A Labyrinthine Journey: Soon Coming in 3-D

It doesn’t take much to convince people that we are in a time of crisis. Many of us have been struggling with things for a while, but in the last few months (and longer) our entire society and our world-wide system has been disintegrating through circumstance and invasive anxiety. It doesn’t take much for us to be afraid, does it? While there are many ways we can exhibit anxiety and fear, this latest crisis has hit our pocketbooks. (Other crises in our history hit other parts of our relationships and culture, this one has attached itself to our finances). We see it in reduced spending and company layoffs. We experience it with foreclosures and the perceived terror of the markets. In our congregation, this is the first year in many when December donations did not catch up the expenses of the year. The weather can accept some responsibility, yet I think we are afraid to give.

As I began my ministry, I was formed by the writings of Edwin Friedman on Bowen Family Systems theory (his foundational book is Generation to Generation: Family Process is Church and Synagogue). His ideas about how church families functioned and eventually his ideas about leadership are in my core. He died of a heart attack 13 years ago while writing A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. I have a well-worn copy of the first edition that his widow and some friends published themselves, while I was doing continuing education with them in Bethesda in 1999. That book comes off the shelves of my library more than most books. Every time it does it becomes God’s gift to me again.

For Ed, the “key to the kingdom” in leadership was to recognize the pervasive nature of anxiety that is present in crisis and to respond in a non-anxious way that leverages crisis into growth and positive change. History is filled with times when crisis led to short-term disintegration, but out of the ashes a greater strength was found (US Civil War, World War II, are only two examples).

As I consider the anxiety we face through our current state of crisis, we have a choice to make. Will we give into the fear and anxiety that pervades our media and culture or will we use this crisis as an invitation of faith to step up and see what strength we already have through Christ. God calls us to not simply survive but through the Holy Spirit to do greater things for God’s glory.

To offer practical help to live more in that freedom, I share a list of “Principles of Functioning” that Ed Friedman has in his chapter on facing crisis (A Failure of Nerve, p. 302 in the October, 1999 edition as published by the Estate of Edwin Friedman).

• Keep up your functioning; don’t let crisis become the axis around which your world revolves.
• Develop a support system outside of the work system, such as professional helpers, family, and friends.
• Stay focused on long-term goals.
• Deep breathing, prayer and meditation.
• Listen to your body
• Watch the triangles.
• Work out the balance between being responsible for self and being labeled obstreperous [stubbornly defiant].
• Keep the system loose with humor.
• It’s time to make decisions when the same question brings no new information.
• Accept the possibility that one’s own functioning brought it on, which means that one may be able to influence one’s recuperation.

Let us Trust in God’s love more than we believe in the Fear that paralyzes us!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Emotional Process Systems (Friedman/Bowen), church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.