The Church as a Blended Family

Darrell Bock:

Welcome to The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Darrell Bock, Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary, and our topic today is the church as blended families. So we're going to be talking about blended families on the one hand and use it as a metaphor to talk about church relations on the other, and the way we interact in church. And my guest today is Veteran of Foreign Wars. He's been with us before.

Ron Deal is bestselling author and licensed marriage and family therapist, podcaster, popular conference speaker who conducts "laugh and learn" marriage and family seminars. That's a good combination when you can laugh and learn in a marriage, and professional training around the country. He specializes in marriage enrichment and stepfamily education. He is President of Smart Stepfamilies and Director of FamilyLife Blended, a division of FamilyLife Ministries. So welcome, Ron. It's good to have you back.

Ron Deal:

Darrell, you know how much I enjoy working with you. Thank you for having me again. I'm glad I haven't worn out my welcome.

Darrell Bock:

No, you're good. You're good. You're perfectly dressed for the occasion and everything. I mean, it's really nice, and that background is just… I can't decide where it's from.

Ron Deal:

It's stunning, isn't it?

Darrell Bock:

It's amazing. Anyway, so let's dive in. Let's talk about blended families first. So you were here a few months ago in a cultural engagement chapel in which you dropped a statistic that I think just about floored everyone in the audience. They were sitting in chairs, but they were floored by what you said, and that was, the percentage of average audience that represents a blended family as opposed to the simple husband and wife, kids, one-time around family. That's the way I'm going to describe it, the traditional family. So give us that statistic. We'll start there.

Ron Deal:

Well, yeah. If you think, again, this is inside and outside the church, across the country, less than half of people are in a first marriage situation where mom and dad are living at home with their kids. Actually, mom and dad living with their children is less than 25% of the population. The other, more than half now, are single, never married, single again by widowed or divorced, or in a blended family. So literally, I'd like to say the non-traditional family is the new traditional family. Sometimes we immediately say, "Well, we need to argue with that. That shouldn't be the case." Well, okay, we can have that conversation, but that is your audience.

That's who you're trying to reach out to in the community, that's likely who's sitting in your church even though you don't know it. And that's what we were talking about that day was, when you stand up to speak from the pulpit or teach a class, who do you envision as your audience? If you have a first married couple raising 2.2 kids in your mind, you're really missing a lot of your audience. We need to think more ethnically diverse, we need to think more family typology diverse, and we just need to understand who's sitting there so we can teach them, talk to them, give illustrations for them. There's a lot of implications for even how we do church.

Darrell Bock:

Now, I'm going to ask you a strange question. I don't know if you'll know the answer to this question, and that is, let's go back to the traditional family, just first marriage, husband and wife. A relatively new category in some ways is the interracial marriage in which you're actually combining two cultures as opposed to just two people. Do you know what the percentage is on that? Because there was a time in which that was outlawed and controversial and couldn't happen. So what's that statistic? Do you know?

Ron Deal:

I don't know off the top of my head, but I do know that it is increasing rather rapidly. Over the last 10 years there has been quite an influx of intercultural, interethnic, they call it, marriages. Again, for some people that's not a problem. For other people, they look at that and they think, "Wow, the world is changing and I wish it wouldn't." I mean, we can have the conversations about what should and should not be and why we believe that, but when it comes down to, but what are we going to do? I think that's the practical thing that we have to address.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, the illustration I like to use is, it's one thing to have your belief. It's another thing to think pastorally about how you handle what's in front of you so that when a mom or a dad walks into your pastor's office and says, "My child just came out as gay. What do I do?" Your pastoral responsibilities are not only about what you believe about that, but how are you going to handle the father, the mother, the child, all those relationships that are bound up in it. And I think one of the things that's fascinating about thinking about blended families is, is that everybody has to recalibrate. When you end up in a new family with a new set of siblings and at least one new parent, everyone's having to adjust and that takes some time, doesn't it?

Ron Deal:

It does. It does. On average we say blended families need somewhere between five to seven years to figure out their family identity, find their fit, bond relationships, navigate the parent, stepparent team unity question, and how we're going to work together? What are the standards going to be for our home? And then develop some traditions, some practices that there's a rhythm, if you will. The daily rhythms, but also those annual events, Christmas, Thanksgiving, et cetera, birthdays, how we do those things. That just takes time. My favorite metaphor is to say, cooking a stepfamily is done in a crockpot, not in a blender or a microwave or a pressure cooker or an instapot.

It is in a crockpot which is slow and steady, which by the way, I know we're going to turn the corner here in a few minutes and talk about leadership in local churches. That's also a way you do leadership. Anybody who comes in and walks in on day one and says, "I'm the new sheriff in town, and my way or the highway," is not going to be the sheriff very long in the average church context. You develop those relationships slowly over time. You gain your trust with people and different parts of the church, if you will, the different groupings within your church. And so the crockpot metaphor works in more than one way.

Darrell Bock:

That's interesting. And of course, one of the things that happens with blended families is you're not only dealing with the new family that you put together, but you're dealing with the residue of a broken family if it doesn't involve a death in the family of, "I've still got to negotiate taking the kids from one parent in the house to a parent outside the house." All the relative relationships that attach to that initial spouse, if I can say it that way, and so the adjustments are at multiple levels and in multiple directions.

Ron Deal:

Yeah, and this is really important, Darrell. I'm glad you hit on this because let's just think again about the audience. Sunday morning, standing up on the stage pulpit speaking to your audience. It's one thing to say how many blended family couples are in the room. It's another thing to say, how many grandparents are in the room who now have a stepgrandchild because their son or daughter who has made some choices in life that have caused some consequence to them, have affected three generations of people? So grandparents are sitting there, they're key stakeholders in your congregation, and they're trying to figure out how to navigate relationships.

Uncles, aunts, children in your children's program, teenagers in your student ministry program, not their choice, not their decision. "Dad passed away a few years ago. Mom's now married to somebody new. I got a stepdad." That's the reality for lots of people. Here's the number that knocks people down, and I think I shared a few months ago. When you count the individuals in the United States who have a step relationship, meaning they have a stepparent, maybe they have a stepsibling, maybe they have a stepchild, that's one third of the US population. That's 113 million people.

Now you add the people who know and love them, friends, neighbors they go to church with, maybe it's a grandparent who's become a stepgrandparent, that doubles the number. That's two thirds of the US population. If you look at your church and you say, "Well, we don't have any stepfamilies here." Something's wrong. I just got to say it. You're not connecting to your community. You're nice and tight, you got your people that look clean, but you're not doing outreach. You're not ministering to people. You're not really living where people are. Or maybe you have more than you realize. But I think the question is not… In other words, this is our world and if we're going to be relevant and active in our world and take the gospel to our world, we're going to have to figure out ways of navigating this terrain.

Darrell Bock:

And so just to add to the level of challenges that's a part of this discussion, so you've got a child, I'm going to say four to 16 range, so they're in the house. Maybe I go four to 18 just to make that clean. And they're going back and forth between parents. What's happening in that exchange on the other side is impacting how they come back to you from week to week, the way in which they relate, what's said about the new marriage that might take place, or the family that now exists, et cetera. There are additional levels of concern that are going on as those relationships are playing themselves out.

Ron Deal:

Exactly. I mean, that speaks to the emotional climate of the child moving between homes, bio mom, bio dad, maybe a stepparent or two in those different households. All of that is going to affect the child's emotional wellbeing, their psychological… Their child development, their attitude, their heart and their spiritual development. I mean, again, I make the case that inadvertently, there are a lot of fractured family systems that are training children to be post-modern in their thinking. They go to mom's house, she has a set of values and rules and beliefs, and we go to this church. And then lo and behold, she just married this guy and he's got a couple of kids of his own. Well, they go to a slightly different church. They have a different take on certain things.

And so I'm confused what is truth just between churches. "When I go to dad's house, he didn't go to church at all. He's now living with a woman who definitely is against church. She's anti-church. She has liberal values about politics and all sorts of things." And so what does this kid want to do? He wants to get along. He wants to enjoy everybody in his world in his life. So he doesn't fight over values and politics. He just adapts into it. He learns how to be a post-modern thinker. All truth is okay. Well, guess what? We're trying to say something about truth with a capital T, and that's confusing for this child whose life is about adapting to multiple truths. You could see how this works against what your student ministry program, children's ministry program is actually trying to do.

Darrell Bock:

And of course, the other factor is, is that sometimes they're in that, assuming you're attending church consistently, sometimes they're in that class and sometimes they're somewhere else, either not in church at all or in a completely different program.

Ron Deal:

Yeah, very common for kids to just be one weekend a month, they're in a Sunday school program or in a small group program, maybe two a month, and that affects consistency. It affects the child's relationships with the other students in the student ministry program. All kinds of things are impacted by that.

Darrell Bock:

We could go on and on and on this. I mean, we've done it before and we'll probably do it again, and it is a real challenge. It does introduce a whole layer of dynamics that the traditional family, generally speaking, doesn't have to deal with. Traditional family may have to deal with my aunt or uncle who's a little odd and that kind of thing, but at least the players are consistent and have been around from the beginning.

Whereas in this situation, you're having to adjust on the fly and everyone's adjusting. The new couple is adjusting, the kids are adjusting, the people around the family are adjusting. Everyone's trying to figure out where to land. And so, as you've said, it takes a while to figure out where the game stands.

Ron Deal:

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I just have to say, as complicated as it is, Darrell, I often have pastors who will say to me, "Wow, I've just never really thought about that and I guess I need to learn more." And then they'll say, "I just have never experienced anything like that." And I'll say, "Well, be careful. You live and work and breathe in a church context, right?"

And they'll say, "Yeah." And I'll say, "Well, you know how we say, churches are like families? Well, really, they're more like blended families." And all of a sudden they'll kind of perk up and their eyes open, like, "What do you mean?" And I'll start drawing these parallels between blended family living and church family living. And it's like you really know more about this than you realized you did because you're living it day after day in church and leadership and how things work within local congregation.

Darrell Bock:

So you've made our transition. I just want to tell people how we actually got to this podcast. You were here visiting, doing one of our chapels. It was on blended families and we were just talking about the different kinds of family units that people have to cope with and raised the question, "How do you pastorally care for them? All the things that you do on a regular basis." And in the midst of it, you popped in this remark about, "The church is really like a blended family." And all of us, because we had our whole team there, looked at one another and said, "Yeah." I mean, if you stop and think about it, it's kind of transparent, which is I have a lot of people who I call brother and sister who are not my biological brother and sister. Boom, we're there.

Ron Deal:

Yep, there you go. I mean, that's just the first place. Let's just go a little farther. That brother and sister came from a different origin, meaning that maybe they grew up going to a different church, different denomination. Maybe they had a completely different theological training or understanding when they walked into your building. Well, you don't just have one or two people. You got a whole bunch of opinions out there about what's right, what's true, what the Bible says, how we should approach it. Those different traditions we even call them are sort of like facing a tradition about how to do Thanksgiving or how to do Christmas. We all have our origins that influence what we're emotionally invested in and what we think is correct. Now, that's just two quick examples, and I mean, I could go on.

Darrell Bock:

Well, and just think about, I almost think the church is a blended family on steroids because it's not a singular unit. There's not a clear mother and father in the family. It's almost like a blended family, not without the parents, because I mean obviously you have leader figures, but it's not… It's the same on the one hand, and it's different on the other. That's the point that I'm making.

Ron Deal:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You think about members of a stepfamily often have different last names, right? Kids can have different last names because they came from different origins, and that represents a loyalty. It represents something that's deeply important to them and people that they're connected to. You think about a church, it's a collection of people who have different paths and histories and loyalties, things they're connected to and deeply passionate about, and we have to navigate those. Sometimes people bring you ideas for ministry that you're like, "That's a great idea. It's not within the scope of what we can do. We just don't have personnel."

And this person's like, "But you have to." There's a deep passion somewhere in their heart that's connected to something that matters to them. How do we pay attention to that? How do we affirm those things, even though we can't choose necessarily to follow through with them? Those sorts of dynamics I think are very, very common. There's just one other quick observation I'd love to get your reaction to. Blended family happens because two people fall in love. Mom, dad, father, mother, maybe one or both of them brought children to the relationship, but two people fall in love. They just invite everybody else to figure out how to be a family.

That's part of the journey of, now what do we do? Who are you to me? You're my stepbrother. What do I do with that? And that's the journey of becoming family. In a church context people come together around an idea of Jesus Christ and faith, and we trust in Him, but that doesn't mean I like you. That doesn't mean that this person sitting next to me in the pew and I have anything in common. Nan and I, we've been a part of a church where we live now for about a year and we still feel lonely. I mean, candidly, we still walk in looking for somebody to connect to. We developed a few relationships. We have some things that are working, and a couple of people we can stop and visit with, but on the whole, we don't really know anybody there.

And it's amazing to me how, for a year, we've been in this journey and it's not family to us. That is something I hear from children in blended families all the time. That's something I hear from stepparents all the time. "I'm still trying to figure out the lay of the land. I'm connected to this person and this person, but, man, I'm not connected at all to these people." And, again, it's a very common experience. You have insiders and outsiders, both within a blended family and the church. Insiders in a blended family are people who are biologically related to one another.

They come in with a last name. They come in with history. They come in with DNA. They both have traveled the same foxhole through life, the hard stuff that has bonded them and knit them together very, very tightly. And now you have outsiders who are like, different last names, different history, different… And I don't know who you are. We're both here because something brought us together, but we have differences. We have to figure out how to cross those differences and bond and build relationship. That happens all the time in a church on a regular basis. That's a very similar journey in stepfamilies.

Darrell Bock:

So you asked me for my response and I go, there's a similarity and there's a dissimilarity, it seems to me. The similarity is that you're having to forge a new set of relationships as you walk into a new community. It's like walking into a reconstructed family and trying to figure out, "What do I do with these new people who've shown up?" The difference is that whereas in a blended family, a couple of people have made the choice to be there and others are kind of around it. In a church, you make the choice. This is going to be my community. You step in with an advantage, it seems to me, which is, "We've decided this is where we're going to worship. These are the people we're going to hang out with," and that strikes me as a difference.

And then here's the odd irony that comes out of that. The odd irony is, it's the responsibility of the community to help build off of that initial decision and identity and solidify it, if I can say it that way. And then the other odd irony in this is, when you get a new pastor into that group, the person who's having to do the biggest acclimation work in some ways may be the new pastor if he hasn't been around that community before. If he's dropping in on a parachute and this is now my new community and I'm going to lead it, and all these established relationships exist, he's like the stepparent who comes into a family and has to negotiate all these established relationships that are around him.

Ron Deal:

I want to come back to that idea of pastor as stepparent in a minute because that is exactly what I teach and talk and help pastors to see. A couple of other layers, just to reflect on what you just said. Motivation is really important. If you come to a church and you're choosing to make this your church family, your motivation is high. That's a huge advantage. For some people in a blended family, they make the choice. Their motivation is high. Usually the couple, for example. They're choosing marriage. They're choosing to bring their kids and family together. Their motivation to find connectedness is high. Other people, however, sort of brought along and they haven't made that choice, but they're forced into figuring out the territory.

The same thing sort of happens in a church. You can imagine a scenario where mom and dad say, "Hey, we're going to this church," and the kids are like, "Eh, we don't really like it." Well, motivation's high for some, motivation's low for others. The student ministry program has got to figure out how to deal with that teenager who really doesn't want to be there, but their mom and dad are making them. So there are some parallels there, even I think in a church context, but motivation is everything. We teach blended family couples, for example, you got to temper your high motivation for a child who has a lower motivation, not necessarily against you. They're super low, but they're just not as high as you.

You've got to temper your motivation because otherwise you're pushing them and it feels like, to the child or the other member who has lower motivation, it feels like you're invading my territory, my space. Well, we sort of get that in church leadership. You reach out to somebody who comes and visits a couple of times and they're sort of like, "Yeah, no, I don't really need that." Well, you got to temper your motivation to their motivation in order to build a little bit of a connection that would make it easier for them to have their motivation grow over time. That's just basic relationships. All of those things I think parallel very nicely into blended family living. But can we go back and talk about pastor as stepparent?

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, because I think that's the other real challenge in some ways.

Ron Deal:

More than once, I have been sitting with somebody who's moved into a new job, maybe followed the founding pastor, and maybe you're the 10th pastor down the line. But the person who preceded you was loved. People thought they were great, and they led the church to a certain place. Okay, you got to recognize this. It all depends on how the transition took place. We spent a lot of time in church leadership talking about transitions. Let's imagine if there was a divorce in your church. The pastor, the church, all of a sudden didn't like each other. Too much conflict and they separate and went separate ways.

Divorce polarizes people. There's a lot of pain left over, and you're walking into that scenario as the next generation leadership. You've got to notice where the pain is. You've got to spend some time listening to those stories and understanding. It's very important. Stepparents, we teach them to not come in with, "my rules, my way," claiming authority you have not yet earned. What is it that is really wise for a new generation of leadership to do? Yeah, you need to come in and listen. Spend a year listening, absorbing, hearing people out, getting to know the different parts of the church, the little sibling groups. This pocket over here that believes this, and this pocket over here that loved the last guy, and this pocket that hated the last guy.

You got to hear all of them and try to connect to them, otherwise you're going to get triangled between all those various parts. You try to lead out too soon without having built trust, you're in a peck of trouble. Same thing's true for stepparents, right? That's 101. But here's the thing. The other thing we tell stepparents is, there's a lot of things, but keep in mind there's a fragility to your relationships when you're the new person and you've got to temper how aggressive you get to create change, for example, to say, don't ever denigrate the previous person. "Oh, boy, I don't know why he made those decisions. They really led you guys in the wrong direction. We're going this way now."

You just burned some bridges with that pocket of people that really cared for and loved and were loved by that previous person. If you don't understand the fragility, you can inadvertently undercut yourself fast. Recently I was actually a part of a dialogue with, we'll just call him the stepdad, the new leader that came in. And by the way, he and I were having a conversation one day and he said, "I just can't figure this out. These people want this from me. These people want this from me. I'm not really sure what my role needs to be. The elders are saying this, and I'm just trying to get my footing and understand my place and the relationships and I'm completely lost."

And I said, "You're the stepdad." And he just stopped and he thought about it a minute and he said, "Tell me more." We start processing all. He said, "That is exactly what's happening. There's ambiguity around my role. I don't know who I am. Everybody needs something different from me, and they sort of resent me because I'm not the last person that they dearly loved that passed away, if you will. That sort of moved on, but everybody wished they were still here." Wow, you got to be careful in that position or you're going to get stuck.

Well, this guy had some tense relationships with some people that reported to him, and all of a sudden he began to back away and he wasn't as invested anymore. And they saw that distancing and they were like, "See? We can't trust him." It's so easy when you're the stepparent to be judged harshly and to be judged, well, inaccurately, and it works against you. It is what it is. People will take that in the wrong direction. So now it's tenuous, but then if you do something that really sabotages the trust you've gained, you can lose it all really fast.

Darrell Bock:

I'm going to play with this metaphor some because I like the picture of the pastor coming in, who's the stepparent. Let's go to the staff. The staff are like adult kids, right?

Ron Deal:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

They're old enough to be making their own judgments. They're independent. They're used to making their own decisions. They have a world that they had stability in and understood, and you're the new kid on the block and they're having to respond to you on the one hand, but they're responding out of, "I've been here a while. I know what this is."

Ron Deal:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

Fair enough?

Ron Deal:

Fair enough. Absolutely. And again, like we were talking earlier, there's pockets of the church. They'll be staff that are polarized over how that last transition took place, and what the story was, and what it means, and therefore what you should do in… Again, lots of opinions, lots of ambiguity about what's expected of you. And, these people, you're right, they're staff, they are deeply invested in this church, this family, and they want you to play the role that they need you to play in it.

Darrell Bock:

Okay, so now this is the hard part. I don't know what to do with elders, okay? What do you do? Which slot that I… And I'm thinking of, in a family, they're always kind of the big players who actually run the dynamics of a family to some degree. Let's assume that you're an older child and you've got parents who are in the house who are there. The elders are kind of like that parent that's sitting over you in one sense, and how they respond to what you do actually becomes very important to how you lead.

Ron Deal:

Darrell, here's the metaphor. The elders are your spouse-

Darrell Bock:

Okay.

Ron Deal:

… okay? This is the biological parent who brought you into the family. All right? And so, marriage is important. Unity is important. It's doubly important in a blended family because the stepparent's authority is based upon the spouse, the biological parent, in this case, the elders, their ability to extend authority to you, to communicate to the church, "Hey, we're invested in this person. We're on a team. We're together. Let's figure this out together."

Darrell Bock:

And they have a track record in the community that you can't replace.

Ron Deal:

That's it. Right. The biological parent has authority and definition and clarity in their role with the people that the new person doesn't have yet. You haven't gained that trust yet, so you have to rely on their ability to support you. That's why nurturing your relationship with those to whom you're accountable, the eldership or what have you, is so critical. You want to be very careful making decisions or changes or anything over the first couple of years in your tenure at a church, making sure always that the elder board is definitely with you in that decision.

And I would say any early changes. Sometimes you're forced into doing something that you said, "Man, I wouldn't have scripted it this way, but I've got to do something." I would say, try to let the elder board even communicate on your behalf because their voice is clear. Your voice is, "Hmm, we're still figuring this guy out," but their voice is clear. So that gives you leadership strength that you didn't have on your own.

Darrell Bock:

Now, that that image assumes something, and I'll just talk about what it assumes. And that assumes that there's some degree of, how can I say? Coherence between where the elders are and where the church community is. If you're in a church that has already… You've walked into an internal fight that you may or may not be aware of when you took the job, the dynamics change significantly.

Ron Deal:

Oh, my goodness. You just gave me a flashback, Darrell. Early out of graduate school, I went and applied for a job and I had picked up from a friend that there had been some trouble with the guy that previously left the role that I was applying for. And I went through an entire weekend interview and never heard anything from anybody. The elders, nobody ever brought it up. And I am smart enough to know as a family therapist that when there's secrets, there's stories behind those secrets and there's dynamics at play and there's power issues.

And so I finally waited long enough and I just said, "It seems to me there's a story here that I need to hear a little bit more about. Can you tell me about my predecessor and what happened?" Now they all just stopped and looked at each other. There was great division in that group. Long story short, he'd gone down the block and started a new church and took a bunch of members. They weren't even going to tell me, as if the past didn't have anything to do with the… It has everything to do with the present. It certainly has everything to do with your ability to fulfill the role that you're trying to step into.

I turned that job down. And sometimes, like you said, you don't know those things until you're already there and you're committed and now all that stuff starts bubbling up a little bit. It is very difficult and it can be hard to maneuver. It's helpful if you understand. Think of your role, "Okay, but I'm still the stepparent. I can't take on too much, too soon. I've got to be careful. I've got to make sure my primary connections are," like with the elder board, for example, "are tight and secure because that's the thing that's going to help me maneuver through all of these difficulties."

Darrell Bock:

We haven't talked about this, but when you're thinking about transitions and coming into a new role, et cetera, when you're approaching the possibility of a new job, I often say this is particularly true if you're not particularly happy where you already are, that the grass always looks greener on the other pasture. And if you're not careful, you will not ask the questions you need to ask before you make the move because you may realize that you went from one mucky situation to another mucky situation.

Ron Deal:

Hey, what do we tell single people who are dating? Single parents, singles never married. "Desperation is not a good motivation to find a partner, and it's not a good way to look for a job because you will not be discerning. You lose your discernment. You lose your ability to ask the hard questions. You lose your ability to be able to say no. And if you can't say no, then you really haven't made a good yes." You're exactly right. And so if you recognize that desperation in yourself and you're thinking about a transition out, I would try to resolve that as best you can. I would try to stay in the relationship, in the marriage you're in, if we could put it that way. By all means, work on that reconciliation.

Sometimes in a job situation it's just not possible, but you still got to get your discernment back. Darrell, something else has just occurred to me. I want to just say, in a blended family… Here's another parallel I think is helpful for leaders. In a blended family in the beginning, because children preceded the stepparent's presence in the family, children have an inordinate amount of power. A kid can say, "Look, I've been here a lot longer than you have, and you're not my mom, so you can't tell me what to do." At least there's a platform for that battle to even take place. That never happens in a first family because the kids know, "Well, you're my mom. You do belong here." There's inherent power-

Darrell Bock:

You beat me here.

Ron Deal:

Right. You made me here.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, yeah.

Ron Deal:

And so, same thing's true in a leadership situation. When you're the new person, when transitions have taken place, in particular if there's been a pain at the core of why the last person left, children, members of the church, have an inordinate amount of power. They have influence, they have a voice, they complain. They know who's on their side. They play those little lines to their advantage, and it's all out of fear and pain, and it's very hard not to take that personally, but it is really not about you. We tell stepparents all the time. "It's not about you. This is about a kid who misses their parent."

Darrell Bock:

It's about the past.

Ron Deal:

That's what this is. It's about the past, it's about sadness, it's about loss and grief. Now you just happen to be the person standing here, you're the new person, so you're going to take the brunt of all that pain, and that's hard, but try not to take it personally. I think understanding that dynamic, and again, working in alignment with the other leaders who have clarity in their roles, it is one way. But the other ultimate thing here is to say to that person who's treating you harshly, "I am so, so sorry that you've had to go through this difficult transition. This is so hard. I can tell you lost a lot in this. Would you mind helping me understand that more?"

And that softness, and that "let me help you grieve" posture, here's the irony, can be a form of building trust with that… They see you as somebody who cares deeply about them, who ministers to them, even when they're less than Christian in how they're behaving towards you. At the end of the day, you might win their affections, if you will. You don't do it to be manipulative. You do it because you're loving them, but it might have a really nice by-product in terms of your role in becoming a leader.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, it strikes me that when you come in from that situation, that one of the disadvantages that you have is, you don't know what you don't know. And they know.

Ron Deal:

Yes.

Darrell Bock:

In fact, they may know and they may know more than they know. In other words, they think they know more than they actually do know, that kind of thing. And so you're dealing with that. You're dealing with a space that's hard to get your hands around because you don't know what you don't know, and you don't know what they know. And that's hard. And I do find your response of letting that person talk and just… I sometimes talk about this in evangelism, that sometimes in evangelism what you have to do is, you have to put your doctrinal meter on mute, okay, and just ask questions and get to know the person you're interacting with.

What motivates them, what's driving them, what concerns them, et cetera. It strikes me you're in a similar situation here where the issue is, your tendency is going to be, "I want to fix this. I want to get our hands around it. I want to make a decision." No, you need to step back and actually get a better lay of the land before you start picking sides.

Ron Deal:

I think you're exactly right. Be careful with those initial steps. Grow your relationships with the different parts within the church, the different little subgroups, the different individuals, especially those who are deeply wounded. The old adage, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer," has great, great application to leadership in those situations.

You want to move toward them, not away from them, because toward is how you gain influence. But that means you have to deal with your own emotional pain and your own difficulties and how you deal with conflict. A lot of us in ministry, we're conflict avoiders. We don't want to touch it. That does not bear well in these situations. You have to find your resolve and step in with gentleness and try to move toward them.

Darrell Bock:

So, it's a lot to process and we've really focused in this conversation on the role of the pastor, and as happens in all our conversations about blended families, you change the player, the discussion changes. The role of the pastor's not the same as the person in the pew, or the elder who's brought in the new pastor or the staff that's dealing with… Depending on who we're talking about in the genogram, if I can use a technical term, well, the dynamics change.

Ron Deal:

They do indeed, and here's one of the complicated things about stepfamilies and church leadership. Some moments you find yourself in a different role with a different person. So in a blended family with your spouse, it's husband and wife and it's intimate and close, and we're trying to figure out our us-ness even as we're bonding this family and trying to be parents at the same time, and that's confusing. Sometimes I'm your lover and sometimes I'm your copartner in raising your kids, and I don't know which is acting. And then the next person walks in the room and they want me to be a parent. That's your child, but the next child, the stepchild, is saying, "No, I don't want you to be my parent."

Similar sorts of experiences and dynamics within a church context. Again, especially in the beginning of your journey as a leader within a… You're not really sure who you are with what person. It's a lot to navigate, and I think here's the hope. Here's the thing. We started our conversation talking about average stepfamily needs five to seven years, something like that. Have that same sort of crockpot mentality and just say, "I'm just working on this relationship today. This particular ingredient in our church crockpot is wide open to me. They're on board. They're ready to go. They're looking for the future.

"This ingredient is still holding on to the past and I just have to be super patient and gentle with this person. I have to spend a lot of time unpacking their pain in the past for them. They're not where this ingredient is." And then there's a group over here that's got this opinion and that. I just got to be what I have to be in this moment, in this relationship, trusting that over time what the Lord is doing is softening all the ingredients and they begin to share of themselves in new ways.

That's what happens in crockpots. That's what happens in blended families. That's what happens in churches. And with time, your level of clarity in your role, clarity in your relationship with different people, rises. Generally, what would you say to people these days? Five years in is when you really begin to pick up steam as a senior pastor in a church. Obviously with more time that goes even faster. Some pastors, maybe, in less time can get there, but you need some time for that to bake, for things to really begin to take off.

Darrell Bock:

It's interesting because you ended up landing in the very place that I was going to go, which is the crockpot metaphor, the five to seven year window, which actually means that you have to go in with a high level of patience about how you're walking into the space, the way in which you are perceived. You may even be initially misperceived because of stuff that you have no control over, that kind of thing, and it's giving yourself that space to figure out, "I'm in the crockpot, but I don't know where I'm sitting in this crockpot."

Ron Deal:

Hey, Darrell, as I was thinking about this conversation today, it occurred to me that, how much time does Jesus and Paul spend in the New Testament encouraging unity among the various members of his family? We got to get over the ethnic stuff. We got to get past the racial lines. We got to figure out ways of merging our hearts and our dreams and our passions, and your spiritual gifts and my spiritual gifts, and the way I think we should worship. The whole thing is about figuring out what we have in common, moving towards that which we hold up, and that's Jesus Christ, first and foremost. The things that unite us, and then me putting off my selfishness and making sacrifices on behalf of my brother and sister so that we can have even greater unity. That's an exercise in spiritual discipline right there.

That is what blended families have to learn to do, figure out how to not be family and grow into being family. And that's essentially what the local church is doing as leadership changes over time, as people come, as new people join the church, as children are born. It's an ongoing process for all of us, and it's a beautiful thing when it happens. I mean, my mantra is, blended families are redemptive. They're an amazing act of God when it comes together for this generation and the next. When blended families don't come together, well, it's a lot of hurt and chaos and pain for people that have already had hurt, chaos and pain. I think the same thing happens in churches.

Darrell Bock:

Well, my guess is, this has been an interesting journey for people to hear us talk about this and explore this idea. I want to thank you, Ron, for taking the time to talk our way through this and to have us think about it. I think it's a helpful metaphor of thinking about the relational side of church, which sometimes we perhaps desire and desire deeply, but underestimate what's involved in getting there. And so I want to thank you for taking the time to do this with us.

Ron Deal:

Oh, always. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Darrell Bock:

And we thank you for being a part of The Table. If you are interested in more podcasts, you can go to voice.dts.edu/tablepodcast. We'd love to have you look at the other things that we've done and we hope you'll join us again soon.