While there’s no ‘I’ in team … there is in family
While there’s no ‘I’ in team … there is in family
Chatting with one of our adult daughters recently, we were laughing about some of the old ways we used to communicate in our family. Particularly about how family members with different personalities and ways of being clashed or weren’t well understood. (It’s nice to be able to laugh about it now!)
Why would we have expected it otherwise? Our place in the family, our personality and temperament and a whole range of other factors are expressed in unique combinations in each of our lives.
Some of us are more naturally team players. Others prefer to work and relax alone. My natural preference is to be a team player …
‘After all’, I said to my daughter, as we were chatting, ‘There’s no ‘I’ in team!’
Quick as a flash she responded, but there is in ‘family’.
There’s no ‘I’ in team, but there is in family.
She stopped me in my tracks and I said, ‘You are absolutely right. I love that!’
A team trains or works together for a specific outcome or event. A team of co-workers has clear operational outcomes they are working together to achieve.
A sports team wants to perform their best to outplay all the other teams and win the competition. Maybe a teacher will take a team approach to life in the classroom with a particular focus. Each individual on a team hones their skills and capacities so they can better contribute to the team’s objectives. A team has a designated leader whose job it is to ensure the team’s best possible performance.
A family, on the other hand, while ideally a cohesive unit, serves to allow each person in the family to flourish as a full expression of their God-given temperament, personality, gifts and way of being in the world. When family stifles or denies these things in a family member, the family is less than what it could be. There’s no such thing as a perfect family. However, some families find making room for each person to be themselves easier than others. And that’s for all kinds of reasons.
Since families are shaped by particular dynamics, and each person in that family, how might we as a church community help foster healthier family dynamics?
For me, the theological views of church communities I have belonged to in previous decades of my life have sometimes been helpful, and at other times destructive. It will be no surprise that theological views about male headship and the church as patriarchy have not served me or many, many women I have journeyed alongside well, nor the families we belong to. In my opinion, the scriptures do not preclude women from leadership, preaching or serving alongside men in the church, and most emphatically encourage women to foster their gifts in church and community for the benefit of everyone.
I’m so grateful for our church communities at Robina, Palm Beach and Burleigh Heads where women and men can serve alongside each other in meaningful ways that bring fulfilment to them as individuals AND are life-giving for the whole community!
I’m grateful that in our parish communities people can express different views on a range of topics – hot topics even! – and be respectfully listened to.
Listening well to each other and being slower to blurt out our own opinion was key to our family growing closer and becoming a place where each individuals can flourish. My daughter’s emphatic response is a case in point!
There is no more important skill we can develop as followers of Jesus than listening well to each other so that as a family of God’s children – all known and loved by God in equal measure, then challenged to love and serve others – we can contribute to each other’s flourishing and celebrate the diversity of personalities, life experiences and journeys of faith represented in our community. All in a way that generates the kind of hospitality at the heart of Jesus’ life and ministry.
I heard a school principal say recently:
If we don’t get another person, it’s simply that we haven’t heard enough of their story.
I wonder. How might we listen better? How might we learn how to be less demanding/critical/unappreciative of people in our family who are different from us? And how might we grow the courage and confidence to express ourselves in healthy ways, so that when we are ‘I’ in family, we can be ourselves and not be consumed by the expectations of others nor isolated because of our difference.
There is no excuse for hurtful behaviour in our church community. We are so very fortunate in our world today to have access to incredible resources to help us better understand human behaviour – including our own – and undergo the changes that will assist us to relate better to others, including our loved ones.
While there’s no ‘I’ in team … there is in family.
The gospels tell us that Jesus continually oscillated between the centre of religious and cultural life, and the fringes or margins of society. Wherever he was, Jesus the Compassionate Listener and Welcomer, saw and heard and loved every person so they could live into their ‘I’. Jesus invites us to follow him, and to find ourselves seen and heard and loved and challenged by him so that we can see and hear and love every person we encounter, whether on the fringes or at the centre, no matter how challenging that encounter may be. And to become a nurturing family where every person can flourish.
Grace and peace,
Mary-Anne