In a new survey, the Gallup organization interviewed people across 142 countries and asked them a series of questions to determine whether they felt they were thriving in their lives or struggling or, worst of all, suffering.  It reminded me of a presentation I made in 2016 to small group novices about how the church could be a place to help people thrive.

Last week David Brooks interpreted the Gallup findings for us in the New York Times:

The number of people who say they are thriving has been rising steadily for a decade. The number of people who say they are suffering is down to 7 percent globally, tying with the lowest level since 2007. This trend is truly worldwide, with strong gains in well-being in countries as far-flung as Kosovo, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Paraguay.

Unfortunately, there is a little bad news. Some people reported sharp declines in well-being. That would be us. The share of the population that is thriving is falling in America, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In 2007, 67 percent of Americans and Canadians said they were thriving. Now it’s down to 49 percent….

People thrive when they live in societies with rising standards of living and dense networks of relationships, and where they feel their lives have a clear sense of purpose and meaning. That holy trinity undergirds any healthy society. It’s economic, social and spiritual.

I spoke with Dan Witters of Gallup, who broke down some of the contributors to social and spiritual health. People who are thriving are more likely to feel a strong attachment to their community. They feel proud of where they live. People are more likely to experience greater well-being when they join congregations and regularly attend religious services. Feeling your life has purpose and meaning, he adds, is a strong driver of where you think you are going to be five years from now.

The sociopath president Trump is terrible fruit of this awful decline of  economic well-being, relationships and meaning. He’s bankrupting us, dividing us, and doesn’t mean a thing he says, much less attends to deep meaning.

The young people in the West are the hardest hit by the decline in thriving. So my wife and I decided our basic reaction to Trump had to include starting a small group. Our first try has not totally failed yet. But we quickly found out just how hard it is these days to get people together who don’t know a lot about getting together.

The small group is the basic unit of the Church.

In the U.S. we Jesus followers might think the individual is the basic unit of the Church. If we are moral, we might think it is the family. But I think the Bible and common sense tells us it is a small group which is the basic unit. Many church people call that small group a cell, a construct within the Body of Christ held together by the Spirit of in love — not born of flesh but of God.

In Acts 20:20 Paul notes how he has been teaching the church in Ephesus in public, like most churches do on Sunday morning, and from house to house — or in all the places where they are gathered to love or serve as a small group. The house to house groupings were like cells in the body of Christ.

The towns and cities Paul visited were relatively small. The churches in them were small in number, too. His teaching assumes people know each another. He’s not writing for the internet. We say “it takes a village to raise a child” because we need to remind ourselves  we are that village. If we did not reinforce our relationships, we might be swallowed up in the huge media machine that makes sameness a substitute for connection. Being the church might become attending a Sunday event featuring Joel Osteen, thinking our common experience or common connection with the person on the screen is connection with each other.

We can lose the essence of what Paul is teaching house to house — to people who are supposed to love each other like family in practical ways, even though they are only family because of Jesus. If we are not a vital part of the basic units of the church, we not only lose the redemption inherent in those relationships, we lose the psychological development inherent in struggling to build them and we remain unfaithful and unhealed.

What do you think of that? Do you have a place in your church where you are the body of Christ? Where you can be healed and be a healer? Where you learn to love? Where you can have healthy conflict that convinces you the process of facing difficult things is not so scary?

Creating groups

I have spent my whole adult life trying to create a place where people can receive what Paul is talking about. So often church people have been in class where they are thinking about doing what Paul is talking about sometime after class! Then they go to the service, which is often another lecture and mainly individuals consuming a religious product.

When Jesus was walking around with his disciples, he was demonstrating the basic wisdom of living as a small group. People caught stuff as they went along. They found some people they could follow and discovered who was a betrayer. They fought over who was the greatest. They were indecisive and unsure. But Jesus was in the midst and they figured stuff out together. They learned self-giving love, they learned how to doubt and be restored, to grumble and be corrected, to ponder and come to agreement. They got a chance to earn a secure attachment, differentiate from their past, learn a new script and act it out in a safe place. In a lot of places the church has deprived people of a chance to mature in Christ, so twentysomethings want to go to therapy when they are mildly anxious – their therapists end up being substitute friends and spiritual guides.

The paradigm we came up with in my former church was simply designed to fly on two wings: a large group wing and a small group wing, everyone energizing our movement. Everything we did was done in groups. Even the pastors of the 4-5 congregations did most of what they did as a team. I think this is so important because the essence of what we do is love. We are meant to be together as surely as the godhead forms a small group – father, son and Holy Spirit.

In the early years, I had some interesting and sometimes wild cells.

In one new cell, we had multiplied from another one that got too big to be face to face enough. Our core group included a somewhat shy Asian architect, our host, a loud South Philly guy who had a coke habit he was trying to kick and his longsuffering wife, and a woman who had just come off heroin and had wandered into the church for a meeting because she saw “hope” on the door — a genuine borderline personality. There were a couple of others who were not so comfortable and me. I did not have my doctorate yet, but I was beginning to earn one practically through my work with this little system. It was a very dysfunctional system I remember fondly. The couple  would continue arguments in the group. The recently-clean woman was an expert at pointing out the vulnerabilities in everyone. The architect wondered why she had ever allowed these people to meet in her apartment, since she had mainly done it to get some friends, not experience this challenge.

Needless to say, this was not a cell that worked out for long. It died. Some groups must die a natural death, otherwise it is hard to get one to live.

Even though we did not thrive, I learned a lot about how to nurture a small group and help people live in them.

The couple needed marriage counseling, so my wife was already inventing Circle Counseling, since you can’t solve every problem in the small group, especially when it is not professionally led. This is often the problem with church groups – they are not porous, their “holiness” requires them to have all the answers so no one can admit they don’t have the answers.White corpuscles gathering around the injured or unincorporated massPlus I began to think about how some situations, like a couple having conflict or a person addicted to cocaine, might need to get some space in a relational container to heal — a small group with a purpose, like white corpuscles rushing to wounds.And I had my second chance to make a treatment plan for a borderline person to be part of the church. It would not be my last.

Most people who have BPD suffer from:

Problems with regulating emotions and thoughtsImpulsive and reckless behaviorUnstable relationships with other people.

People with this disorder also have high rates of co-occurring disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and eating disorders, along with self-harm, suicidal behaviors, and completed suicides. The malady can be inherited. Is likely trauma-based or family-induced.

Borderline people are attracted to groups in the church but they often kill them. They desire stable people to balance their instability. Unfortunately, they like the ready “hosts” loving people are to feed their insatiable neediness.

Growth requires risk

The needy woman got better and ended up in her own apartment. Her growth required risk — hers and ours. I am amazed that a good third of the Christians in the country are obsessed with their own safety and are filled with fear. We should be the ones safe to risk our utmost and undermost for God’s highest.

A lot of small groups create a nice homeostasis that feels like mother’s milk but often curdles. Groups centered on Jesus need to keep moving with the Spirit, keep growing and renewing, to be healthy. Some churches have Sunday school classes that began when the members were the “young married” class and they are still together in their sixties!

Church leaders need to keep things flexible and changeable, as various and unpredictable as are the members. One reason for this is that spiritual and psychological growth takes risk.

Personal growth requires the interacting flows of relationship building and faith development. Healthy small groups have these complementary flows swirling around in them. That flow makes them good delivery systems for the spiritual food we need to grow and act. It’s a bit like I need to keep the air moving in my basement so the water that recently flooded it does not stay there long enough to grow toxins.

Small group leaders attempt to maximize the positive impact of the movement while minimizing the impact of the inevitable perils. They are always gently helping people to take the risks they need to take.

Making a relationship with a Christian, listening to the story of Jesus, entering a small group meeting, telling one’s story, listening to others, daring to express thoughts and gifts, praying with others, taking responsibility for others and the cell, bringing another person to Christ and the small group, joining in the Sunday meeting, taking action to serve others, making a covenant with the others in the church, giving birth a new cell — there are many risks along the way.

Here are some examples of the elements of each flow that we can encourage, and the risks we can learn to encounter with wisdom:

Do you have any experiences in small groups in the church that just didn’t work out well? Or just felt too risky to you?

Many times the risk reaps benefits

Not long after that other cell died, I formed a cell with a couple of bike messengers and their girlfriends. They all knew “A,” who was a sweet, but not-too-Christian guy in the church. This time the experience was electric and formative. These people became so close they met quite a bit outside the meeting. Some of them eventually became roommates and four of them became two married couples. They loved the opportunity to grow deep in love and to tackle the hard questions of faith and justice together. The group got so large that we multiplied it three ways and they sent me out to make another one from scratch.

What was so different about this one?

Groups like their homeostasis and if they can’t form it, they do not cohere. This one became a safe place.Leadership. They liked “A” a lot and me enough. I was a lot older than them, but since they all came from relatively unstable families, I provided some parent power. If you therapists have twentysomething clients you are probably doing that, too.Youth. They were pliable. I think groups are especially important for young people because they have so much to learn about having relationships. And do we really want to send people out into the world thinking that they can or must face all the huge issues of our day and the huge organizations that run it by themselves with only their hand held computer?They wanted what the group offered. At least enough of them did so the others either went with it or kept their criticisms quiet.

Have you ever been in a group that worked out well? What was the best thing about it for you, personally?

A few main themes for training leaders

My presentation was mainly to leaders who were training leaders. So we concentrated on that quite a bit. Training small group  leaders is a lot like training group-therapy leaders. The big difference is the church’s twin flows of real relating and real-time experience of God’s presence.

Regardless of the flow, it is a major temptation to turn an expansive cell into a closed therapy group. People love therapy groups. Once they have been vulnerable with a small group, they don’t really want to repeat the initial risks of forming more relationships.  But it is just that risk which makes them alive and valuable.

Leaders who catalyze the growth we all need to keep experiencing are precious. Here are a few of the important things they must help us do to form life-giving small groups:

Learn how to listen and teach people to listen, to God and each other. — Everyone is writing their story, day by day, and they need to tell it.Create an environment of safety. Leaders always need to wonder if they are controlling things out of their own fears and needs or effectively shepherding people along their uncertain, God-directed way of love and truth.Encourage the dance of the big and small. The individual and group both matter. The promise of freedom and our deep need for covenant are dancing. We must honor uniqueness and promote mutuality.Protect the EGR – There is always and extra-grace-required person — at least it will feel that way to people who are not good at relating. The leader protects that person from the group and protects the group from that person. We are all moving somewhere deeper and fuller. We are unfinished. Our present weaknesses and sins have hurtful consequences. That’s a given the leader monitors.Embrace before people believe or behave. One does not have to believe to belong. A small group is like meeting Jesus along the way — therapists might call it “client-driven.” Implying that someone is not “doing the group right” probably won’t help them face the risks they must take to connect with God and their true selves.Don’t deprive people of reproductive rights.  If a church expects their small groups to grow and change, we all learn there is enough love to go around. Love grows as big as it needs to be. We are always changing which always feels risky. When we give birth to the next basic unit of the church, we all get the thrill of bringing new love into the world.

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Today is Clare of Assisi Day! Celebrate her at The Transhistorical Body.

 

 

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