. The Hebrew concept of “knowing something” reflects this approach to learning. Genesis 4:1 says that Adam “knew” his wife, Eve. That is, he experienced her sexually. In Hebrew thought, we “know” something or someone by experience. Having information is not enough and, in fact, is quite dangerous.
Components of the Transformational Learning Model Information: Master the Concepts
Reflection
Dallas Willard encourages reflection. He writes, “It is one of the major transitions of life to recognize who has taught us, mastered us, and then to evaluate the results in us of their teaching. This is a harrowing task, and sometimes we just cannot face it. But it can open the door to choose other masters, possibly better masters, and one Master above all.”
Practice: Engage in New Behaviors
Ask ourselves, “What behaviors do I want to consider changing in light of this new information? What new behaviors or disciplines do I need to take on if I am to see this change occur?” Asking and answering questions of this sort presses us into action, which creates further learning.
Establish a Peer Group
Reggie McNeal notes, “A critical intellectual capacity for twenty-first century leadership success will be the ability to build knowledge together with other colleagues. The rate of information growth, coupled with the collapse of the Christendom paradigm, makes it no longer possible to prepare for ministry challenge through traditional preparation processes. Academic, conferential, and self-guided learning must be supplemented through a peer mentoring process for debriefing life and ministry experiences.”
Failure to keep Jesus’s life in the center of our vision results in the other components of the learning community becoming just another self-help process. But if he is at the center of our coaching and our peer learning, he will draw all the component parts of the process into his life (John 12:32).
Thinking Systems as a Christian
If you stick with this, living out what I tell you, you are my disciples for sure. Then you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth will free you.
Jesus, John 8:31–32 (Message)
Murray Bown focused on “what happened, how it happened, and when and where it happened, insofar as these observations are based on fact.” Bowen took exception to the “why” question because it calls for a subjective answer. “Why” questions push us toward cause-and-effect thinking (as opposed to systems thinking).
The appropriate questions for science are What? When? Where? and How? When it addresses issues of motive, meaning, or purpose, Why? is not a helpful scientific question. The “why” question is entirely appropriate for theology and philosophy, however. So, for example, Bowen Family Systems Theory can help us see the emotional processes involved in a family or congregation, but it cannot help us discern the influence of the Holy Spirit, the purposes God may be working out in the system, or the spiritual experience of an individual or group.
When Christian interpreters attempt to make the Bible speak scientifically rather than theologically, answering questions about the created order that the scientific method more appropriately addresses, they often twist either the Bible or science.
In the Greek text of the New Testament, Jesus’s instructions on self-denial have no noun for “self,” only a reflexive pronoun: “deny themselves.” The biblical word for the interior life of a human is not “the self.” Sometimes it is “heart” (kardia) or “mind” (nous) or “spirit” (pneuma), each of which seems to refer to the will or the decision-making control center of the human life. This is the dimension of human life that is “formed” in “spiritual formation.”
Eugene Peterson charges the modern world with substituting the “self” for the “soul.” “But in our current culture,” Peterson writes, “‘soul’ has given way to ‘self’ as the term of choice to designate who and what we are. Self is the soul minus God.
“Self” is the modern, non-transcendent, scientific word for the interior life. To think of “defining a self” or “forming a soul” would be more of an equivalency. The “soul” in Jesus’s teaching is not to be denied but to be preserved (Mark 8:36).
Paul describes the movement into a life of love as being akin to growing into maturity. We must abandon childish ways (1 Cor. 13:11). A choice to be patient, kind, humble, respectful, and truth seeking despite the actions of the other originates from deeply held principles and values. It is a differentiating move.
Epilogue
The question hanging in the balance is this: Will we participate with God in embracing the transformation that must occur in each of us?
The apostle Paul says it clearly: “No prolonged infancies among us, please. We’ll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are an easy mark for impostors. God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love—like Christ in everything. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love” (Ephesians 4:14–16 Message).
The authors close their book by exclaiming, “This is our heartfelt hope for you!”