Small Churches as Healthy Family Systems
by Lewis A. Parks

While teaching pastoral care and counseling to a group of licensed pastors who serve small membership churches, I decided that a lecture on family systems would be just the ticket. Students of the pioneering work of Murray Bowen and Edwin Friedman have been applying family systems analysis to the realities of small membership churches for almost two decades. Repeatedly I hear my clergy colleagues warn of the dysfunctional family systems found in small churches. “They’ll try to triangulate you at every turn,” my colleagues warn. “They’re great on scapegoating,” they say, and “God help you if you cross the matriarch!” So, thinking the licensed pastors should be alerted to these problems, I introduced family systems to the class.

Many of the basic concepts of family systems theory (the family as emotional system, triangulating relationships, self-differentiation, scapegoating, family secrets, etc.) assume that things are not as they should be. The therapist asks, “What is wrong with this family that this individual member should come to me presenting this symptom?”

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A United Methodist Pastor Reflects on the Benefits
of Longer Appointments
by Bruce Bennett

Over the years, I have done my share of “living in my next appointment,” dreaming of the day when I would serve “First Church of Big City.” But a retired pastor, who had spent forty years in ministry moving every two to three years, changed my perspective. This pastor told me that I would serve only one or two churches in my career where everything would “click.” I decided that when I got to a place that really fit and where remarkable things started to happen, I would stay for the long haul, regardless of the church’s size – not because I never desire a larger church, but because I desire more to know that God is using me to make a difference.

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Leaders do not need answers.
Leaders must have the right questions.

A congregation wanting to reach younger people found this question  helpful:

If in the coming year, your congregation were successful in reaching people younger than the current congregation, who might these younger people be? Where would you find them?

Editors:  Lovett H. Weems, Jr. and Ann A. Michel
Production and distribution:  Joe Arnold

Copyright © 2007 by the G. Douglass Lewis Center for Church Leadership. Leading Ideas material may be freely distributed with attribution (exclusive of material protected by separate copyright).