September 21, 2025
Several years ago, I took a continuing education class in Emotional Intelligence in Group Development. I didn’t know it when I enrolled, but it is one of those type of classes that throws you into situations that may create conflict so that it becomes a learning lab for the concepts the class is teaching.
For this particular class, we were divided into two small groups and were told that each group should plan a project that we would undertake over the course of the week. To do the project, we should interview the people at the camp where we were staying about what we could do that would make things better for them, and then pick a project to carry out. My group immediately got to work, and it became clear that we had different ideas about what projects would be suitable. We had three men in the group and two women, and two of the men were emphatic that they wanted to do manual labor in the community garden that had slipped into decline as our group project. I expressed my unhappiness with this project idea, saying firmly why that project would not work for me. (I often experience contact dermatitis when gardneing and didn’t want to spend the week dealing with an allergic reaction to some strange weed I was sure to come into contact with.). Two of the men proceeded to pursue that project, insisting that we all had to be on board with it. The other woman in our group and one of the men tried to advocate for me, saying that I shouldn’t have to do anything that I wasn’t comfortable doing. The garden champions finally agreed that the other woman and I could conduct interviews of the staff to try to identiy a secondary project for our group, which we did, and we learned that the camp had just received a new shipment of pillows and they needed us to raise funds for pillow covers to protect them.
So, my group proceeded in pursuing not one but two projects, but we were still experiencing a fair amount of tension as the garden project proponents insisted that all in our group needed to participate in the cleaning out in some small way. And I drew a firm boundary that I would not do it.
Meanwhile, the other group spent all their time getting to know each other. They spent the first couple of days sharing their stories and nurturing their relationships. And they reached the half way point of the week without having even conducted their first interview to determine what project they would undertake.
After one of our leaning sessions, the instructors gave each small group a challenge where we had to build something with tinker toys with some stringent stipulations and under a time deadline. The other group worked together well to do this, but my group broke out in an argument, and the tension was palpable. The other group began to be affected by the arguing and tension in my group, and everyone became stressed.
The learning from all this that I took away from the training is that in group development, we always have to balance two competing goals. The first is the task that we as a group are called upon to complete, and the second is the relationships that we are called to tend in our group. If we pursue the task whole-heartedly without tending to relationships, then often the task will suffer because we don’t have the relational foundation to carry out the task in a healthy way. If we only focus on our relationships, then the tasks or the things we are called to do may never get completed.
Our gospel reading for today gives us a glimpse into this world of task and relationships. The parable of the unjust manager shows us a person who has focused solely on the task of amassing wealth, but when he gets into trouble, he realizes that it is the relationships that will save him, so he gets to work trying to cultivate those. Jesus concludes the parable with teachings on faithfulness, and I’ve been reflecting on these this week in the light of a statement that my former bishop Frank Logue often would reiterate to his clergy: “what does faithfulness to God look like in this present moment?” And I’ve been wondering this week what does it mean to be faithful to both our tasks as people of faith called to proclaim the gospel, and what does it mean to also be faithful to our relationships? How do we balance these two competing claims on our faithfulness?
I think this is going to look different for each one of us in every different context we find ourselves in. The key is continuing to ask the questions: “what does faithfulness to God look like in this present moment?” and “how am I being called in this moment to balance task and relationships?”
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