Leading congregations in times of anxiety
This week the Alban Institute is featuring a resource and discussion on how clergy can effectively minister in congregations experiencing significant anxiety about their future.
A key insight is the appropriation to congregation life of lessons taken from attachment therapy:
"Congregations grieve because members and groups have lost significant defining points. Anxiety escalates as people sort through the realities of loss, their intense feelings, and the uncertainty of their future. And anxiety escalates further as a congregation and its leaders wonder how to (1) care for people who are grieving deeply, (2) respond to people who are grieving similar losses differently from each other, and (3) relate to people who are not grieving the changes at all because they feel no sense of loss. Pondering all the change, loss, and grief, members may become anxious about the congregation's undefined future and doubt whether its leaders have the necessary gifts to lead the congregation into unknown territory.Many congregational members and leaders are familiar with the overlapping perspectives of authors who have written about the processes of naming and grieving losses. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler- Ross, the most familiar theorist, identified five stages that terminal patients and their families typically experience to cope with impending death: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (On Death and Dying, New York: Macmillan, 1969). From my work with attachment theorists, I have come to appreciate a dimension beyond acceptance that provides a deeper fulfillment to grieving people. I refer to this as attaching anew. Attaching anew is not the same as reattaching; developing the capacity to attach anew requires hard work.
Clearly, the possibility of reattaching is tantalizing to grieving people and congregations. Reattachment would restore broken bonds and lost relationships, terminate the intense feelings of sadness and anger, fear and despair, and would allow congregational members and leaders to avoid the expressions of anxiety that disrupt relationships and distract the congregation from its ministries. Reattaching would allow us to return to the stability we enjoyed in the past and halt grief."
Read the full article here. There's a round-table discussion linked at the bottom of the article if you'd like more information.
McFayden's observation that the grieving person must withdraw emotional energy from the previous, lost relationship into new one(s) is very accurate and most valuable. It describes a fundamental marker in successful grieving.
Kubler-Ross did not pick this up in her ground-breaking research because her focus was on the process of dying and her subjects were all terminally ill.
William J. Worden's description of grieving as a series of four non-sequential "tasks" of mourning is apt here: Accept the reality of the loss; Experience the pain of grieving; Adjust to an environment where the deceased is missing; Redirect or relocate emotional energy into new relationship(s).
Grief theory can be useful in describing changes that groups such as congregations experience when they come to an end or experience radical (even predictable) change. But this particular application reveals the essential short-coming in thinking about grief according to the Kubler-Ross' model. Her "stages of dying" is often inaccurately re-cast as "stages of grieving" and has become the most quoted and most taught model of grieving.
What is ironic is that she wrote her books to help people talk about and accept death, and yet her work is seldom applied to the kind of people she studied, namely, the terminally ill person moving towards foreseeable death.
It is good that MacFayden saw past the essential difference between the experience of the dying and the grieving and then saw the connection in the lives of congregations that are dissolving or facing radical change.
Andrew Gerns
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August 17, 2009 6:00 PM