1860 Beulah Road
Vienna, VA 22182
(703) 938-6753
1860 Beulah Road
Vienna, VA 22182
(703) 938-6753
by Rev. Eugene C. Buie, DMin.
May 2, 2008
The "power of the past" cannot be denied. Individuals, families, communities, and even nations are shaped by past experiences. We are expressions of who we have been. These formative experiences color the way we perceive the present and react to developing circumstances, forming additional memories that shape the future. In this way, we are in one sense tied to our past and in another have the potential to evolve into something more (or less) than we have been. There are, however, internal and external forces beyond our control that arise during periods of high anxiety and stress, the situation in the world today. These forces can block our potential to change for the better, hold us prisoners to the past, and even cause us to regress into divisiveness and conflict.
The biblical story of the Exodus illustrates this phenomenon of the human experience. Enslaved by Egypt’s Pharaoh, the Israelites experienced an existence in bondage for four hundred years until Moses was commissioned by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to lead them into freedom. This was no small task. Divine intervention was required, taking the form of ten devastating plagues inflicted upon Egypt, before Pharaoh submitted and released the Israelites. Moses led them out of Egypt and into the wilderness to meet the One who had set them free.
It was not long, however, before the Israelites began to grumble and complain about their new existence free of Pharaoh’s rule. Encountering hardships in the wilderness, they wanted to return to Egypt and to slavery. In Egypt, they at least had food and water and a sense of security. The "power of the past" called for them to return to the ways they had known, even if those ways included enslavement and oppression. Indeed, without the leadership of God, as mediated through Moses, the Israelites would have returned to Egypt and accepted anew their former bondage.
Faced with the unknown challenges of freedom and a God whom they had forgotten, they acted to deny the potential of their future by creating and worshipping a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. Only the anger and differentiated leadership of Moses arrested their movement toward failure and propelled them into the future as God’s chosen people. It took the overwhelming power of God’s presence, reflected in the face of Moses, to reverse the power of Israel’s collective memory and their desire to return to the past.
A community, such as a congregation, is a social organism with a collective awareness. It possesses a common memory of emotional processes that are transmitted unconsciously from generation to generation. Small congregations in particular tend to repeat behavioral patterns from their past. The smaller a congregation is, the stronger are its collective memories. In times of stress and high anxiety, these patterns of communal memory can assert themselves and may do so repeatedly throughout the life of the community. Such patterns can be modified, and even suppressed, during periods of differentiated leadership. However, they never disappear. When the presence of differentiated leadership is weakened or lost, unregulated emotional processes begin to assert themselves. A congregation can regress into conflict.
Consider two religious institutions from the perspective of emotional processes that formed them. Here we find emotional patterns that did not change. During the last two thousand years, Catholicism was born and was spread through the conquests of the Constantine Empire. The Church was joined to the Empire and reigned in the Western world as Christendom. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church continued to relate to the Western world in terms of political and spiritual sovereignty. Celtic Christianity was one of Catholicism’s many conquests, in addition to indigenous pagan religions. On the other hand, Protestantism was born out of division with Catholicism during the Reformation. Consequently, in the last five hundred years, Protestant churches have multiplied because and as a result of conflict and division.
Modern Christian congregations do not escape the generational patterns of these historic emotional processes. These patterns are ingrained into our institutions and communities, such that we accept them as natural processes. Why do Protestant religious institutions find it necessary to teach conflict management to church leaders? It is because congregations are repeatedly threatened by division and conflict. It is systemic within Protestantism and jokingly referred to by some as a way of growing the church. If we consider how many congregations are actually destroyed and how many people are driven from the church because of conflict and division, it would not be such a joke.
Like so many Protestant churches, Antioch’s formation was a consequence of conflict and division. In Antioch’s one hundred plus years of existence, conflict has continued to be a reoccurring pattern in the life of the congregation. As recently as 1992, the congregation divided once again and today continues to recover from this injury. After the division, conflict continued as an emotional undercurrent, affecting every aspect of the congregation’s life for several years. Even though this pattern has been suppressed and modified during the last ten years through differentiated leadership, it waits to be released once again if differentiated leadership ceases to be a regulating presence.
To keep this from happening, the leaders of the congregation must strive to be and remain differentiated, that is, taking responsibility for self (not others), regulating one’s personal behavior in order to avoid anxious reactivity, and staying connected with others through open conversation and mutual respect. In other words, this requires being in a right and loving relationship with everyone according to the commands of Christ.
Only differentiated leadership can modify and regulate the power of the past. Such leadership must exist in the pastor and elected leaders of the congregation. It can be even more effective when the congregation itself magnifies and strengthens its leadership through further individual differentiation. The power of the past cannot be denied, but its power over the congregation can be minimized and controlled by a communal righteousness that is manifested in right-relationships within the community. ECB
