Andrew Roots biography reads –

Andrew Root, PhD (Princeton Theological Seminary) is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. He is most recently the author of Evangelism in an Age of Despair and the six volume Ministry in a Secular Age series (including Churches and the Crisis of Decline, The Congregation in a Secular Age, The Pastor in a Secular Age, The Church After Innovation, The Church in a Age of Secular Mysticism and Faith Formation in a Secular Age). Andy also serves as theologian in residence at Youthfront. He has worked in congregations, parachurch ministries, and social service program. ( see his web page for further information : https://www.andrewroot.org/bio/)

He is a prolific author and this book ( though published over a decade ago ) remains an key influence on my present work of the formation of a new generation of women and men for authorised lay ministry and ordination in the Church of England. He speaks into the moment and mindset of much of our present ecology of Christian witness.

These are surely uncertain times for the Church of England. Many have diagnosed the problem and decline and a lack of trust in us due in the main to safeguarding failures but also an inability to capture the spiritual imagination of many in communities across our country. The narratives around decline are contested though there are signs that the spiritual pulse is beating away across the generations. Our challenge might be to slow down and listen for that pulse. In theme of this book to rediscover what happens in life when we slow down and listen as we nurture the relational.

Towards the end of the book Root offers this reflection on Anxiety. I found it challenging and disturbing in equal measure,

ANXIETY
“What destroys sharing, what makes relationships fray and sometimes die, is so often anxiety. Anxiety is a cancer to sharing, because anxiety keeps us from being open enough to share ourselves. Anxiety keeps us from being ourselves, fearing we need to please everyone. Anxiety pushes us to cut off, to protect ourselves, to overfunction, to be what
others want us to be, or to triangulate to pass anxiety on. Anxiety has a kind of zombie effect; it seeks to pass its state on to others, to spread itself. Friedman says, “Chronic anxiety might be compared to the volatile atmosphere of a room filled with gas fumes, where any sparking incident could set off a conflagration. And where people would then
blame the person who struck the match rather than trying to disperse the fumes.””
Anxiety is so powerful and dangerous to communities because it can so easily be passed from one person to another. Anxiety can so easily hide in our action and language like cancer in cells, but this cancer is contagious because it lives in the emotional connections between us, in the invisible wires that connect our brains.” Anxiety is so potent because it grows near our brokenness, making our brokenness no longer the invitation to share in our person, but festered wounds that promise to infect your own person at the vulnerable point of your brokenness.'” (p212)

I wonder if you recognise this in yourself or others? What might we do to disperse anxiety in ourselves or the communities in which we belong ?

Root closes this book with this advice

THE FINAL WORD: BE OPEN AND CLOSED
To lead in gratitude, focusing on your own person in a way that allows relationships to flow and avoids anxiety, is to be open and closed-a pastor that is a person, inviting others to also be persons, living among a congregation in an open and closed manner. Balancing open and closeness allows for sharing and brackets out anxiety.
Al relationships of personhood are actually contingent on persons being open with each other. But just as important as openness, persons in relationship need to be closed with each other. We can only have openness, we can only have personhood, when we are also closed to each other, when we are able to differentiate, when we are able to have a healthy sense of ourselves! Bonhoeffer has articulated this open and closedness as the essence of true relationship: “Thus the ‘openness’ of the person demands ‘closed-ness’ as a correlative, or one could not speak of
openness at all.”?

Without this open and closedness we have only enmeshment, where we lose our personhood in our overwhelming connection. Here anxiety encircles us. Without differentiation, without closedness, there can be no gratitude, for your neighbor can never be a gift to you, but only a burden to your freedom or an object to possess.” (p213)

It is of course a tall order. Standing still in a fast flowing river requires determination some considerable flexibility amid the changes and shifts in the currents of our present situations. In all of this, we need to pay attention to the stories we tell at an institutional, organisational and local level. We have a responsibility to be honest about the undercurrent of anxiety. We have a choice about how far and to what extent we live within a commitment to allow relationships to flow. We may be adept at diagnosis. Perhaps some of this ring is true in your own context but the opportunity is to step into a different space and begin to create in Roots invitation and openness to a different way of both being and doing.

Much of my work in pastoral supervision with a range of people in group groups concerns the simple but profound and life changing gift of slowing down and noticing. Looking clearly and intently at a situation or a story and asking simple and focused questions that invite us into making connections, uncovering that which we might have missed and thereby deepening our humanity and understanding.

I wonder if any of this ring is true for you? What might need to change? How do we share ourselves with integrity and honesty?