Postkiwi Duncan Macleod

I took a class with ministry students this morning, focusing on roles, boundaries and self-differentiation.

We started with Edwin Friedman’s fable, “The Bridge”. It’s in his book, “Friedman’s Fables“, together with questions for unpacking. The story is online in the context of Friedman’s address on family systems to the Seven Oaks Foundation. Friedman applies research on family systems by Murray Bowen in his book, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue. Murray Bowen’s work can be explored at The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family.

Friedman tells the story of a man on his way to fulfilment and destiny. As he walks across a bridge he is met by another man with a rope tied around his waist. He is talked into holding an end of the rope. All of a sudden the stranger jumps over the side and our traveller is forced to keep him from falling to his doom.

We explored self differentiation as a healthy alternative to disengagement and enmeshment. Drawing on the work of Cameron Lee and Jack Balswick in Life in a Glass House, 1989, we explored the development of integrity in the face of idealisation, impoverishment and intrusion. Balswick and Lee examine clergy family systems in the context of a congregational family system.

Theological and cultural issues are linked with psychological crises here. The roles played by ministers play out the implicit theologies of minister and congregation. If clergy are expected to be morally, spiritually and emotionally different to others, what does that say about everyone else? Many of us are still working out of an approach to spirituality that says we must always be giving, not receiving. The prayer of St Francis has a lot to answer for!