“BASIC ASSUMPTIONS” IN PARISH LIFE
A Parish Council meeting from the TV series The Vicar of Dibley.
In a pastoral-sized parish, the beloved rector with a lengthy tenure left to accept another call. (1) The parish’s interim minister, who was widely perceived as disengaged, had the misfortune to arrive only a few months before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a sudden shift away from in-person services to virtual worship. In the absence of in-person meetings, the vestry and search committee struggled to communicate updates about the parish’s search process for a new rector. Parishioners came to believe that secrets were being kept and their opinions were ignored. When the vestry called a new rector, much younger than her predecessor, she became the target of the parish’s grief, frustration, and fear over all that had happened since the previous rector left. Even as in-person worship resumed, the vestry struggled to communicate their plans to move the parish forward with parishioners. A sub-group of parishioners circulated a petition calling for the bishop to remove the new rector. When the bishop refused to do so, this sub-group encouraged parishioners to withhold pledges. The resulting pledge drive revealed that the parish could no longer afford a full-time priest, and the new rector left to take another call after a tenure of fewer than nine months.
The circumstance recounted above are hardly unique. Conflict is common in parishes; however, the drastic deterioration of a seemingly healthy parish in less than twenty-four months is quite striking. COVID certainly contributed to the anger and grief parishioners felt, but I doubt the blame should be placed on the pandemic alone. Instead, I suggest that Wilfred Bion’s theories of group dynamics can explain this and other conflicts in parish life.
Bion, a British psychotherapist, began developing his theories of group dynamics while treating patients in an army hospital during World War II. Two of Bion’s concepts are most relevant to parish life: the working group and the basic assumptions. Bion argued that groups vacillated between two states: the working group, which is realistic in orientation, rational, and concerned with observable phenomena; (2) and the chaotic and emotionally-driven basic assumption group. (3) All groups naturally move between both states, as human beings struggle to sustain the working group indefinitely. Moreover, participation in the working group requires training and skill, while the basic assumption group operates instinctually. (4)
Basic assumptions manifest in three ways, each associated with a specific emotion or fear. The dependent group attempts to assuage its anxieties by looking to its leader for guidance and direction. Dependent groups idolize their leader because they believe that they cannot face the tasks before them without the leader’s guidance. When the leader fails to function according to the group’s expectations, they can quickly turn on them. (5) Interestingly, Bion especially associated the dependent group with the Church. (6) Groups turn to pairing when they are concerned with the preservation of the group. Pairing groups have messianic expectations that a leader or event will arrive to save them, but this expectation is constantly pushed further into the future. Although concerned with the preservation of the group, the pairing group avoids any change which might improve its functioning. (7) Finally, the fight or flight basic assumption emerges when a group is faced with an outside threat. Fight or flight assumptions sometimes emerge in groups when new formal leadership enters the system, causing the group to select an alternative leader to marshal their efforts to fight or flee from the leader’s demands. (8)
Returning to our case study, we can observe each of the three basic assumptions operating. The former rector was the idolized leader of the dependent basic assumption. So long as he was present, the parish could mask their underlying dysfunctions beneath an appearance of health. The arrival of the interim rector marked the emergence of the pairing basic assumption. Parishioners claimed to be excited about selecting a new rector with almost messianic fervor so long as the new rector remained an imagined possibility. The relative silence of the vestry and search committee encouraged the parish’s pairing basic assumption by failing to share regular updates about the search process – updates that might have nudged the parish out of the realm of possibility into actuality. The new rector’s arrival moved the parish into the fight or flight basic assumption. The sub-group members rejected the rector’s leadership because she failed to conform to their expectations. They elected a rival leader who mobilized parishioners to fight the external threat represented by the new rector and the diocese.
Interestingly, diocesan leadership saw the fight or flight basic assumption group within the congregation as a conflict based on issues rather than emotional drives. The bishop appointed a committee of diocesan leaders to work with the vestry. The subgroup transferred their hostility from the new rector to the “outsiders” from the diocese. The more the diocesan leadership became involved, the more overt the conflict became. Diocesan leaders understood the conflict as an opportunity for reconciliation; the subgroup pointed to diocesan involvement as evidence that the parish was “under attack” by outsiders. Efforts to facilitate reconciliation paradoxically prolonged conflict. Only when a vestry member exerted leadership to refocus the vestry on the concrete issue of the lack of income did things begin to shift. The vestry moved into working group behavior, focusing on the reality of the parish’s situation. The subgroup members, no longer able to influence other parishioners to join their basic assumption, moved into flight behavior and left the parish.
Most of the individuals in this parish conflict would not describe their actions in this way. Basic assumptions function unconsciously; when we are caught up in them, we typically do not recognize our behavior. For parish leaders, lay and ordained, the task of leadership involves drawing light to the basic assumptions at play within the parish’s life. In doing so, leadership helps the parish face the issues they avoid by enacting a basic assumption. In most cases, it is unhelpful to deal with the surface conflict created by the basic assumption instead of the issues behind it. The new rector did nothing wrong; she represented an outsider whose leadership was unlike her predecessor. Perhaps a more active interim might have dealt with the parish’s grief over their rector’s departure; the basic assumption might have played out anyway. What is essential to recognize is that groups functioning on the basic assumption level will initially reject the leader’s efforts to move them back to work group behavior. (9) Leaders should respond to such rejection by remaining emotionally engaged, practicing open communication, and pointing the parish back to the work it is avoiding. Basic assumption groups become distanced from their own emotionality, even as they are driven by it. Emotionally-engaged leaders model remaining in touch with one’s emotions to manage them, rather than being manged by unexamined emotions. Likewise, each of the basic assumptions subverts open communication. The dependent basic assumption silences voices other than the leader’s. The pairing basic assumption encourages secrecy to avoid open communication which might result in change. The fight or flight basic assumption shuts down communication entirely by dividing “us” from “them.” When leadership refuses to participate in the ineffective communications of a basic assumption group, they help group members reorient themselves to reality. This reorientation underscores the final recommendation. Groups turn to basic assumptions when they wish to avoid some practical task which they find distasteful or difficult to manage.
Basic assumptions play out at every stage of the church’s life. They operate on the small group level within vestries and Bible studies, on the parish level (where various groups within the parish might be conceptualized as “individual” participants within the larger group), and on diocesan and wider church levels. The current debate over the proposed General Convention resolution to allow communion without baptism provides ample temptations to engage in basic assumptions. The open letter signed by twenty-two theologians teaching at Episcopal seminaries is an example of pairing behavior intended to prevent change within the Church. After all, when was the last time that every Episcopal seminary spoke with one voice on any matter? The pushback against the theologians’ open letter can be understood as a rejection of a dependence basic assumption by those who claim that the letter attempts to infantilize the laity. Of course, the rejection of a basic assumption also enacts it; only the return to working group behavior, a focus on the external reality within which the group finds itself, moves the group out of a basic assumption. Even the resolution itself can be understood as basic assumption behavior; reactions to the resolution have divided the church into “us” and “them,” thus distracting us from the larger task of evangelism and welcoming new believers into the church.
In short, Bion’s concepts of the work group and basic assumptions provide a new lens to understand the lived realities of parishes and the church as a whole. Many times, church conflicts are not about the presenting issue. Instead, they are a reflection of a deeper emotion or fear which has gripped the community. Bion provides leaders with a path out of these basic assumptions, allowing the church to return to its central mission.
This case study is based on real events but identifying characteristics have been removed.
W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2001), 143.
ibid., 146.
ibid., 143.
ibid., 147.
ibid., 156.
ibid., 150-151.
ibid., 153.
ibid., 73-74.
