Quotes from Peter L. Steinke

All relationship systems become anxious. People put together and inevitably anxiety will arise. Anxiety can be infectious. We can give it to others or catch it from them. What precisely triggers anxiety is unique to each system. Common Activators are significant changes and losses. They upset the stable patterns and balance of the system.

Where there is little self-definition, there is a vague vision. Where there is an unclear vision, the people perish in their own anxious reactivity. They have no head and are headed nowhere. Where there is self-definition, there is a clear vision. Where there is a clear vision, there is a response to the future.

Anxious systems also fail to get a clear view of things. Embedded in their dread, they lose a sense of proportion. They have little awareness of what is happening and how it is being mutually maintained. Emotionally cramps the broader view.

The church is holy, set aside for God's purposes, and yet it is ordinary, subject to human ends. It is not that our metaphors and ideals are false but that we fail to realize that the church functions as an emotional system.