I believe that we are now on a path towards full restoration to what I hope is “koinonia,” honoring God’s plan for each of us to live in unity;
We started off on the wrong foot, and my efforts at correction only made things worse. I was angry and frustrated because I observed a situation which went against our family’s values. Two people in a relationship, one of them being my son, not honoring the Lord with the way that they began.
Without getting into all of the gory details, my wife and I were not happy with where this relationship was going because it was built on a shaky foundation. I tried to make some corrections by speaking truth into the situation. But my efforts at delivering what I believed to be truth only pushed them further away. They cut us off for four years, and I regretted my approach to the situation. How many times have I’ve been right in what I believed, but totally wrong in my approach to addressing just how right I was? Can anyone else relate to this?
I repented of this many times and hoped for a restoration of the relationship. After four years of no communication, suddenly there was a trickle of opportunity that began as my son joined our family’s group chat. His siblings were also dismissive, but we all agreed to let this simple decision develop without comment. After some time, the communication became more overt, and there was some hope of reconciliation. Finally, we just took the step to fly out and visit my son and his now wife after they had worked through some very difficult circumstances in their own lives.
There were two things I needed to do when we finally met for the first time in 6 long years: First, I repented of my behavior. Even though I thought I was in the right, I had approached it completely wrong. Secondly, I used an approach that has proven to be a way for me to build trust in the midst of hurt feelings and bruised egos.
This is the season of examining strained relationships. Where shall we go and spend our holiday? To whom shall we send cards? We haven’t talked to this person in a long time, so how do we handle this? Each encounter is an opportunity for us to make a choice: will this encounter be simply transactional, or do we want build a strong relationship that leads to loving acceptance? Do I need to build a loving relationship with the Amazon delivery driver? Not necessarily. But I might choose to be more observant about his persona and his life, allowing for an open door to personal encouragement and sharing my faith.
Each encounter gives us an opportunity to choose our social interaction style, which means that you can choose to remain transactional – do this for me; or move past this style to embrace the building a connection that could lead to a gospel decision; or possibly a healed relationship.
I believe in the power of strong relationships. I believe this model is based on the intimate relationship that God desires with His creation, to rejoice over us (Zephaniah 3:17). To be known by God is scary and threatening. Jesus said that the poor in spirit are overwhelmed when they come into contact with God (Matthew 5:3); and they begin to mourn and wail because their self-knowledge leads to mourning over their secret sin (Matthew 5:4). You see this when Isaiah the prophet was confronted by the spirit of God in the temple (Isaiah 6:5).
Intimacy with God and by extension with others is about being comfortable with being fully known. We are not embarrassed or fearful by this knowledge, but instead we feel completed. In the famous love chapter of the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13, one statement made by the writer described intimacy this way: “Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12b).
Being fully known exposes our weaknesses and prejudices which can be very embarrassing to each of us. So we try very hard to cover those up. But the blessings of intimacy with God are being able confess our shortcomings, be made completely whole, and then to enjoy a deep fellowship with Our Heavenly Father.
When we cultivate an intimate relationship with God, there are two results. The first one is that we are never satisfied with any relationships in comparison. Such a relationship with God is an incredible experience and promises great blessings both in this life and the next (see 1 John 3:1-2). We then strive for building more intimate relationships with others, modeled on our relationship with God. The fact is, we don’t always know how to achieve this.
I have found several models of developing intimacy with others from which I have built my approach to strengthening relationships broken by sin and mistrust. I developed this approach over many years of observations, drawing upon two distinct and unique experiences. One was a meeting with a bug-eyed business owner teaching me a sales system based in psychology. The other was drawn from a contrary approach to traditional team building found in a Bible study methodology.
I made a profession of faith in Christ while in college. We immediately started discipleship training with a unique Bible Study series by a man named Lyman Coleman (Mack, 2019). Coleman worked with Billy Graham on his early crusades, and later led small group training and published Bible study materials under the title “Serendipity,” meaning “the recognition of fortunate, unexpected events as divine intervention or guidance.”
Before I learned about the classical approach to team building developed by Bruce Tuckman (Bright, et al, 2019), I learned a similar but distinctive approach. The goal in this case was not optimized team performance, but building fellowship, what in the Greek language of the New Testament is called “koinonia,” which means partnership, social intercourse – an intimate encounter (see Acts 2:42).
In Coleman‘s teambuilding approach (Howerton, 2016), the first step was similar to the classic teambuilding model: Individuals would come together to study the Bible, and there would be an “unpacking” or “get to know you” session. People could share details from their past, and their hopes for the future. But the difference with the Coleman studies as compared to traditional team building was the second step. That second step was called affirmation. This wasn’t just blindly giving out “atta-boys” to people at the meeting. This was an effort on your part to reach out to someone else, and to identify something that you saw in them that you valued or actually cherished. It was your opportunity to step back away from conflict and seek to build bridges of trust. Since Coleman’s model was based on a baseball diamond type of format, I used to say that in building fellowship, like in baseball, if you run from first base to third base and skip second, then you are out. Every encounter builds off of affirmation.
When I got into leadership roles and learned about the classic teambuilding model – you know the “forming, storming, norming and performing” approach, it wasn’t long before I was able to contrast the “storming” or conflict stage with Coleman‘s affirmation stage. You can choose to allow conflict, or you can choose to work through it by affirming the unique perspectives and distinctive ideas of someone else. You are not necessarily condoning or agreeing with them; but affirming their unique perspective and your appreciation of their views. It was later on that I encountered the sales training, which is actually built on a similar principle.
Dr. Eric Berne wrote two books about his theories on social interactions. The first was a boring explanation of his Transactional Analysis theory; while the second book, Games People Play, sold over 5 million copies (Butler-Bowdon, 2024). A friend of Berne’s, Thomas Harris, thought that the TA concepts addressed in the Games book were still too complex. So Harris wrote a follow up book, distilling the principles of Transactional Analysis into a very simple series of interactions in the book, I’m OK, You’re OK (drthomasharris.com, n.d.). Harris simplified Berne’s social interaction further into four variations of this simple statement- -“I’m OK, You’re OK.”
I knew absolutely nothing about Eric Berne or Thomas Harris or Transactional Analysis or I’m OK, You’re OK when I was told to attend a sales training in a small room inches away from a very animated business owner. I started to learn about the approach of valuing the input and opinions of others and affirming their perspectives and knowledge as a way to gain the trust of a prospect and turn them into a customer. I would later discover that much of this approach is based on the previously mentioned Berne-Harris literature (Schaphorst, 2016; Gustafson, 2019).
The approach utilizes Harris‘s work as building on this idea that when you’re not OK and the other person you encounter is OK, you begin working to affirm that you value and appreciate their unique perspective. It is all about building and sustaining a mutually beneficial relationship. In the case of sales, this is done with a sales prospect; but this can easily be transferred into building out other relationships as well.
I began to use this insight and saw in person how this approach would impact relationships. I remember distinctly one time in my corporate career when a team of people and myself were being berated by the CEO of this company. He was angry and frustrated with some of the results that we were reporting. By using affirmation and really stepping into his concerns, I was able to reduce the tension in the room, and turn the meeting into a much more positive outcome.
Just recently, a similar situation occurred in my office. A very frustrated adult student came to my office, forcefully demanding a resolution to certain issues. I invited another faculty member to be with me, hoping that a non-partisan observer would help lessen the tension. Things started to turn badly as we began the discussion. Knowing that I could pull rank no matter the consequences, I instead made the active choice to affirm the student’s perspective and recognize what they were feeling in terms of how they were frustrated by the actions of another professor. The meeting turned on this, and after some reassurance that we would continue to work on resolving these issues, the student left, satisfied that they had been heard. My colleague who was in the room was amazed by the outcome and commented that she thought there might be an explosion. She wasn’t sure how I was able to turn this around and resolve the issue without incident.
Some have suggested that this aforementioned sales approach can be manipulative (Elmore, 2016). I will acknowledge that this type of affirmation for personal gain can be manipulative if not undertaken with great humility and respect for the other person, which the sales literature freely acknowledges (Schaphorst, 2016).
Perhaps the greatest gift that you can give to yourself and to others this holiday season is restoring relationships broken by selfishness and criticism, whether your own or others. These are not easy things to recover, because our egos get in the way. But I pray and hope that my thoughts shared here will encourage you in making the effort. I know that I was truly grateful to God to have the relationship with my son and new daughter-in-law restored. It did take some humility for sure, and repentance. But I also purposely seized the opportunity to step outside of my own selfish preconceptions and affirm the unique attributes and thoughts of those who are different than me. I believe that we are now on a path towards full restoration to what I hope is “koinonia,” honoring God’s plan for each of us to live in unity (John 17:22).
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