"Are You My Mother: Family Systems & the Church"
by Rev. Kimi Riegel
February 22, 2004

This is a sermon about church, any church. It is also a sermon about families and any organization. We are part of hundreds of intersecting groups, familial and familial-like that affects us and we affect. It is good practice to look at those relationships just like we go to the doctor once in a while to see how we can become as healthy as possible. This is one sermon about one aspect of organizational / church health – there will be others.

One of the most common metaphors for a church community is family. That image is comforting for some, bringing up memories of being cared for and loved. Family is a place where one was respected, listened to, taught, challenged, hugged, fed and generally guided into becoming a fully functioning, health person. However for others the image is not so positive. Families can be places where self-esteem is destroyed instead of developed. Families can be full of destructive emotions such as jealousy, isolation, fear and violent anger. Families are subject to abuse, alcoholism, illness, and what we have generally come to call dysfunction. For most of us, family is probably a mixture of the life-affirming and the destructive. For most of us as, with the rest of life, family is a mixed bag of good and not so good. One comedian I heard once said, “Me, therapy? Of course I am in therapy. I was raised in a family.”

Our family relationships are some of the most complicated in our lives. Thus, when we talk about church, using the metaphor family is both helpful and complicating.

No matter what the health or lack of it that exists in our families, it is in that environment that we learned how to relate to the world. There we learned whether people could be trusted. We learned how to communicate to get our needs met. We learned about cause and effect and about the consequences of our behavior. Some of that “learning” continues to be accurate and effective as we become adults and some becomes erroneous and debilitating. Some of those skills get in our way or clash with the skills of others as we try to create a career, community and new family connections. We can do a fair amount of relearning if we find our skills lacking in our adult world, but that takes awareness and a great deal of time and energy.

The title of this sermon, “Are you my mother?” comes from a wonderful children’s story by P.D. Eastman. In the story a small bird hatches from an egg while his mother is away. I suspect she wasn’t being neglectful but needed to go out to gather food. The little guy not seeing his mother sets out on his own to find her. He, in an attempt to find someone to pattern his life around, asks every creature he comes across if it is his mother. Finally a kindly excavator, referred to in the book as a “snort,” puts him back in his nest where his mother soon returns with a fat worm and he goes on about the business of growing up. The story ends there. But one could wonder how that experience affected the rest of his life as an adult bird. When he marries would he choose a wife who had had a suspicious and critical father and was prone to be emotionally distant? That could create a system where he felt abandoned and always suspicious wondering when she too would wander off. Would he, when he was in his religious community, expect his minister to be the mother he never had, or would he transfer to her all the negative feelings about being abandoned and thus find himself quick to criticize and anger. Perhaps feeding into that particular minister’s feeling of inadequacy around her own mothering skills.

It’s a silly metaphor probably taken way too far. But what congregational theorists have come to realize is that within any given congregation the clergy “irrespective of faith are simultaneously involved in three distinct families whose emotional forces interlock: the families within the congregation, the congregation [as a family], and our own families”[i] Which brings in more than ample opportunity for confused communication, transfer of old issues and general entanglement. Thus the little bird’s past and current family relationships will in fact affect his life in the church.

Family systems theory is used in individual and family counseling. It understands all people as part of many interacting systems that bring out various behaviors from that person’s repertoire. The guru in this work as it applies to congregations is Edwin Friedman. I will be quoting from his work Generation to Generation, which I would highly recommend to anyone who is interested in the topic. One of my favorite quotes of his is, “we are all hard wired for more pathology than we will have a chance to express in this life time.” As a consequence with the three interacting families in any given church encounter and our own hard wiring there is a good chance that unresolved issues in one area will produce symptoms in the others. The good news however is that increased understanding of any one creates more effective functioning in all three.

We are all part of interconnected systems. As Unitarian Universalists, interconnection is our seventh principle: we affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. And we are a part of it all. We cannot escape the connections to each other and our natural world. Understanding those connections, and learning to make them healthy enriches the whole system. Making better family connections in each family in the congregation improves the church. A minister who understands his or her own issues improves the church and the families in it. Church members who work to deal with their issues with the minister improve the minister’s family and their own families. A small effort has a great and abiding good.

The overriding principle of family systems theory is not to fix a bad or dysfunctioning part but to insert new input in the form of understanding and behavior that cancels out what has gone wrong. It is about learning how to change our own behavior and responses. It is about changing our relationships with one another through changing ourselves and thus the system. It is not our nature that makes the system dysfunctional but our functioning within that system that continues to reinforce and feedback the dysfunction.

Family systems theory works with five basic concepts. They are all very interrelated but to cover all five would take a 300-page book or in my case a sermon series. Today I will begin with just one of the concepts, differentiation.  

Differentiation “means the capacity of a family member to define his or her own life goals and values apart from the surrounding togetherness pressures, to say ‘I’ when others are demanding ‘you’ and ‘we’. It includes the capacity to maintain a (relatively) non-anxious presence in the midst of anxious systems, to take maximum responsibility for one’s own destiny and emotional being. … Differentiation means the capacity to be an ‘I’ while remaining connected to the we.”[ii]

Relationships generally fall somewhere on the continuum: one end being very well differentiated thus being in relationship without needing to tug on one another and the other end being so fused that they are very reactive to each other, thus becoming always anxious about the other.

Differentiation reduces anxiety and anxiety reduces differentiation. When a system is anxious it is less likely to allow its members to function with autonomy. When a system doesn’t allow its members to function with autonomy it becomes anxious with every move.

It just makes sense. The more a person is able to define who they are and where they are going without being dependent on another, the more likely they are to be sure of themselves and non-anxious. For instance, the more you as a church know what your goals and direction will be the less anxious I am as a minister. On the other hand the more stuck together a relationship, the more potential for running each other into dysfunction. For instance the more I am dependent on you for my sense of myself as a minister the more anxious I will become if you move away from me or do things I don’t approve of. It is an interdependent relationship that is made stronger by a strong sense of autonomy and differentiation.

Friedman says, “There is a very accurate test any religious leader can use to obtain a reading on where the members of his congregation tend to cluster along the scale of differentiation. All we have to do is give a talk in which we carefully differentiate ourselves – define clearly what we believe and where we stand on a controversial issue, in a way that is totally devoid of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts.’ The response of the congregational family, no matter what the faith, will always range along a spectrum. Those who function emotionally toward the ‘more differentiated’ will respond by defining themselves. ‘Father, I agree.’ Or ‘I disagree’ or ‘I like what you said, though I am not sure I can agree with you on…’ Those less differentiated will respond not by defining themselves but continuing to define the clergyman or woman: ‘Father, how can you say that when you know…’ or ‘Rabbi, sometimes I wonder if you are even Jewish.’ Clergy benefit from serving congregations that have more differentiated individuals, as there is less anxiety.

And I would turn that around on to clergy. Congregations benefit from having more differentiated clergy. These clergy tend to be non-anxious and thus reduce any of the anxiety that might be present in the system. There are some signals that apply to individuals just like congregations. Being overly serious and not having an ability to laugh and use humor are indicators of anxiety thus a lack of differentiation. The seriousness and anxiety is often content-orientated and prone to diagnosis rather than process. The more differentiated the minister the more likely they will be able to attend to the process in a conflict rather than the content, the more they will respond with process questions rather than becoming defensive.

The most valuable contribution a person can make to their congregation as a minister or a congregant is to be a differentiated person, a person who is autonomous yet interdependent with the church. The church will not rise or fall with you or me. The system is bigger, stronger and longer lasting then both of us. The church that our little bird from the beginning of this morning belongs to will be helped greatly if he talks with his mother about his feelings of abandonment and if his wife will develop a stronger connection with her father. Then the two of them will be less likely to contribute to the anxiety in the church system by becoming entangled in their minister who has the potential from her own back ground to be less than differentiated. The minister can help the system by getting more connected with her kids and spending less time at the church thus becoming less entangled with little bird and his wife.

So, in conclusion I would offer two things to watch for in yourself, your clergy and the church system that are indicators of a lack of differentiation they are: sabotage and over functioning. These indicators of a system bound for trouble at home as well as and at the same time as in the church.

First watch out when things are going well. If you find yourself looking for trouble or waiting for it there is a good chance there is a lack of differentiation. It may mean we are so stuck together that we have become constantly anxious thus assuring that there will be trouble. It is likely there is very little ‘I’ and a whole lot of we going on when one is waiting for trouble. One of the concepts that I will talk about in another sermon is that of balance. A system that has been undifferentiated or one that contains a number of people who are less differentiated will try to return to or recreate a familiar state. Healthy and differentiated can feel threatening if we are not used to it. Thus we look for reasons to find failure and fault to assure ourselves of things not changing. We sabotage the change because we are afraid. When you see or feel anxiety about failure surfacing, name it, speak to a process to reduce it and above all else see how you might make yourself more differentiated at home and at church. Any change in a part of the system will cause change elsewhere.

Secondly pay attention to over functioning. It is the downfall of many clergy and lay leaders and a key indicator that there is a lack of differentiation. Over functioning means doing it all yourself, taking the all the responsibility, serving on every committee for years and years, or being a minister who worries about other’s spirituality without having time for their own. Over functioning allows others to under function and remain dependent. While it is often a response to anxiety (we can’t find anyone else to do the job) it also increases the anxiety as we become fused with and overly dependent on those who do everything.  At home, if we are doing all the work, at some level we feel needed but it also breeds resentment, and a lack of differentiation on all fronts. Setting our own goals and direction apart from the functioning of the church or having clear goals in the church helps to alleviate over functioning as everyone knows his/her job and trusts that others will do theirs.

We are all, every one of us, part of concentric rings of connection. Church, home, family of origin, the family we live with, our partner’s family and history, it all affects us. As Unitarian Universalists we affirm the inherent worth of every person as an individual and the interconnected web of all existence. We affirm the personal search for truth and meaning and the democratic process. Believing in these principles is not enough; our churches and our families will be made stronger if we act on those beliefs. If we trust that each of us is a capable differentiated person and we act that way as much as possible ourselves, the whole world will become a better, less anxious place. May it be so.