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The Case of the Battered Boundaries
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Deborah P. Brunt
I could write a book about boundaries. Oh wait! Someone already did. I read the book several years ago, desperate for help.
If you missed it, Boundaries, by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, teaches that people have boundaries, just as surely as property does. Property boundaries mark where one parcel ends and another begins. Personal boundaries mark where one person ends and another begins.
People dispute property boundaries all the time. People challenge personal boundaries too. Typically, the biggest disputes over personal boundaries involve two types of people:
- Those who run roughshod over the boundaries of others;
- Those who let others run roughshod over them - ignoring any boundary they set.
When I read Boundaries, I finished the book still perplexed. According to everything Cloud and Townsend described, I should have been in a good place, boundary-wise. It was my heart's desire and my practice to honor other people's boundaries. I also sought to establish healthy limits and was not easily guilted or coerced to let others mow them down.
Yet, something alarming had begun to happen: I would set a healthy boundary. I would identify it clearly and with kindness: "This is what I can do, and will do gladly. This, in good conscience, I cannot." When tested, I maintained the boundary consistently. Yet in crucial situations, my boundaries were not being honored. Rather, I was pressured without ceasing to take them down.
In every case, the boundary involved a major issue - and a spiritual one. The line drawn marked a place I could go beyond only in disobedience to God. But people who should have been loudly encouraging the choice to follow God fully never stopped pushing against it. I faced instant and unrelenting pressure to recant - not just to move my boundary an inch or two, but to renounce it entirely. To stand where God had told me to stand, I had to exert an enormous amount of effort for a very long time.
According to the Boundaries book, that should not have happened. People tend to honor the boundaries of those who maintain them consistently. The boundaries may be tested immediately. But when they hold firm, the testers typically move on to people whose boundaries they can shift at will.
"Why is this happening?" I asked the Lord. At last, I began to see: The refusal to honor my boundaries hinged on the view of adulthood in general, and womanhood in particular, in the culture in which I live.
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| The personhood clue |
The first clues came as I read a series of blog posts by Arthur Burk on the subject of personhood. Burk suggests that God has designed human life in such a way that each person is set into a series of "offices" at appropriate times in life, beginning soon after conception. Some offices are for everyone - such as personhood, childhood and adulthood. Some are specific to gender - such as girlhood and womanhood. Some offices, such as motherhood, are specific to God's call.
Drawing insights from the treatment of Hagar by Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 16), Burk examines ways a person can be denied the most basic of "offices," personhood. He explores how it may look when a person is seen and treated as a non-person, how such a thing can happen and how to cooperate with God to gain the office that has been denied.
Arthur Burk's insights, coupled with other things I'd recently learned, triggered stunning new thoughts that I expressed in an e-column titled, "Personhood."
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| The adulthood clue |
As I continued to ponder, to pray and to wait, I read a book by Henry Cloud titled, Changes That Heal. Cloud's comments on adulthood produced another aha! moment. In regard to the mystery of the battered boundaries, I had at last uncovered a second crucial clue.
 Cloud describes adulthood as a place of freedom, authority and "eye-to-eye equality" with other adults. Adults have freedom:
- To make their own decisions without permission from others,
- To evaluate and judge their own performance,
- To choose their own values and opinions,
- To disagree with others freely, and
- To enjoy sexual relations with an equal spouse (Changes).
Adults also have freedom to give up rights and serve others in submission. Cloud writes, "When we submit in love, we are displaying our freedom; if we submit in compliance, it is not true submission. It's slavery."
All these freedoms give adults great authority. With freedom and authority comes a weighty responsibility. As adults, we're accountable to God for every choice we make. Certainly, we're not to live as islands. We're to give and receive wise counsel, to exhort and confront one another in love. But "adults don't need 'permission' from some other person to think, feel, or act" (Changes). Rather, adults answer directly to God.
Children, by contrast, relate to adults in a one-down/one-up relationship. Children need permission to make important decisions. If a child makes a choice the parents think unwise, they have the authority to intervene. In fact, if they see their child doing something harmful and don't take action, they're accountable. If parents say "no" to a child but the child persists in doing what the parents said to stop, the parents have a responsibility to stand firm and not to let the disobedient child have his or her way.
"Becoming an adult is the process of moving out of 'one-up/one-down' relationship and into a peer relationship to other adults." We miss the important passage into full adulthood if we grow up physically, yet remain "one-down" in key relationships. Remaining "one-down" means "looking up to other adults for parental functions," such as thinking for us, telling us how to live and what to believe (Changes).
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| No prolonged infancies, please |
God created us to grow to adulthood - spirit, soul and body. Scripture calls us to do just that. The role of leaders, like the role of parents, is to encourage and affirm this process, not to ensure that everyone except the leaders remains perpetually one-down. Paul modeled the type of fathering that raises up adults - and releases people into adulthood.
He wrote to the believers in Corinth, still young in the Lord: "I'm writing as a father to you, my children. I love you and want you to grow up well, not spoiled. There are a lot of people around who can't wait to tell you what you've done wrong, but there aren't many fathers willing to take the time and effort to help you grow up" (1 Cor. 4:14-15 MSG).
Paul instructed the Ephesian leaders "to train Christians in skilled servant work, working within Christ's body, the church, until we're all ... fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ. No prolonged infancies among us, please. We'll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are an easy mark for impostors. God wants us to grow up" (Eph. 4:12-15 MSG).
Paul told the Colossian church, "We teach ... so that we can bring each person to maturity" (Col. 1:28 MSG).
Sadly, our church culture does just the opposite of what Paul modeled - while convincing ourselves we're doing it the biblical way. We point to all the sermons, all the programs, whereby the wise train the immature to grow up - to own their responsibility to hear God and to act on what he says. Yet the system we've created perpetuates spiritual infancy indefinitely, and often severely punishes those who try to mature.
In a nutshell, our system enforces one-up/one-down relationships as the norm among adults. "Clergy" are one-up to "laity." Men are one-up to women. The one-down are taught that they must always seek wisdom and permission from the one-up. Only the one-up are adult enough to hear God clearly on the truly important stuff. Thus, in the name of biblical submission, whole groups of adults agree to being treated like perennial babes.
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| Adulthood denied | |
The wholesale practice of denying the office of adulthood to most people in the church inverts God's plan for leaders and creates a host of problems that ravage all involved. We won't even begin here to try to identify all the negative repercussions. Rather, let's get back to the mystery of my battered boundaries.
If, as an adult, I set a boundary, it may be a good boundary, or it may be unwise and unhealthy. My parents may disagree with my boundary. They may implore me to change it, because they love me and want the best for me. They may pressure me, for their own unhealthy reasons, to make that boundary go away. Even as an adult, it's important that I treat my parents with honor. It's wise to pay attention to what they say. But bottom line: My boundary is not their responsibility. They can offer counsel. They can set boundaries of their own. But God does not hold them accountable for the choices I make. I'm an adult. He holds me accountable to hear his voice clearly and to follow him fully.
In every case where people have pushed relentlessly against my boundaries, they denied my adulthood. They saw themselves in a parental, one-up role in my life. If they had counted me an adult, they might have railed against my boundary temporarily, but when I said, "Thank you for your input. This is my choice," they would have backed away and left me to sort it out with God. They did not do that. Instead, they determined, "One way or another, we will force you to comply." In their minds, they are ones to whom I must listen and from whom I must get permission - and I'm nothing more than a rebellious child.
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| How do we get counted as adults? | |
Which leaves me in an incredibly frustrating, incredibly exhausting place: I'm truly growing - learning to hear God clearly, stepping out to follow him fully, seeking the whole time to honor others, including and especially those who object. More than ever before, I'm thinking and acting like an adult. Yet people don't see me as an adult or treat me as an adult, because all of us have been caught up in a system that does not count me qualified for the office of adulthood.
Even when I appeal to those people, even when I look in their eyes and try to explain the truth, they cannot hear me. From their one-up/one-down perspective, my appeal sounds as foolish as if I were a six-year-old, pleading to take the car out for a spin. So they reject my plea and continue trying to beat down the boundary I have set. If I respond by getting angry and throwing a fit, they're even more convinced that I'm no older than six.
How do I gain adulthood when the people supposed to confer it will not? How do any of us get counted as adults?
Arthur Burk writes, "My tentative hypothesis is that in the first round, people who are in an office are supposed to put us in each office at the appropriate times." That is, as we reach adulthood, other adults affirm us by treating us with "eye-to-eye equality." But what if we're denied that affirmation? Burk says,
Then God puts us in the office at the right time, sometimes through human involvement and sometimes directly by His own hand.
The million dollar question is, "Who has the ball?" Is this totally an issue of the sovereignty of God? Or do we have to do something so that God will then respond and put us in the office? And if so, what do we do?
My belief is that we have to do a lot. I think God puts us in the situations where we CAN progress to the point where we are fit for the office, and then He does it or has someone do it.
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| A key step in the process | |
"We have to do a lot." We cooperate with God, Spirit-to-spirit, in the maturing process he's tailor-made for each of us.
I had missed a key step in that process, a step Henry Cloud describes this way: "coming out from under the one-down relationship that a child has to parents and other adults and coming into an equal standing as an adult on his or her own."
I hadn't even realized how much I still remained under this system of thinking - how much I was struggling to find my place somewhere in the world of one-up/one-down. It's wrenching to make this confession. But I offer it, with the prayer that it can free others too.
Even as I sought to follow God fully, I kept hoping for affirmation from certain quarters. Without even knowing what I was doing, I looked to the people considered "adults" in my culture to affirm that I too had grown up. Why did their displeasure with my boundaries batter me so much? Why did their continual pushing against me exhaust me so completely? Even though I knew that doing what they wanted meant disobeying God, it took everything I had not to give in. The reason? Deep within, I was still agreeing to relate to them in a child-to-parent role.
As I waited for someone "above me" to approve me, I also kept seeking adulthood in the other way the system told me it was done: I kept trying to "come up" by finding people who would agree in some way to be "one-down" to me. I didn't want to rule over anyone, yet I kept looking for a means by which people would look up to me.
Perhaps I'm not alone. God created us to grow into adulthood. His Spirit and his Word call us to mature. When our church culture teaches us, "You can't ever get there unless you're a man and, in particular, a man ordained into our branch of the church system," some give up trying. They may seek adulthood in other places, but do not look for that affirmation from the church. But some of us try doggedly to fulfill this God-given desire in the place we most closely associate with God. We seek in the church culture to fit into the one-up pattern we've been taught.
We seek to be over others in a variety of ways - some of them obvious; some, extremely subtle. We agree to be "one-down" with someone who's influential or well-known, believing that connection somehow puts us "one-up" over the rest of the crowd. This is different from a hunger for power, yet it can develop into that very thing.
We don't see that, deep down, we just want to be acknowledged as adults.
We don't see that we're only, ever, set into the office of adulthood, eye-to-eye.
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| Eye-to-eye equality | |
As I sat before the Lord, undone by what he had showed me, he began to instruct me what to do in response. Here's what he said to me. See if he says anything similar to you.
Keep cooperating with ME in the maturing process. That process is ongoing as long as you live. Yet, you can reach a place of adulthood in this process. In fact, something's wrong if you don't. I designed you to grow up spiritually, as surely as I designed you to grow up physically.
Stop agreeing to act as if other adults are your parents and you are still a child. Listening to wise counsel is vastly different from seeking parental approval. Honoring your leaders does not mean looking to them for permission to think, feel or act. Repent for agreeing with a sinful, hierarchical system that categorizes adults as one-up/one-down.
Do not agree that you must live your life one-down. Renounce the lie that says a seminary degree qualifies you for the office of adulthood. Renounce the lie that women are too emotional and too easily deceived to be able to hear the Lord for themselves. Know in the depths of your being: Womanhood does not disqualify you from adulthood. Refuse to live as if it does.
But also, do not agree to the lie that you're to be one-up. Repent for every attempt you've made to live toward other adults as parent-toward-perennial-child. Beware of relying on a title or position to make you feel grown up. Beware of counting either gender "less than" the other. Refuse the lie that your adulthood hinges on other adults being one-down to you.
Instead, actively affirm the adulthood of others. Ask ME to teach you moment-by-moment, from your heart, to see other people eye-to-eye.
As I've begun to walk out what God showed me, I've seen a remarkable thing. Wherever people treat one another with eye-to-eye equality, we're all affirmed in our adulthood. We all become more adult.
Some who are caught in a one-up/one-down system may still rebuke me for walking in maturity. They may still pressure me to stop. But I've renounced agreement with that system. Now I see: The perceptions it creates are illusions. The people to whom I had looked for approval aren't one-up at all.
As I relinquish all need for permission from anyone other than God, I no longer feel battered by their attempts to pressure me. When nothing in me is pleading for their approval, nothing in them has anything to push against.
(c) 2012 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.
Read the first three articles in the "What About Women?" series
Waylaid by God
Preach It, Sister!
Where Have All the Women Gone?
For books that deal with this subject, see below.
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What About Women? keytruths books
|  Why Not Women?
A Fresh Look at Scripture on Women in Missions, Ministry, and Leadership
by Loren Cunningham & David Hamilton
Available from keytruths.com Resources
We Confess!
The Civil War, the South, and the Church
How does the Confederate view of womanhood
still profoundly impact the conservative US church culture?
Ebook: for Kindle and Nook!
Softcover & hardcover: Discounts on 2 or more copies at keytruths.com.
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