Welcome to the Church Renewal Podcast.

I'm Matt. I'm Jeremy. Listeners, we had a good response last season to when Dave Miles was on with us, and so we're bringing him back. One of the things you don't know about Dave Miles is that Blurish doing what we're doing would not have been possible without Dave Miles and Vital Church in the ministry that he leads. It actually was through a team that Dave Miles trained that I first became aware of Family Systems Theory. And so it makes sense that now we would come all the way back around to the origin of me even being interested in that. So join us today as we spend time with Dave Miles. Dave Miles, welcome back to the Church Real podcast. It's good to see you again. Thank you. Good to be here. I've gotten so many good comments, Jeremy. People who've texted or emailed me and said, just listen to the interview with Dave Miles. That was great. Have him back. So here it is. Responding to listener comments by popular demand.

Wow. Well, Dave, as you know because we've already talked about this, we're in season four here of the Church Mill podcast, and we're looking at family systems theory and how it applies. And you have a wealth of experience and knowledge that I'm looking forward to digging into. However, before we get to that, what's your background that led you specifically to family systems theory? How did you first get introduced to it? What confused you about it? And what caused you to dive deeper?

Yeah, so uh this goes all the way back to my first intentional interim pastorate. Wonderful situation, great church. Uh ended with a bang, and I don't mean a positive bang. It was a difficult explosion, a difficult landing. And uh there were things that took place that I could not explain. For example, there were several boards, and one of the boards had just a big explosion, and I wondered what was going on. I after this happened, it was successful, but there was it was it was a rough landing. And I I said to myself, what happened here? Like, because it really took me by surprise. And the one of the things that really took me by surprise is I met with a woman and her husband, and she told me, like early on in the setting, that there was a leader in the church that was hit that was making sexual advances towards her. That's how she experienced it. Okay. And then we had this big blowout, and it it happened to, and then I went out to lunch with him again. Uh she said, Remember, I told you, you know, like whatever, a year or two years ago about that leader. Okay, she said that that leader was the person who was the head of this blow-up. Wow. And I said to myself, wait a minute here. What was going on in the way this person was handling conflict was actually probably a byproduct of what was going on in their, I don't know if they even realized what they were doing, their ungodly advances towards a beautiful young woman. I'm not even sure they knew that that's what they were doing, but that's how it worked itself out. And and so that connection that that got me thinking, what is going on? A friend of mine had done some work in Friedman, had read uh generation to generation, and had given me the book, and so I started reading the book, and then I got invited to a class at Eastern Seminary with one of my friends. I audited the class, which was on family systems, and so I'm auditing this Doctor of Ministry class with some friends, and I'm reading generation to generation, and that's when the quarter dropped. That's when I went, oh, this is why all this has happened. Helped you understand it. Yeah, yeah. It helped, like, why did this, you know, it helped me understand that there was more to what appeared to be a rebellious leader than the rebellion itself. What they were doing was symptomatic of something much deeper. And so we might call that process and content. Well, that's what family systems people call it, process and content. And so I began to look at this stuff, uh, study it, read everything I could get my hands on about it. That was my introduction to it. And that class, that demon class that I audited, uh, the book Generation to Generation, and then uh Failure of Nerve, and then several others. Ron Richardson's book, Creating a Healthier Church, when I was on my first sabbatical, which was life-changing for me, one of the life-changing keys that came out of that for me personally, something I learned about myself based on family systems. And for example, for me it was sameness equals intimacy. I grew up in a family situation, religious situation, where sameness equaled intimacy. Meaning, if we were all the same, if we all thought the same, if we all looked the same, if we all talk the same, that equals togetherness. That equals community. And I'd lived under that the way I did my marriage, the way I handled my children, the way I pastored a church. Well, that's just not true. And being forced into a multi-ethnic environment in my first pastoral situation, it just took years for me to learn something. That probably took other people a lot, you know, a lot shorter time. But sameness doesn't equal intimacy at all. In fact, sameness can be chaos, right? I don't because if you're not yourself, then who you're not sharing your life if you're not yourself, if I'm always trying to be something, for example, that Matt wants me to be. Well, I'm not being I'm not being who God's called me to be. I'm not living out of my own spiritual gifts, my own identity in Christ. None of that stuff that we talk about, you know, being in Christ, I'm not living that out. So when I began to realize in my first sabbatical, hey, you grew up believing sameness equals intimacy. You've married you you treated your marriage partner like this way, you treat your kids like this, and what's it done? What's all that anxiety produced? Chaos, pain, anger, dysfunction, separateness. Like, you know, like uh anxiety always creates separateness, not togetherness. And learning all of that together, I mean, wow, life-changing for me. And it's very biblical. I mean, very biblical. So that's kind of how I got into it.

That it's an interesting theme that you're laying out there because as you were talking about, I was just telling Matt that I've been watching the uh show Shiny Happy People, which in season one was looking at the Duggar family, and season two is looking at Teen Mania. And that statement, sameness equals intimacy in many places turns into sameness as cult. Wherever there's a very high value of the ideal, what is what is right, what's good, the identifying mark, there's going to be that pressure to conform to it. Right. And that conformity can and has in many places um become very culty.

Right.

So where did you go from there? So you were digging into that. How did you start applying that to the work you were doing?

Well, I wish I could say that I had it all figured out. It's taken me years to actually, and I'm still on the journey, figuring out how to actually pull it off. Uh, what I what I started doing is because I was training people to do, you know, what Matt and I do, intentional interim pastoring work, I knew that we had to address this family systems issue if we were to actually address the real issues in a local church. Because what looks like the issue is never the issue. It's it's or I should put it this way, it's rarely the issue. So, for example, we uh have worked in a church where it looked like one of the pastors was the issue. He was the identified patient. In family systems, you say uh the identified patient. In fact, what he did is he simply reflected the dysfunction in the system that had been there for decades. And now everybody hates the guy, you know, but but what they don't like is really themselves. You see, they they don't realize that he reflects all the dysfunction in the system, and uh, and so being able to address that problem has been mission critical to the health of that church, and it's you know, we're frankly in the middle of it still, and I'm not sure you know what's gonna happen, but it it's more than likely or not it's gonna get fixed, but only because and we told him this this person is not the problem. You think that's the problem. The problem is beneath the surface, and it frequently, not always, but frequently is some idol, something that is more important than Jesus Christ. So Keller would call it the sin beneath the sin. I'm not sure it's an idol every single time, but it is plenty of times. And and so figuring that out, that means you can actually address the real issue. You come up with a plan to address the real issue, which is not something that most people uh uh have actually uh grasped or understood. There's the the book Failure of Nerve actually has five areas that if you look at a church and you look for these five areas, this that there's the problem right there. And so it became a diagnostic tool in some respects. I always look for, you know, like uh where's the anxiety? Because I can give you some stories if you want, but once that comes to the surface, ah, I know what the problem is. Now I'm gonna deal with it.

Yeah, no, help flesh us out because that that's exactly what I'm hoping for. Is you've had so much experience here. I'd love to know practically, you know, leaving the theories there, but practically, as you're going through that diagnostic process, what things do you see that cue you in? This is what I'm seeing, this is what this means. Now I now I can start developing an approach.

Okay, so when you go in to affect or facilitate God, and by the way, this is all of this stuff is really rooted deeply in spiritual formation. I mean, this is this is something that you're you know, you're letting God do his spiritual work of transformation in your own life first and foremost while you're doing this. This is not like a psychological exercise, it's not a technique, really. It's really uh, you know, and the money many of the authors, right, they they don't use biblical nomenclature, but what they're teaching, frankly, is right out of the Bible. So I'll give you a story, and I see if I can put pull it all together. Whenever you try to change a system, you're gonna have sabotage. And that means that people's anxiety is gonna go up. Like let's say the church is in a it's in a tailspin, numbers are down, people aren't coming to faith in Christ, people aren't being discipled, the the average age of the church is in their like mid-60s, it's been moving in this direction for you know a long time, and yet people are still saying, we got this great church, man. Look how great we are. Okay, so they're they're deluded about it. They know there's trouble, they don't know what it is. They bring somebody like Flourish, Dave Miles, or Vital Church in, and we identify the issues and we start addressing those issues. Okay, so as soon as you start addressing the real issues, sabotage is gonna happen. That is, somebody's going to go after you when you either do something or you make a mistake or whatever, and you just you gotta recognize that that reactivity points you to the problem. So, for example, at this particular church, I was the pastor, great church, I love the church, but they'd made a God out of their history and their physical plant. And so I had made the mistake of calling the sanctuary an auditorium. Yeah. Yeah. I called the sanctuary an auditorium, and you would have thought that I had denied the virgin birth. I mean, honestly, it was there were letters to the elder board, there was all this anxiety. People are furious because I called the sanctuary, you know, an auditorium. So now what I would have done prior to learning all this is get all reactive, my own anxiety would have gone up, I would have gone back on the attack. You know, you're the sanctuary of the heart, your heart's the temple of the living God. This is no temple. You know, I I would have done that. What I did this time, thank God, because of Jesus shaping my soul, it became more Christ-like. I sat down, there was two people in particular. I sat down and I listened to them. And I didn't react. I just listened to all this anger and hurt. And you know, of course, what they were doing was telling me what the problem in the church was already knew what the problem was, but really knew what the problem was once they they, you know, once they brought this up. And I listened. Then, again, low non-anxious presence, right? Low anxiety, I apologized. I said, you know, I'm sorry, I did not intend to uh hurt anybody by calling the sanctuary an auditorium. I listened, I apologized profusely, they accepted my apology, and then I said, Matt is gonna appreciate this, then I said, but let me tell you something. The Bible teaches us that now we are the temple of the living God. So that actually is not a sanctuary. So I listened, I apologized, I kept a non-anxious presence, at least on the outside, and the inside it was mad. On the outside, I was like, yes, that's very nice, I hear you, you know. And and and but then I didn't back off of addressing the real issue. So I said to them, look at what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a promise to you, I will never call this an auditorium again. I said, but I will not call this a sanctuary either. I'm gonna call it a worship center. See now I'm what I've done is I've lowered the anxiety, listened to their concern, apologized for my failure, and then I and then in Friedman calls this a failure of nerve. I didn't fail in my nerve to actually address the real issue, but in fact addressed it, and I continued to address it in conversations, in sermons, in staff meetings, in elder board meetings. You know, I always addressed the situation, and by the time there's two people, by the time I left that church, these two people took me out to lunch, gave me swag, you know, oh, we love you, Pastor Dave, can't you stay? You know, all of this stuff. So these people became like my best friends.

It's actually for the listeners who've uh been following along and hearing us talk about the theory and then trying to interleave our guest interviews along with the theory, just note there in in Dave's description of the scenario that there was a differentiation of self, right? But he knew his own goals and values, but he stayed emotionally connected. That sitting down and talking, if people will sit and talk with you, do it as a leader because you gain more intel. He also kept his own goals and values, right? He didn't capitulate to the the sanctuary language, but he stayed connected to people. And I think that that's money. It doesn't always work because some people you're you we do in this work, Dave, you know, we destabilize the system, we disrupt the homeostasis, and that produces reactivity in other people. But our job's to stay non-anxious and not respond to their reactivity with our reactivity or our adaptivity and capitulating.

Right now that happened because I managed my anxiety and theirs better while at the same time not failing to address the real issue. And where change uh gets bungled up is when our anxiety gets high and we get reactive and we don't what uh Friedman calls self-differentiate, that isn't hang on to who we are in Christ. I did I was able to do all of that while at the same time actually addressing the problem in question so that eventually um it was dealt with in the same situation, the same church, we had another situation with a ministry that had outlived its life cycle, and the people wouldn't meet with me. And so eventually we actually had to shut the ministry down and they left the church. And it and it wasn't because we didn't want to, it's because they refused to. But at the same time, we didn't uh adapt to them, we said no, this you know, that in the way it's set up, this can't work anymore. And we we stayed true to the course of action. And and again, it was the right thing to do, it just didn't work out as well. And see, that's the problem with systems thinking and self-differentiation to use the language that they're using. I would say like it's hanging on to who I am in Christ uh doesn't guarantee that everybody else is going to act accordingly. Quite the opposite. And and by being non-anxious, we we allow people to make choices that are going to be different than what we make, and we've got to be able to be okay with that. Sometimes like parents mess up in this all the time when kids go sideways on them or want to take a different direction than what the parent wants them to take. Um, you want to stay connected to the kid. You know, if you aren't connected, you have no opportunity to speak into their life.

Right.

And so part of the beauty of the way, you know, the togetherness uh and that that you you you describe, Matt, that's part of that. The beauty is that when you come into these situations with a non-anxious presence, applying Philippians 4, 6, and 7, and a whole host of other verses, you actually usually get what you want, which is a relationship and the and the and the ability to see a person's life changed and transformed. And in our situation, we want to see a whole organization or the organism of the church change to move towards God's purposes, God's plans for God's glory and the good of the community involved.

So, Dave, I want to stick with diagnosis here for a minute. As you're training guys up, I know that Vital has a system that you guys are using to train pastors to go in. Uh, one of the things that FST uses is a geneogram. What do you guys do when you are doing the initial analysis of a church that is similar to or gets you the same kind of information as a geneogram might get you if you're you know when you do an FST?

Yeah. Um what we've done with a geneogram uh from a church's perspective is we don't we don't typically do that upfront in a diagnostic piece. We will we will collect data, what you want to preserve, avoid, and achieve. That tells us you know a lot of that geneogram material.

Right.

Uh we get let them do uh I I you know uh Matt's got his uh I mean a really a good diagnostic process. I don't remember I don't know exactly how you do this, Matt, but in your uh process, but it's really good. It's well researched, I know that. So we get that diagnostic, that kind of stuff in the preservative avoid achieved comments. Where we do the genegram is when we do something we call focusing the church. Which was not original with us. It came out of our parent organization, and they gave us the right to adapt it to what we use it for. You know, so I can't sell it or anything or give it to anybody. It's kind of proprietary. But we do a timeline of the church's life on a on a wall that the congregation speaks into. Literally. And so you can, and we use pink post-it notes for painful area things, yellows for uh areas of celebration, and uh green for like say national like uh regional topics that are events that took place, like 9-11, for example, that affects the life of the church.

Sure.

And uh, and then blue for the lessons that have been learned in each of these areas or stages of life. That's when we do the geneogram, and it is an aha moment for many churches that actually do it.

Tell me why. Why why why what pops out that what are they able to see when you do that?

What they value, what they value to begin with, what they value now. And so, like every church, like a church, nobody, even churches that are sick don't really know how sick they are. I I I've had people, you know, the church is falling apart, and they're going, oh, this is such a great church. You're kidding me? You know what do you see that's good about what why why would you say that? Well, you put that geneagram up there, that that post note timeline, you can see what they valued to begin with, what they were valuing at their high point, because what you value is what you do, how you spend your time and your money, that's what you value. We I had one church, we did it, and we and put we'll do the first when we do the church timeline, uh, what we call a genegram for an individual, and we ask them, what are your actual values? Not what you want, but what you what the what the what the church, your history says you value. This congregation said, we value fighting with each other. I've never there we value conflict. Bingo! You know, yes, and they're the ones that told us. I didn't have to make it up. Like I I knew, I pretty much knew that, but they're the ones that told us. Now, if they've discovered it, and this is the beauty of a gene and the beauty of a timeline, now they own it. They discovered it, they own it. Self-discovery is multiple times more powerful research shows. Yeah, that's why good questions are so much more powerful than just you know prophetic state. I'm a prophetic guy. I think I got a prophetic gift. I love to tell people what's wrong with it. You know, but it doesn't always work. I've got a friend of mine who's much better at asking questions, and uh the questions really get to the bottom, and so this timeline actually uh uncovers all of this stuff, and they can tell you, oh, this is what we value. Now it's that's gold, man. Now it's gold. Okay, so you want to move from this, what you actually value now, to what? What do you want to value in the future? And we'll literally have them do that. But as a congregation, more often than not, where elder boards miss the family systems value, or the piece of it is they have they do that themselves. Like the elder boards come like almost like Moses coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments. Like, this is where we're going now as a church. And if they do it you know every couple of years, they go in different directions in every couple of years. By after a while, the congregation is we're not gonna listen to those guys. They don't know what they're talking about. Because it's just gonna change in two years, and they just get they just blow them off. So when they discover things, now you're actually addressing real issues, and it's and then it gets fun. Then it gets really fun.

It's interesting the intersection here, one of the things that Ken Wickman has brought so valuably into this space is looking at the history of churches and the the cyclical issues that they deal with, that if they don't address them, it's gonna sink the church. And this is an interesting overlay, I think. That if you can diagnose, if they can discover their recurring systemic issues, and you can be there as a guide to help them repent of it, follow Jesus, get back on mission, you can really see a church dramatically change. And that's that's money. That's the business we're in, right? Dave, that's act that's our actual business, right?

Is helping churches uh and to your point, Matt, that word repent, not not always popular in American Christianity these days. I love it personally, I love the word. But what will get a church to a point where they're ready to do that, uh, we do all the groundwork up front, but then we do something that we call a sacred assembly, which is the public repentance for areas of need specific to that local church. And when when a church does that and you see it, uh I mean, I've had repeated experiences where congregations have taken this seriously and it has just like catapulted them into the future. And it's because where there's great humility, there's great grace. And again, we're talking, what are we talking about? Spiritual formation, discipleship, being shaped into Christ-likeness. And so, as pastors, that's what we are called to do. We got to do this first with our in our own lives, and then we invite the church into this as well. You know, when you've got public repentance on the part of leaders or whatever, people just, you know, like, yeah, we're all in, and they are they are because where there's great humility, there's great grace. The sad thing about family systems for me is that I can't control Matt Bowling. I can't control Jeremy, I can't control anybody, I can't control my own wife for crying out loud, or my definitely not my kids. I can control Dave Miles. So I can invite a church into that posture of repentance, but if they choose not to go there and address, again, these family systems issues, there's nothing I can do. And I should keep my own anxiety low in those situations because that's not my problem. That's not my own.

Talk more about that, Dave. Because we you so you talked about diagnosis, you jumped over to the sacred assembly, but there's it seems to me that there is that work that you're talking about right now that bridges from the diagnosis to the point where you're ready to repent. And there's going to be sabotage in the midst of that, there's going to be resistance, there's going to be you're you know, you're gonna be identified as the problem now because bringing up. Exactly, exactly, triangle, exactly. Right? Yeah, so how do you how do you work through this practically? How do your guys work through this as they're sitting there working with the church?

We first of all, we do this as a team to keep the anxiety low. So if we if we are operating like a team, and I'm if I'm gonna gripe, I'm gonna gripe to Matt Bowling, you know, I'm gonna gripe to Tom Wilkins or Greg Carr. I'm not gonna gripe to the church. So we do it as a team, and that that reminds us to keep the anxiety low. And then what's happened for us, the way we do it, is that out of the diagon, the initial diagnostic come a set of what we call ministry outcomes, or some of us call ministry objectives. They are specific to every single church. And the elder board or the session or consistory or the whatever you want to call them, they're the ones that work with the interim pastor to create those outcomes. And then we are evaluated based on those outcomes. Now, vital church has five targeted outcomes we want to do every single time. That's enough, that's in the back of our mind, okay? But the church has their outcomes, and so what I'm doing is I'm moving towards what they think is important, what they want to change, and I'm accountable as the lead pastor because that's what you are as an interim. You are the lead pastor. You're not an advisor, you're the senior, okay? So I'm facilitating that change that they're making very intentionally and giving account of it to the board and being held accountable also on our cohort, our coaching cohorts, you know, with our coaches. And so every church is different, so it's piece by piece moving towards the desired change that we believe the spirit has called the church to. We were asking one question, one diagnostic question. What is the spirit saying to this church? Now, once we figure that out, what we think is the right thing, then we work together with the church towards the accomplishment of that objective, and that leads to the sacred assembly. And so every congregation will be different. Every situation, it could be serious conflict or power issues, or maybe somebody died. So you got grief issues. You know, whatever it is, we work towards those things imperfectly, and then it's the crescendo is the sacred assembly, where there's this public statement about this is what we are seeking to do for the glory of God and the good of the community. And they and there's the you know, all of that leads to that sacred assembly if it's needed, which more often than not it is needed, and and then after that, it's like you've dealt with the stuff, now you can move, you know, you can move quickly towards pastoral search and and discipleship. Best you can. Yeah.

I think there's there's two pieces that that I'll add that are implicit in what you're saying, Dave, which is that whether it's vital that's doing a diagnostic or it's flourish that's doing a church health assessment, the leadership has to own that those are the true issues. Right. And they have to be willing to hear from the Lord and take responsibility. Even if we didn't do all these things, we are the current inheritors of them. We we're um my background's presbyterian, we believe in covenantal solidarity, and it's just it it's the way that God has chosen to work many times in the scriptures is that the current group has to deal with issues. They didn't create all of them, but they're the inheritors of them. They have to be willing to take personal responsibility and corporate responsibility, and that takes right, and that corporate responsibility.

I mean, I think it's very biblical. I I what's what's it called? Federal headship understanding of, you know, right, uh right. There is a corporateness to our lives that Americans just cannot connect with. I mean, uh Nehemiah confessing the sins of the guy had never been to Israel, crying out loud. He's confessing the sins of his fathers. He didn't do anything wrong, same thing with Daniel. So in in that particular culture, they had an easier time doing that than in American culture. American culture, if I did like I have I'd have a problem, you know, I got I'm not a racist, I didn't have slaves. Yeah, we don't understand the systemic nature of these issues in our own lives and in our culture. And and that even that word systemic, oh, just makes people angry, but you got to understand that you're talking to me, but what you're actually getting is the last four or five generations behind me. Like I'm I'm reflecting my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, okay? That's biblically who we are. And you can see it in Deuteronomy 5, Exodus 20, the sins of the fathers have passed on a third and fourth generation. That is, they experience the negative results of them. So there is a part of American culture that just fights against this, okay? But again, family systems would say, no. Genogram, right? You know your genegram, you are who you've been connected to historically, and you have no choice about that. We want to have a choice, but we we don't. And when a church or elder board comes to grips with that, again, it's a game changer. It's a game changer because, again, where there's great humility, there's great grace. And this corporateness, to your point, Matt, is something that, boy, it's just, you gotta do it. We've gotta do it. We gotta do it. But boy, it's it's like a chicken bone stuck in the throat of most Americans.

Come back next week when the conversation turns from diagnosis to leadership practice, where these dynamics often occur. We'll continue our conversation with Dr. Miles and we'll talk through practical discipleship. Thanks for listening to the Church Renewal podcast from Flourish Coaching. Flourish exists to set ministry leaders free to be effective wherever God has called them. We believe that there's only one fully sufficient reason at this day, Dawn. Jesus is still gathering his people and is using his church to do it. When pastors or churches feel stuck, our team of coaches refresh their hope in the gospel and help them clarify their strategy. If you have questions or need, we'd love to hear from you. For more information, go to our website, forestcoaching.org, or send an email to info at forestcoaching.org. You can also connect with us on Facebook, X, and YouTube. We appreciate when you like, subscribe, rate, or review our show whenever you're listening. It can be hard for churches to ask for help, so when our clients tell us to refer them, we'll send a small gift to say thanks. A huge thank you to all our guests for making the time to share their stories with us. We are really blessed to have all these friends and partners. All music for this show has been licensed and was composed and created by artists. The Church Renewal podcast was directed and produced by Jeremy Seferati and associates with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called it. Bye for now.