Creating a Healthy Church
by Pamela Gross
January 16, 2000

My thoughts today began one Sunday a month or so ago in the Nursery at the Bangor UU Church. An elder woman volunteer and I were talking and she asked me what I was going to do with a degree from the seminary ... Well, I said, I plan to become an ordained UU minister...." There was a pause..."Why would you want to go and do something like that for?!?" was her surprising response. She must have seen the shock on my face, because she went on to add "I mean, its such a hard life .... There's always trouble in churches!"

My response to her was "Yes, there is always 'trouble" in churches, but there are many blessings too." She agreed, but still shook her head as if I must be one crayon short of a box. Her question took me by surprise, but her comment made absolute sense to me ... In churches, as with everything, there is a dark side ... A blessing can also be a curse...Our most positive qualities can often get us into the most trouble, and a church- the human institution that it is- is no different. The humans within churches find trouble: quarrels, disagreements and conflicts aplenty in personality alone. But then ... add a building and staff issues and coffee hour and budgets and the type font of the newsletter and Candles of Joy and Concern and (for UU's) Easter and Christmas and the Bible and who's in charge and who talks too much and who talks too little..... Well, all of that is part of church too and it makes a rich compost for conflict. So.... my friend's question- "Why would I want to go and do something like that for? There's always trouble in churches.-- are not only valid, her comment was also true. I felt uncomfortable hearing them.

As I thought about this conversation later, your church came to mind...Not because of "trouble"...l don't really know whether you have experienced 'trouble" here yet. My guess is that sooner or later you will- Belfast came to mind because one of the wonderful things about you is that you have so many choices before you as a new congregation. Without the burden of a long history, you are in a position to create a new model for church ministry. I see this community as holding a newborn church.
Normally, when someone is holding a newborn child we don't respond with 'Why would you want to go and do something like that for? There's always trouble with children!" Yet that same perspective could arguably be held on the birth of a child . Sure, when we hold a newborn, we are holding hundreds of thousands of dollars in clothes, food and shelter. No to mention a college education and car insurance. When we hold a newborn, we are holding sleepless nights, almost endless worry, responsibility, fights, illness, accidents waiting to happen-death-Loss. BUT, we don't focus on this. We choose to focus on the positive potential of a newborn. In a newborn, we know we also hold the potential for a cure for AIDS, a philanthropist, a President, a teacher, a tarot reader, a farmer, a minister, a parent.

So maybe it is all just about what we choose to focus on- the trouble or the potential- whether it is with a new baby or this new church. I look at you and see the potential of a newborn ... But I also know you want this newborn to grow up in a healthy way as most new parents do. Churches have their own version of "Dr. Spock" and this morning, I'd like to share some of those perspectives on 'Church-Rearing" with you.

The readings this morning gave us perspectives about healthy and unhealthy churches from two religious leaders who made a huge difference in their respective worlds. Paul, could have written 1 Corinthians 12-13 to us as a sermon for our first UU principle. I find it heartening to remember that the community at Corinth was also a newborn church, finding its way. Paul gave them a clear image to remind them of what their church should be. These words come to us nearly 2000 years after being written and are a treasure of truth for churches today.

I hear Dr. King's words as a man of my own century, struggling with a maturing church that has disappointed him and yet still being able to see the potential of church- despite the harm it inflicted on his dream and his person. These two people are powerful reminders of the legacy we share as church members: as Beings of the 21st century, we are part of an ongoing, living struggling tradition. We are blessed with thousands of years of history and experience to draw upon. And we are cursed with thousands of years of history and experience we carry with us. You hold this newborn church in your collective arms and have the blessing of all we've learned over the years as well as the burden.
Last year, I took two classes at the seminary that brought these blessings/ burdens to the forefront of my studies. Four books, in particular, affected my thinking deeply. I don't want this to become a book report, but these are resources that have affected me deeply.

First, I read Framezvorks by Douglas Walwrath and I learned about one of the burdens for churches today. Churches in this country have been formed based on a 'framework" or a perspective. The dominant framework for churches in this country is that of rural culture: A culture where we are born, live, work, and die in the same community- with the church at the center of that community. A thesis of the book is that this framework is NOT viable anymore ... we keep using it because it is familiar, but it doesn't apply to the world as it is any longer. In other words, the world around the church has changed so the church can no longer be what it was. Yet most of us come to church with some expectations that it will be what we knew as children.This struck me as especially ironic, since I (and most of the people I know) do not live in the community we were born into. This is a rare occurrence now as compared to the formative days of American churches when remaining in your birth community was the norm. A church in the center of the life of a rural based community, whose members are basically extended family to one another is essentially different from the churches in the world today because so few of us live that kind of life.

Churches as we inherited them tend to be about sameness. Many of us can hear the truth in Martin Luther King's naming the church an "irrelevant social club." In the Birmingham letter, he challenges churches to break free of the "paralyzing chains of conformity." He recalls the original Christian Church's opposition to the status quo of its day and points out that the church of his time is about supporting the status quo, not opposing it. Churches today continue to be challenged by different people from different places coming together to worship. While our denomination has built its reputation on this premise, we have inherited our own tendencies toward sameness in our churches. (UU congregations are the most highly educated in the United States.) Since churches must exist today with many differing expectations, sameness is an impossible goal and disappointment is inevitable.

Yet we continue to come to church with an old Framework. Through Walwrath's book, I have come to believe that this is fundamental information for a forming community of people. Nowadays, we are about as likely to have grown up together in this place as we are to all be millionaires ... Yet, in part, we come to church because of some memories we hold of 'church". Can it be that this is a source of some of the trouble in being disappointed when it doesn't live up to our expectations?

I have been an active member of a church for virtually all of my 43 years. That means I have roughly 40 years of experience to share. With all of us in this room, we must have hundreds of years of combined church experience ... and expectations. I'd like us to take a few moments to draw on that experience together.

Focus for a moment on a childhood experience of 'church." Even if you weren't in a church then, try to recall an experience you had that you could call 'church" now...... Go back to that time and capture the feelings you had ... What was it that you responded to- tastes, smells, sounds, sights? After you have an experience and feelings, you might find an image or words that emerge from that... Bring that memory and those words to this room and I invite you to turn to a person next to you and share what you found ... I invite you to share what feels safe for you and I also encourage you to challenge yourself and maybe stretch those boundaries just a little.....
(Would anyone be willing to share?)

In all of our memories of church there are feelings- this is the emotional side of church. This is the part of church where 'trouble" brews, but I suggest to you that it is also where the blessings can bubble up and shimmer over the entire community.
The emotional part of church is where the next two books brought me. First, Edwin Friedman's Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue applied Bowen's Family Systems Theory to congregational life. Next, a book titled Creating a Healthier Church, gave practical application of Family Systems Theory to churches. I can say without reservation, that these books have revolutionized my thinking about churches and church leadership. Because the church framework we have inherited has been based on linear thinking and hierarchical models of power, it has caused us to forget that there is an emotional side to a congregation. These books ask us to remember that there is a heart to a congregation, not just an organizational body that runs on a well-defined power structure. I suspect that the heart is what got lost in the hierarchical system we inherited and is another source of 'trouble" in churches- one of the burdens of experience we carry with us. These two books focused my attention toward the emotional system in organizations. I believe they offer the possibility of a way to return "'heart" to a healthy organization.

At the risk of oversimplifying what I've learned, when I apply Family Systems Theory to a congregation, I see a clear picture of what my instructor called "emotional plasma." I see the connective tissue between all of us more clearly because I am looking at each person more dearly at the same time. The focus is on the People and the way they connect with one another, not on assembling structures. This theory brought me full circle back to the learning of my youth: I am the church, You are the churches We are the church Together. It is our connection to one another that count; I learned that as a child ... but how easy it was to unlearn it as an adult faced with church 'responsibility".
As adults, what we inherited was a "power over" model for church. What we need for a healthier church is a new model that will allow room for the connections to exist. From the book, The Heroine's Journey, (by Maureen Murdoch):

Mary Ann Cejka writes about these hierarchical pyramids in our culture and traces the roots of these structures...not to Christianity or Judaism but to the Roman Empire. She calls for a conversion from hierarchy to community.
Marc Ellis of the Maryknoll School of Theology argues that the central calling ... [as a] ... Church and as individuals, is the call to conversion from empire to community. To be converted from empire is to dissociate ourselves from the pyramid. The structure of community is a circle. Movement within a circle takes place easily and not at the expense of others. The circle as a whole is the basic form-n of a wheel, and as such it is the appropriate social structure for a "pilgrim people", a people on a journey together. People within a circle share an equal perspective, they can look each other in the eye. The circle facilitates accountability. (p. 173)

All that I learned this past year points me toward the circle as a model for community. When a community stands in a circle, we see each other with an equal perspective, different, but equal. From Native Americans to modem Feminists, we now have reams of paper with this message written on it. As I see it, your new community has been gifted with all of this learning that tells us: Being in circle, being connected, is the key to a healthy church.

Which brings me to the fourth book, Servant Leadership by Robert Greenleaf. On the opening page, he writes: The idea of The Servant as Leader came out of reading Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East. In this story, we see a band of men on a mythical journey ... The central figure of the story is Leo who accompanies the group as the servant who does their menial chores, but who also sustains them with his spirit and song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some years of wandering finds Leo and is taken into the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo whom he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader."

Now there are many ways to hear this story, but what Robert Greenleaf heard in it was this: "The Great Leader is seen as servant first, and that simple fact is the key to his greatness. Leo was actually the leader all the time, but he was servant first because that was what he was, Deep Down Inside." For me, this view made sense of all I have learned and intuited through my life as a leader and a member of organizations.

We exist in a system of power based on a model of "power over". In the last 20 -30 years, theories of power have been developed on a model of "power With" and "empowerment", such as the concept of 'servant leadership".
I can give you an idea of the difference between the two in churches with two images: In Austria, in my grandmothers church, the pulpit is suspended from a door in the wall about 20 feet above the pews. That is where she saw and heard her pastor every Sunday. Today, your leaders stand on the floor in front of you, with you ... what a difference nearly 100 years can make. It gives me great confidence in the potential health of churches when I consider this change of perspective.

You hold a newborn church in your arms; you hold endless possibility and potential. And The really good news is that you have so many teachers and new ideas to support you on your journey. One teacher is a man who struggled with a new paradigm ... a man who taught us all about seeing each other as people in a circle. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: "Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."
This is what churches need too, to be healthy: hearts full of grace and souls generated by love. (I believe there are plenty of those here in Belfast!)

In closing, I bring some wishes to bestow on you today as you move into the future. I hope you will look at each other closely and from far away, know each other as people first ... build a covenant of being together before you build a building care for your connections ... cultivate and nurture servant leadership and maybe even start every meeting with a round of The Community Song! Because, while other churches have a pyramid of power in place that needs dismantling ... restructuring... Therapy!... You have a newborn ... a real blessing, a new beginning ... an opportunity to create a healthy new church in the world.

So, to my friend's question of 'Why would I want to do something like that for?" my answer is this: Because churches make improbable things possible ... servants as leaders, people in circles of connection rather than power struggles. Because I believe, as Martin Luther King Jr. did, that churches still can "carve a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment."
So May It Be. Blessed Be ... Amen.

A (very incomplete) Bibliography for Creating a Healthy Church

Chinn, Peggy L. Peace & Power: Building Communitiesfor the Future. NLN
Press, 1995. .(Formerly subtitled: A Guide to Feminist Process)
Friedman, Edwin H.. Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue. The Guilford Press, 1985.
Goldman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books, 1995.
Greenleaf, Robert K. Servant Leadership. The Robert Greenleaf Center,1991.
Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine's journey. Shambhala Publications, 1990.
Rendle, Gil. Behavioral Covenants in Congregations: A Handbook for Honoring Differences. The Alban Institute, 1999.
Richardson, Ronald W. Creating a Healthier Church. Fortress Press, 1996.
Rosener, Judy B. "Ways Women Lead",, HBR, No. 90608. (Available at the
Bangor Theological Seminary Bookstore)
Walwrath, Douglas. Framezvorks. Pilgrim Press, 1987.,1990. (Out of Print at
this time.)