Ministering from the right side of the brain

I’ve been a lifelong doodler. In fact, my college notes look more like sketchbooks than notebooks (and the doodles are the only reason I’ve kept some of my college notes). Even today pencil and paper aren’t far from reach in the event an idle moment provides opportunity to doodle.

At times doodles have turned into sketches, and sketches into drawings. The graphite drawing below, done several years ago, started as a doodle which eventually became a favorite rendering, which today hangs framed in my study.

People sometimes say, “Wow, how do you do that?” On occasion my playful reply is “Well, if you do something every day for most of your life you can get pretty good at it.”

What drawing helps develop is a way of seeing things differently than most non-drawing people seem able to perceive. Artist and teacher Brian Bomeisler was featured in a recent issue of American Artist magazine. Bomeisler (the son of Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (J.P. Tarcher, Los Angeles, California)) teaches the “Global Skills of Drawing” that help students produce more realistic drawings. In effect, he teaches them the principles that help them see the world as it is as opposed to seeing the world as they assume it is.

The global skills of realistic drawing Bomeisler teaches include these five skills:

1. The perception of edges called line or contour drawing.
2. The perception of spaces in drawing called negative spaces.
3. The perception of relationships known as perspective and proportion.
4. The perception of lights and shadows called shading.
5. The perception of the whole, which comes from the previous four perceptual skills.

It occurred to me that those five skills of “realistic drawing” are applicable to ministry leadership. Each of those concepts has a corollary when it comes to leadership in ministry. Particularly, they correlate to the way that Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST) can help us “see” things differently. I like the corollary because, as an educator, one of my tasks in teaching is to move students from naïve understandings to more rigid, deep, or “realistic” understandings about the subject under consideration, whether it’s congregations, leadership, ministry, or education.

1. Leaders need to develop a perception of edges called “boundaries.”

A fundamental idea to the concept of self-differentiation in relationship systems is knowing where one’s boundary of self (our personal identity, our values, our thinking, and our feelings) ends and another’s begins. People who lack a perception of boundaries tend to have a larger pseudo-self than a core self. In times of acute anxiety and reactivity persons who lack the right perception of boundaries can become willful and invasive. A lack of boundaries can also lead to overfunctioning behaviors (overfunctioning is always willful).

Effective leaders not only understand boundaries, they are able to set them when needed. Healthy pastoral leaders know the boundaries between their families and their ministry. They know the boundaries between personal self and the pseudo-self that is appropriately shared with the congregational system. And they know how to draw a line in the sand when dealing with willful church members or persons who lack respect for boundaries and act invasively.

2. Leaders need to develop a perception of what you can’t see, like “negative spaces.”

We can relate this point to the capacity to perceive emotional process. You can’t see emotional process directly, but you can see its effect on the system and the individuals that make up the system. It is the driving force that makes anxious people do what they do when they engage in automatic responses. It’s the force that fuels reactivity and the power behind homeostasis.

To be able to see the “negative space” of emotional process is the ability to focus on how people function in a system, rather than focusing on individual personalities. It’s the ability to perceive an episode of reactivity or strength in the context of multigenerational transmission as opposed to an isolated instance in time. It’s the ability to recognize a triangle when you see it (or when you’re in it) and be able to discern your place in the triangle and the forces that put you there.

3. Leaders need to develop a perception of relationships.

If ministry (in all its forms) and BFST are about anything, it’s about relationships. One of the most transformative aspects of BFST related to ministry happens when clergy leaders re-frame their perception about their relationship with their congregations. Gaining a new perspective on the nature of leadership and of relationships can be freeing, if not redemptive, especially for those caught in the trap of transferring their own family emotional process issues and patterns onto their congregational ministry.

4. Leaders need to develop the perception of shading.

Moving away from black and white, either/or, right and wrong thinking is key to better emotional functioning. Its power lies in the ability to engage in imagination. Being able to work in a broad palate of hues of grays, rather than in black and white, can help the leader entertain options beyond the fight or flight reactivity that is brought on by anxiety in times of crises. The ability to perceive the reality of tones, hues, and shades can help in relationships also. It helps us see people in a new light and appreciate that all humans are complex, nuanced, multidimensional, and wonderfully made. It can help us move beyond the temptation to over simplistically ascribe motives to actions and help us appreciate the influence of emotional process on people’s function—a process they themselves often are unaware.

5. Leaders need to develop a perception of the whole.

This is what “systems thinking” is all about, isn’t it? BFST gives us the capacity to “think systems,” to see the whole rather than the individual parts. Like an artist who can see the whole canvas and envision how all aspects of composition help bring balance and proportion to the whole, leaders need to see the system’s patterns, relationships, dynamics, and forces—rather than merely their effects on its particular objects. Often, it’s not what’s on the foreground that’s most interesting—it’s the rest of the components in the “field” that are making us focus on the object of interest that are the most dynamic forces at play. (For example, if you look carefully at the sketch above, you’ll realize that the composition of the invisible lines of the classic “triangle” are designed to “force” you, the viewer, to look at the eyes of the subject.) Leaders are most effective when they understand “what is really going on” and know how to perceive what others cannot. That’s often what we call vision.

“Some people are like slinkies. Not really good for anything but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.”

Copyright (c) 2007, Israel Galindo. Do not copy or distribute text or image from this entry.