A Ancient/New Kind of Family spells opportunity for Churches
An Ancient/New Kind of Family
I read something interesting about the recent history of families. It is an article from David Brooks of which there is also a simpler speech addition on YouTube. I will give you a quick overview.
We tend to see family structures as the result of conscious decisions based on a set and given norm whilst a certain family structure is often if not always rather the result of sociological and historical forces.
In recent history, for instance, there was huge extended families. The context of many people who farmed for a living and needing plenty of labour to sustain that lifestyle was the reason for many big families with seven or more children with other family members living in the same house or close by. Think Jonny boy.
In came the manufacturing revelation. People moved to cities. By necessity, this gave rise to what is known as nuclear families, typically with a working middle class father, a stay and home mother and two children (a boy and a girl with a dog and a white Jetta if you are into detail). There was a golden area between 1950 and 1965 where a variety of conditions made it favourable and easy to live with such an arrangement. Men during that time generally earned 400 times the salaries their dads did at the same age, church attendance and community involvement was the norm and the economy was growing rapidly.
Christmas doesn’t last for ever. Nuclear families are still around but it is much more difficult to sustain this system. It now takes a two-income household that immediately implies shared household and childrearing responsibilities or costly substitute employment for these functions. Community involvement and attendance in everything from churches to tennis clubs has dwindled. The nuclear family has become very fragile and stripped of support from intergenerational influences, friendships and other structures. Nuclear families has thus become non-normative in society. It is all the more seen as an unattainable goal for the very rich, not as a default for the middle class. Single parent household and children born out of wedlock who never gets to know one parent has become rampant. Even nuclear families that does manage to keep it up, do so under much more pressure than before.
Necessity has once more brought about yet another form that is on the rise. It is called chosen families. A chosen family is a family put together on basis of kinship rather than genetics. Chosen families has been around for a long time. In modern day times it started with social outcasts that by necessity and for survival were forced into kinship groups for safety, food and shelter. Now, many “ordinary” people find themselves facing the same necessity. A chosen family can take many forms. There are for instance single moms that cohabit, students living with elderly people and other never seen before family structures.
Now here is what is interesting. David Brooks posits that families based on genetic or so called blood ties is actually a fairly recent development. For most of human history kinship was indeed the more prevalent form of grouping together. Hunting required people to build bonds with people that were different than them (if you are the best bow shooter, you would rather befriend the best cook than the other bow shooter). In Kinship family groupings there is much less of that blind loyalty that destroy so many lives in nuclear families. There is often a greater sense of purpose and a greater variety of gifts and creativity than one would find in a genetically constituted family where everybody plays the piano well and suck at maths equally.
Chosen families shouldn’t be seen a threat or a critique on nuclear families. Some nuclear families stay this way but also draw in kinship relationships to form a type of pseudo extended family.
I marvel at the odd bunch of people Jesus called together as disciples. People very different from each other, people not related genetically for the most part (there were some). I look back at my own life inside the family we call a church or a congregation. Always not the combination of people one would have put together if you got to do it! I look at how immensely my life has been enriched by the kinship relationships that sometimes substituted and other times complimented and extended my biological father, mother, sisters, grandparents aunts and uncles. I feel blessed by it. But I am somewhat saddened by the fact that it was precisely my status as a member of an “acceptable” nuclear family that granted me such easy access and acceptance within these circles rather than the unconditional love of Christ flowing through people towards me. It saddens me because I realize that those with different and smaller families of the non-traditional kind probably needed what I enjoyed even more.
Let us cash in on this enormous opportunity where the need for a chosen family is greater than ever. Let us amp up the hospitality and warm heartedness of our church families so that more may join in, enrich us and be served by the bonds of love we share in Christ. If I read my Bible right what we will enjoy in heaven is one big chosen family held together by loving ties. We might as well delight and work towards a foretaste of that here and now. Even the strongest families could be enriched by loving and accepting people unlike them. When we love and accept people unlike us, we discover we are not as unlike as it first seemed after all. We discover God is our father and we are all his children.
Gabriel J Snyman
February 12 2020