Disclosure: Today’s post was written after a great workshop by Rev. Dr. Joseph J. Clifford of First Presbyterian Church Dallas. He taught on family systems in the church and the Bible, and as he spoke he spurred on much thinking in my mind. This post is partly my working out some of his thinking on family systems, Biblical parables and how it applies to our current American economic crisis. So there is some tangential thinking going on..still connecting dots. I would love feedback on the post, especially if you are tracking with it or not tracking.
FAMILY SYSTEMS
One of the things that I enjoyed in my Marriage and Family graduate work is the research of Murray Bowen, Edwin Friedman, and other family systems thinkers. It’s especially fascinating when you apply family systems thinking to churches (staffs, congregations), cities, countries, cultures, etc.
There are several key components to family systems, and sometimes it can get quite complicated, but what I’m interested in for this post, and what I will overgeneralize is the concept of anxiety within a system, and how that anxiety is often projected onto someone, or something else. For example, in a family, often when there is anxiety between spouses it can be projected onto a child. In a larger context when there is anxiety, for example in a culture or country, anxiety can be projected onto other people groups, politics, etc.
When anxiety enters that system the goal of that system, whether it be a family, or a society, is to reduce that anxiety and bring the system back to a homeostatic state….otherwise to balance it out. This can be done in many ways, but often the anxiety is balanced out in the system because it has been put on someone or something else outside of it. This is an over simplification, but I think you get the idea.
