By Laura Stephens Reed

Effective lay leadership is an essential element in healthy congregational functioning. Without it, your church will not be able to live as fully as possible into its values and purpose, no matter how gifted the pastor is or how hard the pastor works. Jesus’ charge to spread the good news of Christ’s love and to care for all people like they are Christ is for each of us. 

Being a lay leader can be a deeply enriching experience. You get to use the skills you’ve honed elsewhere in service to a mission that you believe in and a community that you love. (You’ll also likely discover new talents!) By working side-by-side with your fellow church members, you have the opportunity to strengthen preexisting relationships and to start new ones. And by rooting your leadership spiritually, you are able to grow in both your understanding of and trust in God. 

The positives are still not to deny the challenges of serving in leadership. These are divisive times in our political and social lives beyond the church, and sometimes that hostility spills over into the place where we often have the most hope for experiencing peace. These are anxious times in many congregations as the most concrete (though not the most telling) signs of church vitality, such as attendance and budget, are on the decline. There are no easy fixes for either of these realities. 

In order to claim the upsides and avoid the pitfalls of lay leadership, those in responsibility can benefit from introductory knowledge of family systems theory, an approach to behavior that considers how people act in relation to one another in a family, community or organization. (If you want to know more after reading this article, look for books by Murray Bowen and Edwin Friedman.) When you can grasp what is happening in an interaction tinged with acrimony or anxiety, you can act with more intentionality, which then makes it more likely that the relationship – and the system it’s a part of – will move forward with energy, compassion, cohesiveness and effectiveness.  

The most basic building block of family systems theory is the concept of self-differentiation. This means that each person knows where they begin and end. Here are some questions to help ascertain that sense of self: 

• What are my non-negotiable commitments?  

• What are God’s invitations to me in this time and place?   

• What are my gifts, and how do I want to use them for good? 

• What is truly mine to do, and what actually belongs to someone else? 

This groundedness in self-awareness is not selfishness. When I am differentiated, I hear, respect and care about your responses to the questions above, even if they are a bit different from mine. I’m just not trying to be you or make you be more like me, and I’m not taking on your anxiety as my own or running away from you because your anxiety is too much for me. In other words, self-differentiation lets the image of God in me be connected to the image of God in you. 

Reading this, you can probably pinpoint times that you or others have not been self-differentiated. (None of us is our best self 100 percent of the time. Thankfully we worship a grace-filled God.) Sometimes people will gossip, manipulate or threaten. They don’t necessarily do this with malicious intent. They do it to try to lower their own anxiety because anxiety is uncomfortable. Our undifferentiated responses to others’ anxiety could look like responding in a heated way or without thinking through what we want to say, being flattered that someone wants us on “their side,” taking on someone else’s viewpoint without questioning it\ or cutting off the relationship altogether. As you can see, unhealthy conflict can escalate quickly when we don’t exercise self-awareness and empathy. 

I want, then, to give you a tool to help you stay in a self-differentiated space. Knowing answers to the big picture questions I have already mentioned is a good foundation, and we will still find ourselves in moments where we’re not totally sure how to operationalize our knowledge of where we begin and end. Marshall Rosenberg has developed a means of interacting with others called nonviolent communication (NVC) that can help us do that.  

NVC helps us to get in touch with what we and others are experiencing and to express that clearly in ways that promote positive change. First, we note what is happening in an interaction. What is going on that we like or don’t like in a particular moment? This observation is best made as objectively as possible, as in, “I hear your raised voice.” 

 Second, we name the feeling that comes up for us as the result of that behavior. The trick here – especially for those of us who live in our heads – is to express an actual emotion like “annoyed” or “scared” instead of our assessment of what someone else thinks about us (such as “I feel misunderstood by you when you say that”).  

Third, we state the need that arises from the feeling as specifically and positively as possible. This could sound like, “I need more time to…”  

Fourth, we make a request that would address the need: “Can we meet again next Wednesday?”  

We can use this same four-part approach to deescalate tension with others. “I noticed that [other person’s reaction] when [something happened.] Are you feeling [emotion]? What do you need because of that? What could that look like?”  

Employing NVC to stay self-differentiated will take practice, because most of us are not taught to communicate this way, especially when it comes to expressing our needs. But if we can do it, we’ll be taking responsibility for ourselves and helping others do the same, thus lowering anxiety, improving relationships, allowing everyone to contribute fully and increasing the functionality of the whole congregational system. That will then permit us to put our energy as disciples and leaders where it is best used: loving God and loving neighbor.