Church Psychology

The Nuclear Family: A Closer Look

• Narrative Resources, LLC • Season 1 • Episode 16

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How often do you reflect on the concept of family and its transformation in our society? Join Matt and me as we unpack the intricate layers of the contemporary family unit, specifically the nuclear family. Drawing from our personal experiences, we examine the historical context of the nuclear family and its normalization in American and biblical cultures. We also navigate through the thought-provoking points raised in 'The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake', an insightful article by David Brooks from the Atlantic.

What happens when the cost of living changes and starts challenging the sustainability of the nuclear family model? As we pivot our conversation, we uncover the impact of the current economic landscape on the traditional family structure. We delve into the contrast between extended family dynamics and nuclear family dynamics, the role of our family of origin in shaping our identities, and the rise of outsourcing traditional resource needs such as childcare and meals. 

Our dialogue takes a turn towards the intersection of families and church life, revealing a fascinating exploration of the contrasting dynamics. We probe into the value system of the nuclear family and the relative stability extended families can offer children. From analyzing the potential of the church to be intrusive or disengaged to balancing the need for blood ties and supportive relationships, our discussion covers it all. As we wrap up, we shine a spotlight on the importance of interdependence in church communities and how individualistic and consumeristic attitudes may influence the perception of church members. Tune in for this enlightening discourse on the nuclear family in America.

Show Notes:

Speaker 1:

So excited you're checking out another episode of Church Psychology. My name is Dr David Hall. Today, Matt and I are going to talk about ideas that we assume about family, particularly the cultural space that we inhabit, that values or seizes normal, the nuclear family, and we're going to look at what that means, how that fits historically into wider culture, specifically American culture, but also in the context of biblical culture, views of family, of individualism, the pros and cons of the togetherness and those dynamics that community can bring and challenge. If you're interested in that, hope you'll stay tuned with us. Now it's time for that intro music.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Church Psychology, a podcast of the Nagev Institute. We are mental health professionals looking at the intersections of social and behavioral science in the Christian life. Please connect with our free resources in our open community library at churchpsychologyorg. We would be grateful if you would follow, like or subscribe to Church Psychology wherever you're finding us, and also leave us a review as we start. If we're to love the Lord, our God, with all of our mind, it makes sense to work on our head space. Let's get to work.

Speaker 3:

Well, welcome everybody back to the Church Psychology podcast. My name is Matt Schooniman. I'm here again with Dr David Hall. David, good to see you, yo, yo, it's always a pleasure to speak with you. So let's talk about something that you had on your mind, which is often the case in these podcasts. It's like, hey, I've got this idea and I'm like that sounds great One time next season. If we do another season, it's going to be all Matt's ideas.

Speaker 1:

Well, of course we're going to do another season and if you want to set yourself up with the pressure, you've got to come up with all the ideas.

Speaker 3:

Go for it. It's like I am.

Speaker 1:

Now we keep a Trello board. For those who aren't familiar with that, it's an online organization tool. It's a pretty cool one, but I have this list on there of just different ideas. I had a particular moment months and months ago where I was in a waiting room unexpectedly for a while and that's just what I was doing. I was just thinking of ideas and putting them on the list.

Speaker 3:

Like 80 came from that sitting it was, but here's one, yes.

Speaker 1:

So I've said this on the podcast before, I'm pretty sure, and if I haven't, I'm saying it now. I generally, as Matt and I have kind of talked about the sorts of conversations we want to have and the topics we want to get into, I'm very strongly resistant to the idea of doing hot takes, like, okay, here's the latest thing in the news, here's this latest trend, partly because I think that creates a bind where if you're doing that all the time, then something comes out and you don't really feel you have much to say about it or you don't want to say much about it. Then the pressure becomes like oh, why don't you say something about this thing that's just come out? And the other bit is, I think part of wisdom and that's part of what I think Matt and I want to communicate in this or help encourage people to consider is what are practical, wise engagements with the things around us, with ideas, with concepts of our lives and our emotions? And I think oftentimes wisdom requires some time to marinate, to consider something.

Speaker 1:

But I did want to bring up this article. So all that in context. This is an article that I've read and really liked, and I'm okay to treat this not as a hot take, because we're recording this in late summer 2023, and this was an article that came out in the spring of 2020. So I think this had time to set, but this is an article from the Atlantic, which I enjoy a lot of things that the Atlantic puts out by the writer David Brooks, and it is entitled the Nuclear Family Was a Mistake and, in it, strong words, strong words.

Speaker 1:

It is, it is, it's a good title that kind of brings you in, but in it it kind of delves into how we have done families and this is specifically in the United States but to a certain degree other parts of the Western world that how family has been considered and done throughout most of human history, looked more or less like a certain thing.

Speaker 1:

And then, beginning in the mid-19th century and really taking hold in the mid-20th century in the Western world, we kind of restructured what family was going to look like into this concept of the nuclear family, which is that in the classic idea it is adult parents and their minor children and that being in the sense of a household. And Brooks talks about the pros and cons of this and there are a lot of pros and cons. So when you think about families, when you think about and I think this is a good way to kind of consider our own sort of family histories and Met and I've kind of talked about it a little bit in the past that both of our we both grew up, were born and grew up in East Tennessee where we are now.

Speaker 1:

However I had one parent at least, who was not from here, who came from somewhere else and were your parents either of your, I know your family in general came from Michigan correct.

Speaker 3:

Well, my dad's side of the family did. They came from Michigan by way of Miami even. They came here for a little bit and then they went there for like six to nine months and then came back. But my mom's side of the family definitely was from this area. Even my grandmother at least mother at least was from the Newport area, and so a lot of East Tennessee.

Speaker 3:

For those who are wondering that Newport like Rhode Island, or yeah, no, no, no, very different cities, but I think that yeah, so East Tennessee from my mom's side and then Michigan from my dad's side.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and for me, east Tennessee from my mom's side. My mom has had ancestors. The different parts of her family had come from different places different time. My great-great grandparents on my mom's side were immigrants from Scotland but my mom had different elements of her family in East Tennessee for generations. But even then it only goes so far back and my dad was born and grew up in upstate New York near the Canadian border and ended up here in his 20s. So but we've and I think this is very common for a lot of Americans to consider like, yeah, of course, like families from different places. We came from different places. I may have personally been born in one place and I live some other place now and we don't think that's particularly strange. But the context of human history and you know human history involves the story of migrations of people. But for most part migration was generally slow and happened in large clusters until you ended up with the transatlantic migrations. It was typically, you know, people may migrate west or east, but it wasn't necessarily over like in one.

Speaker 1:

you know, sometimes it was multiple generations moving slowly over the course of space, and even when you did travel greater distances, it was rarely on your own. In fact, throughout most of human history, it was really impossible for it to be on your own, like there was no survival. Yeah, yeah, what am I talking?

Speaker 3:

about. Well, you talk about history, but even in the sense of the here and now. Different cultures are more this way and maybe this is what the article was kind of looting to too, but like eastern cultures not very much separate from each other as much as the western cultures.

Speaker 1:

No, and that's a factor, as we, the United States has new immigration patterns for people from other cultures. That is an issue, but yeah, or it's something that gets highlighted. So one of my favorite biblical scholars is a woman named Sandy Richter. She's at Westmont College in Southern California and she's she writes a lot about Old Testament social structures and gender roles and things like that, and we have some links in the show notes of one's a great conference video for hers. But then also she writes a lot about the roles of women and concepts of women's rights and the Old Testament and things like that. But one of the things that she highlights that I think is really important is, if you look at like from a biblical, historical standpoint, and particularly early Israel, the idea of your survival was dependent on your relational structure, your kinship structure, your family, and she talks about this as she impacts things of the rights of women and of men, that the idea of the concept of individual rights, and there's a great article that's in the we'll have in the show notes about from Viola. It's a blog post but it's entitled sexual violence against women in the Old Testament law and in that she really kind of takes a lot of assumptions we have in our modern lens and looks at how would someone in the Old Testament see this in the context of family and family relationships, and she really unpacks this idea that there was no such thing as individual rights in the ways that we would think about it, that the Bible and the sense of Hebrew scripture is super unique in its context of ascribing value and dignity to people on an individual level. So there's value of the individual, but in the sense of your rights, in the ways that we think about it, and I mean that specifically my right to choose, independent from my family structure, all these different things about my life, about my livelihood, my spouse or things like that. In the context of the Old Testament that wasn't a concept for men or for women. And if you look out throughout most human history, that's not a concept.

Speaker 1:

In going back to Brooks's article that up until the men 1900s in America most families operated on what he calls the corporate family and this comes out of the work Stephen Ruppel's University of Minnesota Because these were social structures of how, of livelihood and businesses. And up until 1900 or 1800, so 220 plus years ago 90% of American families lived in the structure and a corporate family was most often around a farm and your livelihood was dependent on this. And if it wasn't a farm, it may be a family business. So you may have a tavern or a blacksmith or things like that, but it wasn't necessarily like. This is Matt's business. Businesses didn't run like that. They required so many more people and labor and your family was involved. The idea that Matt would have a blacksmith shop and his wife would work in the bakery would not be a typical thing. It would be well if that was a blacksmith. That's the family business and your kids would be in some degree part of that.

Speaker 1:

And this integrated sort of life. And then industrialization allowed for people. What that did was people moved into wage earning. They left their communities in different ways Because all of a sudden now there were different job opportunities. You're in a farm in Michigan or a village or something like that. Now there's opportunities to go to places like Grand Rapids and Detroit Because there are jobs that pay differently and that was a radically different thing in the context of humanity. But that leads to travel, leaving your family. It means there's distance. So family has to function differently and it changed a lot of things, I think a lot of times.

Speaker 1:

We have this idea that in olden times people got married super young, that you would have been married at 17. And the truth is that in this corporate family structure in the United States, most men this comes out of Ruckel's research or Ruggles that you would have been married at 26. As a man would have been more likely. Your spouse would have been younger, but as a man you would have been married around your mid to late 20s, whereas it's when men began moving away to the cities that marriage age dropped. Part of that was because you think about like I don't have the support or company comfort. I'm just on my own as a bachelor. I may be boarding with another family, but I'm longing for that family connection for that. So I'm going to engage in marriage earlier.

Speaker 1:

And my economic prospects as an independent person are greater, so I'm more likely to be able to do it. And in some ways, this has been super cozy to have by this extended family, but for anyone who's? Dealt with family. There's a cost. I want to quote something from David Brooks in this and want to get some of your thoughts met.

Speaker 1:

And this is a direct quote from the Brooks article in the Atlantic. As we've become more distant and separated in how we do family in the embrace of the small nuclear family this is what Brooke says is we've made life better for adults but worse for children. We've made moving. We've moved from big, interconnected, extincted families, which help protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families, meaning a married couple and their children, which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger, interconnected families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a family system that liberates the rich and ravages the working class and the poor.

Speaker 1:

And that's radical, but you think about it, it is. If you live in a large, extended family, what does it mean for you to have children and still have work responsibilities? Well, it means that you have older generations around you, say parents or aunts and uncles or things like that, that may be older and are less quote productive in the farm in that traditional way, but are available for childcare. What does it mean for you, when you're just a small family unit, to have loss? Anyway, I know you've got plenty of thoughts on this, matt, both professionally and personally.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think that this goes into aspects of generational change but also, you see, some of this still within the nature of different family units. Even in my work with people, kind of learning about their family system, some language that we use is what's your family of origin, and so kind of exploring outside of just your nuclear family but into where you were raised and how does that impact you and seeing the differences in some of these. If you've got these kind of more segmented nuclear families where the parents were really independent and worked a lot and it kind of crafted maybe a independent spirit within the individual that I'm working with and so some of that has some strengths to it. But everything has a shadow side and so they find it more difficult to connect with other people because of their independence. Because a person that comes from a more connected, sometimes enmeshed, family now that's kind of language of where it becomes dysfunctional.

Speaker 3:

But usually there are these family systems that everybody's involved.

Speaker 3:

Maybe they have a lot of brothers and sisters, like the extended families, involved into their life. They have the ability to connect really well, but they lack some of that independent spirit and oftentimes when I work with couples you'll notice that one comes from one lean and one comes from the other lean, and working with them to kind of understand how do they create their family unit has to both incorporate strengths of their family system and let's go of some of them. And so that's what comes to mind clinically, or at least in the work I've done with individuals and couples as it relates to this, because even though we have moved to more of a nuclear family system in our culture, the family of origin still plays a big part, whether positively or negatively, and I think that a lot of this depends kind of more culturally now where, like I said earlier, a lot of the Western society that we are is more of that nuclear bend, and a lot of the things that you were talking about is the way it used to be before the industrial revolution, I think still play out in some of the Eastern cultures. I remember watching a movie recently and I can't for the life of me remember what it's called, oh, but I think it had that actress Aquafina.

Speaker 3:

Is that right?

Speaker 1:

Is that right?

Speaker 3:

Is that yourizations? No, no, no, no, no. That's its own brand of comedy Aquafina yeah.

Speaker 3:

But I think she was in it, that's her name and it was kind of like this it had humor, but it also had a lot of heart and it kind of reflected on this Asian woman that lived in New York City, very Americanized, but her family was in like, I guess, china, I can't remember exactly, but she went to visit and there was one conversation that just stuck out to me where I'm going to butcher it, but something to the effect of she was talking to like one of her aunts or uncles and he was like your mindset is more of like what individually for you, but like our system is more like how's it impact the whole?

Speaker 3:

And that's, in a sense, the cultural understanding is it's not about the me, it's about the we and that's all the honor system and all that of what plays out in more Eastern religions and more Eastern cultures. And all that to say is that we still have some kind of the both. And as it relates to that, I found it interesting in some of the places of what that Brooks article said about how it impacts or benefits more the richer cultures rather than the poorer working class, and I was wondering if you could maybe expand on that some, because I'm trying to piece that together.

Speaker 1:

Well and look up, pull out your phone and look up the Aquafina movie because I'm curious now and what that is. But it is the. So, according to the Brooks article, that the nuclear family in the United States kind of reached its heyday in the post-World War II era and going from like 1950 to 1965 because certain radical there was a huge population expansion in the baby boom. People could move out to the suburbs in ways. House home ownership became affordable to more Americans in ways that just was not available in previous generations and it led to this sprawl where people were moving out further away. It's wages were high for both blue collar and white collar workers and it was much more typical for a family to sustain a prosperous lifestyle with a single breadwinner, typically the man working outside the home. And at the time the wages had gone up proportionally to the cost of living, so much that the average working man, either blue collar or white collar, in the mid-1950s was earning a wage 400 times greater than his father had at the same pace of life In between 20, a man between ages 25 and 29, the article is talking about so significantly more, and that made it affordable to a wide swath of Americans. But after the mid-1960s it began going down quite a bit and a combination of the increased divorce rate meant that you oftentimes had single parent homes with a burden of providing, and what this meant was that the people today that can most sustain the nuclear family model are the ones that have the most money, because what they end up doing is what traditionally were resource needs that were met from the extended family we pay for now.

Speaker 1:

We pay for childcare, whether it's daycare or having a nanny or whatever that looks like. We pay for meals. I don't have children, but I also have a wife that works full time and we don't cook very often. Like cooking is not part of our regular life. It's something we do occasionally, but it isn't a burden to us to pay other people to provide us food. We just take that for granted. But for so many people that is not a thing. But you talked about that and I think it's a big thing to highlight that, both for economic reasons but also for cultural reasons. In the United States a lot of first, second generation Asian Americans and also Latinos the interconnectedness is much more there. Part of it is because that's much more culturally normed in the cultures of origin and oftentimes because the economic needs requires that. That's right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and that movie, by the way, is called the Farewell. It was a great movie 2019. Yeah, so the Farewell with Akwafina in it, great movie.

Speaker 1:

Church Psychology is a production of the Nagev Institute, a research resource and teaching initiative that aims to provide Christian communities with practical education and consulting to faithfully speak to our needs in mental health, relational science and human habit and behavior. A great way to support Nagev is to start a free membership in our open community library at churchpsychologyorg and then stay connected with our email newsletter to hear about new classes, publications, live forums and in-person events. Again, you can find all that at churchpsychologyorg. There's strengths and weaknesses into the idea of living in extended families because, again, it's easy for us to think about oh, it'd be great, let's live.

Speaker 1:

kind of more like this until you have to stop and think about your family and what that means. There's strengths in extended family. One is resilience. That extended family is that if you have somebody who gets sick and can't work, if you have an adult, that is the dyes. If you have a special needs child, if you have any number of issues that kind of come up, there is not just the, there's the expectation culturally, if you live in that sort of space, that of course this is how the family will protect itself. When you live in much smaller family units, the shocks of the disruptions are much greater. That's something I know in your personal story.

Speaker 3:

That's right. Yeah, for those that don't know me or my story, in 2010, my mom passed away from a pretty severe cancer. At the time, I was 25-ish and just got engaged to my now wife. My sister was about to become a high school senior. We being kind of a nuclear family, we did have family around. I remember vividly, like my grandmother's impact of comfort and care, but my mom's mom had passed. Some of our other family was kind of further away. It didn't feel like we could kind of adjust as well based on not having a super large family unit around us. What I was.

Speaker 3:

We talked about this, david, I think, yesterday, even as we prepared for this, something I reflected on, and this is somewhat of what I think the church can be for people. But one of the craziest memories is my mom had just passed away when we were at the hospital, and a lot of stuff goes on after those moments and just the wildness of that. So, somehow, though, we're coming home. Well, we needed to come home, and we all kind of the three of us, my dad well, actually, my soon to be wife was there too, and so we all come to my dad's home, and when we get there, there's like an army of people there. Some people are cooking, some people are like literally chopping down trees that are overgrown, people are cleaning and I don't know if they were intending to be there by the time we got back and maybe we just kind of rushed the gun and they were just going to surprise us.

Speaker 3:

But I remember that kind of army of people being such a place of support and comfort, and there were people from my parents' church and so it's this sense of the extended family for us kind of were adopted into the church unit, as being that. And so I think, even as Westerners in this stage of life or this kind of era that we're in, where the nuclear families become so much the focus, we see that it may not be like our blood family that is kind of surrounding us although they were there too, some that were around but it was more so like this kind of adopted family of the church. That was such a support for us. And so I definitely resonate with a lot of things we're talking about in both sides of this conversation.

Speaker 1:

And as we've talked, we began the conversation talking about distance and that's one of the things you touched on in this matter of that family that cared.

Speaker 1:

But how near were people?

Speaker 1:

And I think of my own childhood, like I grew up generally just with my own nuclear family, that I had, that my dad's family lives somewhere else and I would see them a few times a year but they weren't like part of our regular rhythm of my life and my mom had family in town but my grandparents it even just the value system of the nuclear family, that I have an aunt who's quite a bit younger than my mom who when I was growing up was still in high school for a lot of it, and my grandparents were still working and we're still, and so basically they were, they had their lives.

Speaker 1:

I would see them a few times a month and there was, there was, a season in life where we went to the same church and so I'd see them on Sundays, but it would be it wasn't like every day or even every week that I would see them, even though we were in the same town and, you know, in need particularly, we feel that there's when we have extended family we can absorb a lot more socially and there's also particularly there's a what Brooks talks about.

Speaker 1:

there's a socializing force to it where when you have lots of adults around children as they're coming up, there's a lot of people to impart wisdom and things like that. A lot of the research on thriving for emerging young adults. One of the greatest factors that shows what will set up young adults for success so teenagers and preteens is having non-parent adults in their lives that are speaking to it and that can be aunts and uncles and grandparents and we live in ways where we're more caught from that and those are all positive things that give us strength.

Speaker 1:

So there's difficult things in trying to manage extended families. One, there's a lot less privacy. Yeah, I mean it's kind of. You mentioned the term a meshed, which is that's a very psychological term, but it's what we talk about in mental health of families that feel too together and in that I have critique on the concept of the measurement because it comes from a very. The concept came out of work and research done by Western centric psychiatrists and psychiatrists in the 1950s, during the heyday of the nuclear family. Yeah, there may be a little bit of a bias there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and but this idea of what you know, we have cultural ideas and values of that. Well, what is my business or what is not my business? And there's also the higher stability of living in extended family. The trade off is is there's less mobility. If you're in a culture where the expectation is you're going to continue to work on the family farm or take over the family firm, and that's what if you want to go be a therapist, right yeah.

Speaker 2:

And a lot of the story yeah.

Speaker 1:

A lot of the stories we tell culturally is valuing that independence, that mobility of like. You know you can go and find you and all that, and that's the space we live in, but there's a cost, yeah. So I want to shift now, as we're, to some of what you highlighted to Matt, about the idea of how does the church step in and be different things, or how should the church step in and be different things. This is the thing where people struggle in church life, I think a lot of times, the romanticization we can have in church life is like it's like this big family.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes, the church hurt that I've heard people talk about is like it felt so intrusive, or it felt so disdain on the other side of that.

Speaker 1:

I think every bit of church hurt I've heard people say is either a church that felt too intrusive for what people wanted, so to a mesh in that way, or to disengaged Like I needed you or I needed you and you weren't there. And I don't think I hadn't thought of that till I just said that. But I think that maybe I can't think of a lot of church hurt?

Speaker 3:

that wasn't. No, I think definitely. And I mean, and whether it's, whether the church hurt is directly pointed at congregants or the leadership of the church, either way, they view the person as either I wouldn't it's hesitant to call it a parental figure as they look at their pastor, but some way a part of their family that is leading the family, and then you hurt me in this way. I feel so disconnected from it. So I think you're right. I think it does bring a lot of things into that, and so there has to be a balance between viewing yourself too much as like blood family, but also stepping into things with people and being that.

Speaker 1:

Some scripture I want to highlight, and then there's one particular I want you to read about, but of just basically the whole arc of scripture talks about the desire and the goodness and the benefit of relationship, starting in Genesis, beginning Genesis of Genesis two, 18. Then the Lord God said it is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helper who is like him. This immediate call, the sense of it's the first thing I believe in. After pronouncements of something being good in the creation narrative, it's the first time that God said something that this isn't good. It isn't that there needs to be relationship, there needs to be connection and the idea of stepping into conflict. Proverbs 17-17,. A friend loves at all times and a brother is born for a difficult time. I think there's other translation that a brother is born for strife and this idea of our relationships helping us persevere.

Speaker 1:

There are commands that we have in the sense of obligation that we have, and this comes into the 10 commandments, but this out of Exodus 20-12, honor your father and mother so that you may live long in the land that the Lord, your God, is giving you. We have now I've unpacked with a lot of clients. What does honoring one's parents look like, because oftentimes that is a struggle. There's different biblical sorts of things, of commands of children to obey their parents, but then that becomes what? When are you a child we are always commanded to honor? Does that mean obedience and how to fit into cultural space.

Speaker 1:

But this, moving into the New Testament, some verses, there's this idea of we carry things together. We're called as believers to carry things together. 1 Corinthians 12-26,. If one member suffers, one member of the body, if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. If one member is honored, all members rejoice with it. In relation 6-2, carry one another's burdens and this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. In Hebrews 10-24-25,. Let us be concerned about one another in order to promote love and good works, not staying away from the worship meetings, as some habitually do, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day drawing near. We're called in that, to engage in the rhythms of the community. And this last one, this one, the most significant, I think that becomes a vision for church life. But this is the Acts 2. But if you'd read this one, matt, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Acts 2.42 says and they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, to the prayers. Every day, they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple complex and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with a joyful and humble attitude, praising God and having favor with all the people, and every day the Lord added to them those that were being saved.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think this becomes this passage, particularly in Acts. There's a lot of Christian life over the centuries that have sought how do we become an Acts 2 community, how do we become an Acts 2 church. It's led to things like Christian communes, this idea of what is it like for us to kind of live life together, and I don't dismiss that out of hand. I think they're pros and cons to it.

Speaker 3:

There's definitely a shadow side to it, it is.

Speaker 1:

It becomes, what becomes the cultist sorts of things or what becomes the transgressional or abuse of power that can come into this. I think the challenge is we live. We are not independent from the culture we find ourselves in. We are in a cultural moment right now that the norm is much more of these independent families. But recognizing where does that fall short? Where?

Speaker 1:

is that not necessarily the model as humans that we are meant to live and thrive, and as the church community, I mean that both in the little sea of the church, of the individual congregations you find yourself in what does it mean to live that out and in the wider sense of the wider community of believers. How do we culturally and this is a challenge I want to give, particularly for those who work in leadership roles, lay leadership or vocational leadership and ministry how do we set cultural tones that normalize interdependence in ways that are considerate and healthy?

Speaker 3:

Real quick. You used that phrase and I was thinking about it earlier and I want to just kind of try to visually paint that picture. Interdependence is this in between of independence and codependence, and codependence is more of that clinical term of a measurement that I don't know where I end and you begin, there's not clear boundaries of identified self when independence, on the other end of the spectrum, is, there's very, very clear boundaries of who I am and I function well independently from others, but again, I don't have connections. Well, I don't go deep, I don't rely on other people or trust well. So interdependence, then that phrase you use, is that in between kind of holding we always I well, at least I always talk about like how do you stay on top of the ridge and not fall to the ditches? Or we use the phrase of the pendulum swing too far the other way, how do you keep it centered? And so just to visually paint that picture for people as you use that phrase, yeah, I would also.

Speaker 1:

That's my challenge for church leadership, here's my challenge for work the average congregant church member so as I take a deep breath in this part of our individualistic culture has also become a consumeristic culture, and that's a whole other episode of series of episodes of yeah.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to write that one down and we take a lot of that mindset to church. A lot of us treat church in this consumeristic mindset of what am I getting from it, how is this meeting my needs, how is this end? And part of that becomes is that, even if you live in a fairly secularized environment, you have options, probably in church. Yeah, a bit of options of like whoa, I'm not happy with this church, I'm going to go to this other church. I like this worship style better. This pastor will preach you better. I mean?

Speaker 3:

that's what I mean. Half of church attendance changes is not new believers, it's church hoppers.

Speaker 1:

I would say even more than half, definitely in the context that I live in. And here's the tricky bit of to really make this work. To make community work. It can't just be about convenience. For there to be the stability in extended community, there has to be a willingness to bear and even to suffer with other people and historically, in extended family, it wasn't just I'm going. I want to be a part of this because it's the safety net for me. I've got to be willing to step up and be this important safety net for another person. That's right. I've got to be willing to sacrifice my own dreams and desires or personal preferences. I'm going to sit and have Thanksgiving with you, even though you drive me nuts Even you like, and so many things. And there's a richness that we have access to when we're willing to sit in what at times feel less than ideal situations.

Speaker 1:

Now I want to give a caveat here because, as Matt and I always talk about, there's always the tension and the balance. If your church is legitimately unhealthy and I don't mean unhealthy in the ways that social media will talk about it, but in this idea that they are not this is the leadership and the life of the congregation is not Manifesting the fruit of the spirit, is not pursuing biblical life and righteousness is not. There are lots of legitimate reasons that a person may say I cannot walk with this community or congregation anymore Absolutely legitimate. But if it's, I'm not really feeling the preaching or I'm not like. That's where, as both a Christian but also as a therapist, I give pushback, because if all your life is just about what feels the best, it ends up being so brittle.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, no, it's very true. I think we We'll definitely need to come back to that conversation because I think there's a lot of fruit to having that discussion and can even apply to this, because, whether it's your church family or your biological family both spaces we have to live in tension, to pursue interdependence versus the other two options, and that's not easy and it's not a very clear road. Sometimes it feels like gray lines, but even consider moving into that, maybe the place to which this can encourage you to move.

Speaker 1:

So For a minute, I appreciate the conversation today. I love it, as usual.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's already inspired a couple ideas for further episodes, so, as always, we're going to bring them. So thank you again for listening to this or viewing it on YouTube, and we look forward to bringing more to you soon. Until then, Thank you, Matt Bye.

Speaker 2:

Thank you again for being a part of our latest episode of Church Psychology. If you have enjoyed it, we hope that you will share this episode with others in your life, and please do remember to follow, like and or subscribe to Church Psychology wherever you're finding us, and leave us a review. We look forward to connecting with you again soon.