Sunday, December 02, 2007

Family of Origin - Toward Healthier Ministry

It was during this time of year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that my counseling load was the greatest when I was Director of Counseling at Central College. The increase in counseling stemmed from students having to enter and re-enter the life of their family. Family of origin dynamics were powerful and impacted most individuals well beyond their capacity to recognize and understand. When students came in for counseling, thinking that school deadlines and pressures were the cause of anxiety and depression, it was often their family of origin pressures and scripts to which they were reacting.

I have observed some of the same in candidates enrolled in the MFCA. Excuses for missing deadlines, blaming church leaders for anxiety and their inability to perform, and struggling with continued medical problems are often the results of family of origin and people’s strongly embedded scripts that were formed there. The power of these scripts control individuals in both personal and professional life. In ministry the ability to understand and manage one’s family of origin can make a huge difference – sometimes to the point of making or breaking the ministry as a whole.
Understanding relational systems, whether in family of origin or church community, is a crucial aspect of ministerial formation. The new seminar, the Pastor as Person, will have this as a key objective. Dr. Hamman will be guiding participants in reading and reflecting on topics of self discovery and understanding relational systems. The understanding gained allows individuals to differentiate causing ingrained scripts to be recognized and managed. This is especially significant if the scripts have been dysfunctional and hazardous to the health of the person and their ministry.

This will be hard work. In one of the books used in the seminar, Ronald Richardson writes:

"In doing this work, you are breaking the patterns of generations of functioning in particular set ways. We are only the latest version of accumulated, unresolved emotional issues that we had little to do with creating but that, as members of that same emotional system, we have been perpetuating. Breaking the power of the generational patterns takes takes a tremendous act of courage and is truly heroic. People who do this work eventually (though not at first) become a kind of hero in their families and a resource for the following generations to create a new way of functioning emotionally in life. Working through the power of God’s creative Holy Spirit, they are helping to bring new life and health to themselves and their people, so that their ‘days may be long in the land.’" (Pg. 10; Becoming a Healthier Pastor; Family Systems Theory and the Pastor’s Own Family, Fortress Press, 2005).

The increased awareness of family of origin "scripts," or "generational patterns" as Richardson would say, is important for those in ministry and I am excited we are able to offer MFCA candidates the opportunity to participate in the Pastor as Person – a process of learning that will allow individuals to interrupt harmful patterns that make both personal relationships and ministry relationships difficult. If you are interested in taking the seminar, even if you have completed a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), I encourage you to contact our office and register. The seminar begins March 1, 2008 and will end with a week gathered on the shores of Lake Michigan at Camp Geneva Shores in May (May 27 – 31, 2008).

I wish all the readers of this newsletter a blessed Christmas and Happy New Year! May 2008 be filled with joy and God’s miracles!


Cor