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52 Chapter 3

uring one traumatic week, the church board—one minister and three lay
people—of a new church faced nearly insurmountable challenges. On Monday
Dthe board chair suffered a stroke; on Wednesday the minister died. The
remaining members, in shock, recruited three other members to help carry on the
work. The board had been working to establish a second church of that denomination
in Springfield, Missouri, following an unpleasant church split two years earlier. The
new church had just gotten off the ground when these tragedies occurred, but mem-
bers, committed to the project, decided to keep the church going. The board elected
Bill, a lawyer, as chair. Sally, a widow whose husband had been a minister, agreed to
serve as secretary. The other members included Marina, a college professor; Sunni,
director of a university speech and hearing clinic; and Norm, a massage therapist who
was also an accomplished musician. No paid employees worked for the church—all the
work was accomplished by volunteers, including board members.
Among the challenges board members faced were how to handle Sunday services
without a minister, how to pay for the lease they had recently signed on an older build-
ing, and how to overcome opposition to the new congregation from the denomina-
tion’s headquarters and the original church’s minister. The board quickly decided they
needed additional expertise so they soon added two more members: Don, a retired
business owner, and Gary, a maintenance worker. The members had diverse experi-
ences and expertise, but they all shared a similar vision for the church and common
values to guide them in their work. The board met every week for two years. At the
end of that time, members could point to several important accomplishments: Sunday
services were held every week and attendance had increased from about 40 members
to about 90 members per Sunday; bylaws had been approved by the congregation; the
board, originally an informal, self-selected board, was voted in by the congregation;
enough money had been set aside to cover a minister’s salary for six months; and,
most important of all, the formerly renegade congregation had received official
approval from the denomination’s headquarters and was now “legal.”
Small groups are pervasive in our lives and our need for them requires us to study
their dynamics. In this chapter we will use this church board to illustrate the basic
principles of general systems theory, a framework for understanding small groups. We
periodically present dialogue from the church board to illustrate how various
principles of systems theory may appear communicatively. Once you have a
System communication-based model for understanding systems principles, you can recognize
An entity made up of the principles operating in any group.
components in
interdependent
relationship to each The Systems Perspective
other, requiring When a new person joins a group, the group changes in some ways. For example, when
constant adaptation a new baby is brought into a family, all family relationships will change, including
among its parts to between the parents, among the other children, and among the parents and the chil-
maintain organic
wholeness and dren. In addition, new relationships must be accommodated—between everyone else
balance. and the new baby. This illustrates the idea of a system—a set of relationships among
interdependent, interacting components and forces. General systems theory is built

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