The Co-dependent Campus

She thought it was love.

I have this friend who found herself in a relationship where all of her resources were going in one direction: the needs of her beloved… and her beloved had a lot of needs. My friend’s relationship drained everything out of her. Constantly asking for more attention, and more money, her loved one was never satisfied, but my friend might never have stopped trying.

Things got to the point where resources were running so low, however, that my friend had to choose between survival and sustaining her beloved. Only then did she realize that she and her beloved weren’t one and the same. She disentangled and decoupled herself. Some of her friends and family were supportive and understanding. Others thought she gave up too easily, which of course made her wonder if they might be right.

The good news was that my friend learned what her needs were, and that it was okay to prioritize those needs. The next time she entered a relationship, she did so on more even footing. She still misses her beloved, as that’s how the relationship was wired: disregard for whether it was healthy, chronic stress, and constant shame. My friend still misses all of it from time to time.

Why, you might be wondering, is Sarah writing her leadership ‘blog about a friend’s love life? Well, what Sarah is actually writing about today is co-dependence, and we’ve all gotten pretty good at recognizing it in amorous relationships. Where we don’t tend to recognize co-dependence is in institutional life, so I wanted readers to get their heads in the game before presenting a very different parable. I encourage you to return to the opening illustration above. When you read my “friend,” think, “mission.” When you read my “friend’s loved one,” think, “campus” or “church building.”

So, here’s what happened. The seminary I serve, Andover Newton at Yale Divinity School, had a large and beautiful campus on a hill in Newton, MA; a lush Boston suburb where real estate prices soared in the 1980s and ’90s and have only continued to rise. A merged school, the campus originally belonged to Newton Seminary, a Baptist school. Andover moved in during the early part of the 20th Century and brought financial resources that gave Newton a needed boost.

Like many institutions in the salad days post-WWII, Andover Newton built, and built, and built up the campus, with the largest developments taking place at the apex of enrollment in the early ’60s. Church membership in Andover’s United Church of Christ, and Newton’s American Baptists, began to decline in the early 70s. The pipeline running drier and drier, predicted enrollment growth never happened.

The school then found itself in what we call in higher education “financial exigency,” starting in the 1980s, and then off-and-on for the subsequent decades. During that time, the school deferred maintenance on the buildings it had, but since expansion equated with vitality, there was always a new building project underway. An addition on the library turned out to be an architectural lemon — it was never water-tight — and pledges on a new chapel never materialized after ground had been broken. On one level, leaders knew that the campus was getting past the point where it would ever be able to catch up on its care. On another level, the idea of losing the campus was too awful; it didn’t compute.

In 2015, having tried absolutely everything — selling off pieces of the campus to balance the budget, renting out huge portions of even the most mission-relevant facilities — the school came to a crossroads. The steps taken to save the campus had led to such mission-drift that it took lots of head-clearing to see that the mission and the campus were in a codependent relationship. The two had to be decoupled if one was to be saved.

Fast-forward six years. The Newton campus: sold, and being turned into a new kind of school. Andover Newton: embedded at Yale Divinity School, with access to the whole YDS campus and designated spaces that serve the school’s mission to educate ministerial leaders for church and society. A lot — a lot — happened between there and here.

At first, it was assumed that Andover Newton would buy a facility in New Haven, but as deal after deal fell through, we got used to sharing space and realized that our needs for particular, designated space were more modest than we’d realized. After years of property-rich-cash-poor anxiety, we’d gotten so used to that anxiety; to not have it hanging over our heads? Priceless.

A lot of ministers tend toward co-dependence. Ministers care deeply about people and communities. The edge between relationships where they’re called to serve, and relationships meant to be mutually supportive, is sometimes difficult to ascertain. People become ministers in part because they take great satisfaction from being of use. The wider community also tends to expect ministers to be self-sacrificing in the extreme, and no one wants to chronically and constantly disappoint the expectations of others. Co-dependence is, however, a form of mental illness. Rather than transferring it to our institutions, we need to get help for it.

Buildings are supposed to serve missions; not the other way around. “But what about sacred spaces?” you might ask, and it’s a good question. Faith communities and schools identify themselves strongly with their buildings, just like married people identify themselves strongly with their spouses. And just like in marriage, institutions’ relationships with their buildings need to be healthy, and healthy relationships aren’t fused ones. They involve wholeness on the part of both participants in the relationship, and sometimes wholeness means they can and must go their separate ways.

Bob Kegan writes about adult developmental psychology. One of the lessons he offers is that a young and immature person isn’t able to separate their identity yet from, say, their parents. A younger person is their relationships. “I am a daughter,” the child-me says to myself. A more mature person has relationships: “I have a mother, and my mother has a daughter.” Institutions need mature leaders.

You might be wondering if I’m trying advise all churches and schools to shed their sanctuaries and campuses. Heavens-to-Betsy, no. I am saying that decoupling and disentangling mission from facilities is an essential act of leadership for the sake of institutional health. Borrowing Kegan’s model, my school now knows it has a campus. We love our new campus, but it doesn’t define us.

What defines us is our God-given, Holy-Spirit-communicated, world-serving mission. That mission and its former campus went through some tough years, an eventual divorce, and now the mission is in a new chapter. In the words of Melody Beattie, it’s co-dependent no more.