The Bowen theory concept of multigenerational transmission in families, although often difficult to accept, is logically appreciated. Families pass along habits, traditions, beliefs, grudges, feuds, genes, and emotional process down the generations. That force can be as powerful as a tidal wave, or as subtle, though influential as an undercurrent. Most of us can readily appreciate how past generations affect contemporary family systems and the individuals in it.
However, I find that many have difficulty appreciating the same for a congregation. This despite the fact that there is ample evidence of how congregations get stuck or have conflict over issues in the past—even from the long ago past, generations before any current members were around. Generations and members have come and gone since “the incident,” yet new members, many of whom have no direct experience of or connection with (and sometimes no awareness) the issue will find themselves acting out the same conflict. How is that possible?
Edwin Friedman wrote:
The nature of connections in the present have more to do with what has been transmitted successively for many generations than with the logic of their contemporary relationship.
I think that’s where most people fail to appreciate the power of multigenerational transmission in congregations: they are looking for the logic. But what we’re dealing here is emotional process, not logic.
One pastor I talked to finds himself hurt and disheartened after experiencing an episode of reactivity in his congregation. He’s been at his congregation for five years and in the past three years the church has seen an increase in new members, many young families—the kinds of new members every congregation craves: families made up of young adults with young children. But predictably, a quick influx of that populate is met with resistance and anxiety and things begin to change: new schedules, new groups, new patterns, new faces, not to mention all those little children running around putting their little fingers all over the furniture!
The reactivity took the form of personal attacks on the pastor and the staff. Many of these attacks came from older members who were feeling threatened by all the new changes. But some of the attacks came from new members, people who had joined the church not two years before. And yet, both groups were attacking the pastor and staff from the same frame of reference: they were focusing on and accusing the pastor and staff with issues that had happened fifteen or more years earlier—long before any of these parties had been in the church!
Because congregations are a type of faith community, they operate under the same systemic dynamics as families, communities, and similar emotional-relationship systems. New members do not just join and organization, they join a community, with its culture, memory, and identity. And part of what any community must do is inculcate new members with these in order to “make them part of the system.” It does not take long for new members to become part of the homeostatic milieu of the community. And along with it, they somehow seem to take on the multigenerational transmission of the emotional process of the community, making it, in a real sense, their own.
