A Faith that Lasts: Think and Act in Systems

In Tuesday’s post, I discussed the first lesson from permaculture that I think can help us build a more sustainable life of faith, the importance of observation: How, in order to build anything lasting in life, we need to understand our environment, the givens of our situation, and the nature of the problem before we act. What this means is understanding the whole system of our life (or community). Today I’m going to unpack this idea of systems thinking and how it applies to the life of faith.

Systems thinking, or rather its absence, has been a trademark failing of modernity. Western science emerged by focusing on specifics — a type of plant, an animal, a chemical — and has only relatively recently begun to understand that the roles these things play and the interconnections among them are just as important as the things themselves. This insight is the heart of systems thinking: In order to understand anything, we need to understand it as a system, comprised of not only elements, but also connections and functions. In any system, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and can only be understood all together. This is to say, for example, a forest is not just weather, earth, flora, and fauna, but about how all of these interact with each other in order to create a sustainable and thriving ecosystem. A car isn’t just a jumble of parts, but must be assembled in a certain way in order to function as a car.

A system can be defined in many ways, but essentially, is made up of the following components (for more on this, see Dekkers 20-23)*:

• Constituent Elements: The ‘parts’ of the system. If we think of a car, its elements are things like its engine, wheels, transmission, brakes, chassis, and so on.
• Structure: The elements need to be organized in a specific way in order for the system to be identifiable as the system in question. In the car example, those elements are just a pile of parts until they are put together in a specific way.
• Relationships: The structure of a system creates a set of relationships among the various elements. As a general principle of systems theory, the more relationships exist within a system, the more complex and robust it is. To shift the example, it’s helpful to think of this in terms of a road system. The more roads lead in and out of a place, the more tightly it becomes part of the system; a community connected by a single road is vulnerable to being cut off. Likewise, a road network overly reliant on a single highway easily falls apart if that one road is compromised, say through flooding or fire. Strong, robust systems, have many connecting points and relationships.
• Interactions: The elements, properly structured to establish relationships, interact with each other to do something. We might think of this in terms of cause and effect. In the car example, the interactions produce things like motion, heat, and exhaust. In the road network, the interactions produce smooth flowing of traffic, goods, and services. So, when thinking of a system we also need to think of its inputs and outputs and the interactions that transform one into the other.
• Emergence: This is what a system does beyond what can be defined by the interactions and relationships among its constituents. So, while motion is a natural output of the system we call a ‘car’, transportation of goods and people is an emergent property. There’s nothing inherent about the car that carries things from one place to another; it’s something that emerges out of the inherent output of motion.

When looking at systems, we also have to consider any subsystems or supersystems that may be involved. In the car example, the engine itself is a system (comprised of things like pistons, cylinder heads, crank shafts, and so on), and so acts as a subsystem of the car. But a car is also part of supersystems; in a city, it might be part of a transportation system that also involves trains, buses, bicycles, and pedestrian zones. Thinking about supersystems also requires us to think of the larger environment in which the system exists. Most systems are open systems, meaning they interact with their environment, often in complex ways. To a large extent the success of any system depends on how well it is suited to its environment and is able to adapt to changes within it.

The final thing I’d like to think about here is feedback loops. As defined by Dekkers, “feedback measures the output of a process and intervenes in the input, the resources or the conversion process itself” (110). The most easy to understand types of feedback loops are positive feedback, in which the outputs of a system amplify the system, and negative feedback loops, in which the outputs interfere with the system. In a perfect system (which of course doesn’t exist), these loops would function in a way as to create homeostasis, a state of dynamic equilibrium.

All of this just scratches the surface of systems theory, but even here we see that there’s a lot going on. In order to think in systems we need to think through a number of important questions:

• What are the boundaries of the system? How does it interact with its environment?
• What are the component parts?
• What relationships exist among the parts, and how is the system structured?
• How do these components interact with each other? What processes are involved and what do they produce, directly (causal properties) or indirectly (emergent properties)?
• What inputs does the system require to function?
• What subsystems or supersystems exist?
• What feedback loops exist and what do they tell us?
• What are the paint points or vulnerable places in the system?

So then, how might all of this apply to the life of faith? Thinking first in terms of personal spirituality, I think it’s very helpful to look at it through this lens:

• Boundaries: As a big believer in integration, I think the boundaries of spiritual life include pretty much everything in one’s life.
• Environment: What is going on in the ‘outside world’? This might involve broad social things like politics, economic systems, cultural expectations, and dominant worldviews or feelings, but also more specific things like work dynamics, and relationships with close friends and family. The environment for the spiritual life of a single mother is, for example, going to be very different from that of a student or a retiree.
• Component parts: Components of the system include things like prayer, worship, Scripture reading and other sacred practices, our relationships, politics, financial decisions, and orientation towards all kinds of natural and personal resources.
• Structure and relationships: How do these components fit together in our life? In a healthy, resilient system, there will be a lot of integration among them, with each relationship between the components structured in a way that reinforces the values of our faith. Anything that isn’t well-integrated is a vulnerable point.
• Inputs, Outputs and Processes: What feeds into our spirituality? And — the big question of Christian faith — what does it produce, including as ‘waste’ or side-effects? Do they align with what we want to produce? And what are the processes we see that create the transformations we see?
• Subsystems and Supersystems: What systems exist within our spirituality/? What bigger systems are we a part of? Relevant supersystems for spirituality are things like family, church communities, and religious traditions.
• Feedback Loops: What are the outputs of our spirituality telling us about the functioning of the system? What can we learn about pain points and vulnerabilities? What decreases energy in the system? What increases it? Is anything producing too much energy to be sustainable?

While I won’t go into them in detail, all of these ideas work just as well if we think of our communities of faith rather than our personal spiritual lives. Such communities act as larger, more complex systems, made up of the personal-level systems described above, and they too interact with larger systems of tradition, religious administration, culture, and society.

Be all of this as it may, why does it matter? Why is this a helpful perspective to take in trying to build a lasting, sustainable life of faith? It’s really a subtype of observation, a certain perspective to make our observation more robust and helpful. By observing our life or community in terms of systems thinking, we are better able to diagnose any problems, pain points, and vulnerabilities. And juts as importantly, it helps us to better understand how any proposed solution could impact other areas by virtue of its connections and impacts to the whole system. Since I’ve been thinking primarily in terms of personal faith so far in this post, let’s switch now to thinking about the church, or communities of faith more generally. Here, these connections and impacts are fully on display in St. Paul’s famous metaphor of the Church as a body:

For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body … and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot were to say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear were to say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? (1 Corinthians 12.13-19)

To my mind, scientific understanding of the body has only increased the potency of this image. For the body is not only comprised of many parts, but a system comprised of many subsystems — the circulatory system, lymbic system, endocrine system, digestive system, musculoskeletal system, and so on. Any community of faith is too built not just out of parts, but also subsystems: A typical Anglican church, for example, is generally comprised of at minimum clergy, the corporation, the board, an altar guild, choir and musicians, a hospitality committee, and Sunday School. These — and their constituent members — all interact to produce the community’s life. All too often, these run into one of two problems: Either it’s the same people doing all of these things, and so they’re at risk of burning out and also unable to give full attention to any given function; or, each of these groups ends up as an island unto itself within the community, separate communities within the larger church. Systems thinking can help us to see right off the bat why this is a problem: Once again, since a strong system is judged not on the number of parts, but on the number of relationships between them, it’s clear that either of these situations weakens the community.

Systems thinking is also helpful in the same way as we saw for perspective-taking within Integral thought. As I wrote in that post:

This is relevant because individual Christians have a tendency to narrow in on one aspect of faith at the expense of the others. It’s common, for example, to find Christians who only care about spiritual experience; for them the sum total of their faith is their life of prayer and worship. Others might define their faith on questions of truth and error; for them to be Christian means to believe the correct things about God and the world. Still others see Christianity as primarily a cultural heritage, more or less synonymous with ‘Western civilization.’ And others, increasingly today, see Christianity as a platform for combating social and political injustice. An Integral, multi-perspectival approach recognizes that while all of these perspectives have important things to offer, they also miss out on a lot, and even slide into error if they become one-sided and are not integrated with the others.

Whereas perspective-taking opens our eyes to the variety of different components of our spirituality, systems thinking helps us also to think about the way each of these components relates and interacts with the others. If, for example, a focus on prayer makes us less active in the community or if our focus on personal salvation makes us less concerned with issues of justice within society, then our system is out of whack, fighting against itself. And, as Jesus pointed out, “No house divided against itself can stand” (Matthew 12.25). If we want to build a life of faith and communities of faith that are built to last, we need to take any negative feedback loops seriously, and make sure some components aren’t interfering with the functioning of others.

This has been a long post, but I hope it’s given us all some additional perspectives and questions through which we can better understand how our spiritual and community lives work, and thereby, be able to act to make them work better, stronger, and more resiliently.

* See the series Bibliography for more information