Family Systems Theory and Congregational Care

About this course

This course introduces students to family systems theory as a framework for understanding congregational life, leadership dynamics, and emotional processes within the church. Drawing from the work of Murray Bowen and subsequent systems thinkers, the course explores how anxiety, triangulation, conflict, role expectation, and patterns of reactivity shape congregational behavior and pastoral leadership.

Building upon prior work in self-knowledge and sustainable ministry, students learn to observe congregations as emotional systems rather than collections of isolated individuals. Attention is given to differentiation of self, boundaries, over-functioning and under-functioning patterns, generational transmission, and the ways anxiety moves through groups. The course emphasizes the pastor’s role not as fixer or rescuer, but as a steady, non-anxious presence within complex relational environments.

Students apply systems concepts to real congregational situations, including leadership transitions, conflict episodes, resistance to change, grief, and community stress. The course integrates theological reflection with systems awareness, exploring how pastoral care, preaching, moderating, and mission leadership are shaped by emotional process.

Designed for Commissioned Ruling Elders serving as congregational pastors, this course equips leaders to navigate congregational complexity with clarity, steadiness, and pastoral wisdom.

Course objectives

• Describe core concepts of family systems theory and apply them to congregational life.
• Interpret congregations as emotional systems rather than merely collections of individual personalities or isolated problems.
• Identify patterns of anxiety, triangulation, cutoff, reactivity, over-functioning, and under-functioning in ministry settings.
• Explain differentiation of self and its importance for pastoral leadership, congregational care, and decision-making.
• Recognize how anxiety moves through families, leadership teams, sessions, committees, and congregations.
• Reflect on their own family-of-origin patterns and how those patterns may shape their pastoral leadership.
• Respond to conflict, grief, resistance, and transition with greater steadiness and less reactivity.
• Practice non-anxious presence while maintaining appropriate boundaries and pastoral compassion.
• Apply systems thinking to preaching, moderating, pastoral care, mission leadership, and congregational change.
• Develop a pastoral response to a real congregational situation using family systems concepts.

Who may participate?

All church leaders unless a prerequisite or a particular offering states otherwise.