A Volley from the Canon, #57

NEED—AND NEEDINESS

The Church is a place for the practice of all Christian virtues, right? The one place in the world, outside of family, where love abounds, where forgiveness is the norm, where grace can be expected. Alas, like the idea of “functional family,” “loving congregation” is largely a mythical creation of wishful thinking.

Not that striving to “live in grace,” is a bad idea—far from it. One hopes that in all congregations there are people who love one another, who are quick to forgive and slow to take offense, and who strive to draw, from themselves and one another, the best they have to give. It is just that, in this earthly vale, the heavenly ideal collides quickly with the fallen human reality, and difficulties ensue that cannot be ignored without imperiling the health of the whole congregation.

We all have needs. The need to serve and to be needed is one of them, and the need to be valued and appreciated is another. The Church can be a place where we are free to offer our best and to have our ministries recognized and honored.
With some, though, underneath the need lies a deeper, veiled, unrecognized thing I’ll call neediness, an equal-opportunity affliction which can strike male and female, young and old, clergy and laity. It can be a bottomless pit, a black hole of low self-esteem that no earthly compassion can penetrate. People with that form of neediness usually wander from congregation to congregation sooner rather than later, their expectations of others never satisfied. Or neediness can be just a chronic condition in which the craving for recognition in self-sacrifice holds greater import than the service itself or the actual need for it. This kind of neediness also comes with an unspoken and un-negotiated, one-way contract: “Because I do these things for you (perhaps without being asked), you owe me big time. You owe me love, praise, and high esteem. You even owe me the favor of asking me to continue to do these things. You owe me entitlement to these things.” And there is an implied threat: “If you don’t, you will hurt my feelings, and you will be a bad person. Your rejection may even drive me away (and it will be all your fault).” Thus, the needy person, placing all responsibility on the other, rules through hyper-sensitivity, and the congregation is held hostage to its own tender-hearted desire to be compassionate. Sadly, the less healthy the congregation is, the longer they tolerate and even feed this sort of behavior, to their own detriment.

Indeed, we are called by the love of Christ to love all those near us, and people who can be hard to love are no exceptions. Yet we are not called to love, or even to tolerate, all of their destructive behaviors. In AA parlance, we need to beware of becoming “co-dependents” to other people’s addictions, and neediness is an addiction to praise, esteem, and position. We’ve seen it so many times in the church: the rector who retires without yielding position and authority, the warden or altar guild directress “for life,” the treasurer or trustee who treats church funds and property as their own, the music director for whom imposing “superior” personal taste matters more than assisting the congregation to worship God, the soloist who would never be asked to sing anywhere else in the world but who is somehow indispensible in church, the kitchen or building-and-grounds czar, the pancake grill-meister—all these characters are uncomfortably familiar in the life of the congregation. When we say our congregation is “like a family,” we far too often mean that it comes with the word “dysfunctional” in front of it. And that does not bode well for the church family growing or holding together in the long run.

We are also called by Christ to work toward getting better: more whole, healthier in psyche and spirit. Toward that end, the congregation needs to have processes and systems that contribute toward greater wholeness. That is why it is so important for congregations to have term limitations and to rotate duties and offices. I know it is not easy in a small congregation, with few willing laborers. Even so, it is essential to health. It is also essential to growth, for in the musical chairs of shifting leadership roles, it is critical to leave seats vacant for a spell to allow someone new to occupy them if they will. We also need to be individually self-critical, daring to discern prayerfully within ourselves our own tendencies toward neediness, and pulling back from the abyss when needed.

After all, none of our ministries or even our gifts is ours to own: they belong to God. A congregation must not become too dependent on them, or even on us, for we are only passing this way for a time, and soon enough we will be on our way. If we can leave behind not only happy and affectionate memories of ourselves but also others experienced and able to fill our places, our time of ministry will be all the more fruitful.