Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide

By Diana R. Garland

North American families are in crisis, and the need for family ministry is more evident than ever. In her many years of ministry, research and teaching, author Diana Garland has found that the strength of Christian families is rooted in their faith and nurtured in their congregations. Garland believes that Christian families gain strength in part because of their communities of faith. Twelve years after first coming to print, the award-winning Family Ministry has been given a significant makeover. In this new edition Garland takes a three-pronged approach to family ministry, which includes developing families grounded in Christian faith, helping families live the teachings of Jesus with one another, and equipping and supporting families as they learn to serve others. The insights gained are organized into four main sections:

- The Context for Family Ministry
- Family Formation
- Family Dynamics
- Leading Family MinistryGarland examines and fully integrates the historical, sociological, theological and biblical contexts to understand the role and meaning of family in the life of Christians and the church. She perceptively connects these explorations with the social and cultural context of the early twenty-first century. Note: Because this ebook is large, please allow a little extra time to download after purchase.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Release date: Aug 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9780830863297

Diana R. Garland

Diana R. Garland (d. 2015) was inaugural dean of Baylor University's School of Social Work, which now bears her name. She was author, coauthor or editor of twenty-one books and more than one hundred academic articles. Some of her books include Flawed Families of the Bible: How God?s Grace Works through Imperfect Relationships, Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide and Why I Am a Social Worker: 25 Christians Tell Their Life Stories. She had served as editor of the Journal of Family and Community Ministries since 1993. Garland earned her undergraduate, master?s and doctoral degrees from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. For seventeen years she served as professor of Christian family ministry and social work at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and she also served as dean of the Carver School of Church Social Work and director of the Center for Family Ministries. Garland gave significant service to national social work organizations. She served many terms as president of the North American Association of Christians in Social Work and was a board member of the National Association of Deans and Directors of Social Work and a councilor for the Council on Social Work Education. She also served as first lady of Baylor University when her husband David Garland was named interim president from 2008 until 2010.

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Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide Cover

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Second Edition

Family Ministry

A Comprehensive Guide

Diana R. Garland

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InterVarsity Press

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Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426

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© 2012 by Diana R. Garland

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Photograph of the Krummholz tree on page 265 (print edition) is credited to Walter Siegmund/Wikimedia Commons.

Design: Cindy Kiple

Images: Images: ©Daria Karaulnik/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-6329-7 (digital)

ISBN 978-0-8308-3971-1 (print)

Contents

Introduction

Section One: The Context of Family Ministry

1: Our Genealogy

2: The American Family Today

3: The Family in Christian Thought

4: A Biblical Frame for Defining Family

5: An Agenda for Family Ministry

Section Two: Family Formation

6: Fieldguide of Family Relationships

7: Family Development

8: Families in Physical and Social Space

9: Culture and Family Identity

Section Three: The Processes of Family Life

10: Family Interaction

11: Power and Roles

12: Working Together

Section Four: Leading Family Ministry

13: Congregational Life as Family Ministryy

14: Knowing Your Congregation and Neighborhood

15: Planning and Evaluating Family Ministry

16: Programs and Services

Notes

Glossary

References

Name Index

Subject Index

Scripture Index

About the Author

Introduction

For more than thirty years, I have been studying and consulting with congregations about ministry with and through families in the context of their neighborhoods. A number of research projects have led me to visit families in their homes. I began two decades ago, carrying with me a tape recorder that now looks clumsy compared to the tiny digital recorder I currently carry, capturing the conversations and stories of children and adults telling me about their congregations and families. Above everything else, I learned how strong many Christian families are. Their faith has not protected them from troubles and disappointments, but it has given them a framework for coping and even thriving in adverse circumstances. Their faith has not protected them from grief and broken relationships, but it has given them the strength to struggle well through those experiences to a renewed understanding of themselves and of God. The strength of these families is rooted in their faith, and that faith is nurtured in their congregations.

Congregations nurture strong families by instilling values that promote strong family life, committing themselves to the challenges of loving unconditionally, celebrating joy together, making time together a priority, handling anger and conflict in ways that strengthen rather than destroy relationships, practicing repentance and forgiveness, and together serving the larger community and the world.

Families can find congregations to be communities of support for their daily lives—support that used to be provided by neighbors and relatives living in close proximity. Parents and spouses and children may receive practical guidance for family living in the teachings and programs of congregations. They find there the support of friends who are journeying through the same stages and transitions of life. The church community also has a wealth of cross-generational relationships. In the context of the congregation, generations can learn from and support and care for one another. Finally, in times of crises, particularly those around physical life transitions such as illness, birth and death, congregations provide entire families with meaningful and practical care.

In short, congregational life is a major support and resource for families. Christian families are strong families not only because of their faith but also because of their congregations. Interestingly, many of the wonderful things we do for families come simply from being a congregation, and not from any special emphasis or program called family ministry. When a congregation prays for one another in sickness and trouble, when they provide a place for families to worship or share a Wednesday night supper together, when they give parents respite and support by offering Vacation Bible School or church camp, congregations minister to families. This book defines family ministry as not only the programs and services congregations target to family needs, but more broadly as the ways congregational life as a whole shapes and strengthens family relationships.

Unfortunately, although congregations do support some families, other families find only loneliness in a congregation that seems to have no place for them. Congregations provide guidance and support for some of the issues and relationships of family life but tend to neglect others. Much of the rich potential for cross-generational support never materializes because so much of today’s church programming is designed for homogeneous age groups. Further, instead of finding the church to be a place where they can share their burdens with others, some families believe the most painful burdens of their family life—chronic conflict or violence, mental illness, unfaithfulness—are shameful and thus must remain hidden from the congregation. Congregations do sometimes shoot their wounded rather than care for them. Married couples going through divorce, or an unmarried woman who learns she is pregnant, may find it more comfortable to leave the church than to seek support and care there.

Congregations thus can create rather than ameliorate problems for families. It is all too easy to catalogue the list of problems and shortcomings of congregations, as there is much they ought to and can be doing. They are more likely to embrace change, however, if they first identify their strengths. We can build stronger congregational communities on a foundation of strength than we can on a litany of failings.

In the same way, family ministry too often begins with a cataloguing of all that is wrong with families today, assessing the needs of families rather than their strengths. Family ministry became defined primarily as family life education in a congregational setting, and indeed, many families have benefited from marriage enrichment retreats, marital preparation courses, parent education seminars, support groups for adults caring for frail elderly parents, and the myriad other services congregations have rendered based on the perceived needs of families. But the perceived needs are many, and they seem to be increasing exponentially year by year. No church can meet all the needs, even for educational services and counseling within its own membership, much less in the larger community. When the focus is on all the problems, real and potential, facing families in a congregation and its community, there is no end to the programs that are needed.

The Structure and Purposes of the Book

This book begins in a different place than the ways congregations sometimes fail families or the litany of stressors today’s families confront. I have attempted instead to begin with biblical explorations about the role and meaning of family in the life of Christians and the church, and then to connect those explorations with our American social and cultural context of the early twenty-first century. My attempt to understand both the Bible and our society have led me to a three-pronged approach to family ministry that includes: (1) developing families grounded in Christian faith, (2) helping families live the teachings of Jesus with one another, and (3) equipping and supporting families as they live lives of service beyond themselves. The focus of family ministry is to help Christians live their faith in and through their families.

This book assumes a basic knowledge of the sociology of marriage and family relationships. It does not address all one needs to know about family systems and the relationship of families to their communities and other institutions. Nor does it address the theory and methods of family therapy that the clinician who provides crisis intervention and counseling for families needs to know. I leave that to the professional preparation and ongoing development of social workers, clinical pastoral counselors and Christian educators who minister with families. Instead, this book explores these areas of knowledge, theory and methods as they have implications for congregational leadership with families in the community and the neighborhood.

What Is New in This Revised Version

I began this revised version thinking I would simply update the statistics, add new research that has been conducted in the twelve years since I wrote the last version, and add an index, which many readers complained was missing in the first version. When I reread the earlier version, however, I realized that far more was needed. The book has been completely reorganized. In the first version, I separated the social sciences from the biblical content, and the theoretical from the practical. This version attempts to integrate these various perspectives for understanding families; throughout, this version explores the implications for ministry with families. I had planned to shorten the book by eliminating the section on history, but when I began to do that, I realized—as I evidently did when I wrote the first version—that history is not peripheral but central to understanding families today. Therefore, I have attempted to make those implications more obvious. And finally, research in the last decade on family service as a vital dimension of family faith life led to the addition of a chapter devoted to that topic.

My definition of family for Christians has not changed, but my emphases have. The first version posited a New Testament definition of family; this version strives to put that definition at the heart of family ministry through the story of one family, which illustrates the centrality of the concept of adoption by God and by one another when we choose to follow Jesus.

The term faith family has been replaced by Christian family. The former term has been underwhelmingly successful in capturing the radical nature of Jesus’ teachings about family; it appears to have been mistakenly seen as yet another family type, as in the listing nuclear family, single-parent family and faith family. Therefore, in this volume I shift to referring to my definition of family simply as Christian family.

I have also added the concepts of community and neighborhood, and I use these terms with care. Community refers to the congregation—the communion of the saints gathered for worship, fellowship and mission. Neighborhood is defined by Jesus in the story of the wounded traveler and the Samaritan who stopped to help—it is the world beyond that needs the care of Christ’s followers.

Although much of the content from the original editions is here, this edition stands as my best effort at a much-revised framework for the ministry of congregations with and through families. This book is a guide for those who give vision to and lead family ministry. The following sections provide a brief overview of the content of the book.

Section A: The Context of Family Ministry

Family ministry needs to be grounded in an understanding of how historical and sociological contexts have shaped modern family life. I start with an exploration of the historical development of family life in America and an overview of family life in America today. I then turn to a history of Christian thought about family life. How the church has defined, related to and consequently shaped family life for the past two thousand years has relevance for what church leaders do and how they do it. At the intersection of historical trends, current sociological realities and church teaching about family life are the families in our congregations.

The historical and cultural explorations of the first three chapters define the context from which I go to biblical narratives and teachings to seek understanding of what the term family means for Christians in today’s world. I present my definition of family, which is based on my understanding of the New Testament and undeniably shaped also by my own professional and personal life experiences, which I will describe below. Here is that definition: family is composed of those who choose to be followers of Jesus Christ and who are caregivers for one another (Mk 3:31-35). In the first edition of this book, I called this the family of faith. As mentioned above, however, I have replaced that phrase with Christian family. I also explore how the Bible describes the roles that family plays in the lives of the faithful, and what guidelines the Bible provides for discipleship through family living.

Given all of these contexts through which to understand families—historical, sociological, theological and biblical—the section ends by defining an agenda for the ministry of congregations with families in their community (the congregation itself) and in their neighborhood (the larger social world in which congregations are embedded).

Section B: Family Formation

Since the first prong of family ministry is supporting the development of families grounded in Christian faith, this section explores how families take shape and develop identity, and the implications for how congregations can support that formation. Chapter 6 tells a story of a Christian family that illustrates how one group of individuals became family for one another in ways that make clear how the term Christian family both builds on and is also distinctively different from other current definitions of family life. Chapter 7 then explores theories and research about family development and suggests that family stage theory, building as it does on the linear development stages of persons, is too limited in understanding families. It suggests that family development is best captured in a model based on phases of relationships between persons. Chapter 8 describes how families interact with their physical and social space and the impact of stress, crises and catastrophe on family life. Finally, chapter 9 explores how families develop an identity based on culture, rituals and stories.

Section C: Family Dynamics

The second prong of family ministry is helping families live the teachings of Jesus with one another, so the book turns in Section C to the relational processes that shape family life over time, day by day, and the way we live our faith in relationship with one another. Chapter 10 explores the processes of communion in families: communication, anger management, conflict resolution, forgiveness, repentance and intimacy. Chapter 11 examines gender roles by exploring biblical texts that suggest how Christians should manage the dynamics of gender, power and discipline in family life. It also discusses family violence and the role of religious leaders and congregations in responding. Chapter 12 explores the final prong of family ministry, equipping and supporting families as they live lives of service beyond themselves.

Section D: Leading Family Ministry

The final section provides practical guidelines for planning, leading and evaluating family ministries. Chapter 13 explores how the ways that congregations worship, provide Christian education, care for one another and conduct administration have an impact on the life of families. It defines family ministry as a perspective taken on all that we do together as a community of faith, not just a set of programs. Chapter 14 describes the processes of assessing the nature, strengths and challenges of families in the congregation, of the congregation itself, and of the congregation’s neighborhoods, as a foundation for intentional family ministry. Chapter 15 describes planning new programs and ministries that are grounded in the mission of the congregation, arguing that it is the very nature of the congregation that is most important in ministry with families. It suggests practical guidelines for implementing changes and evaluating the impact of those changes. Finally, it provides ideas about how to engage the congregation and neighborhood in new family ministry initiatives. The final chapter of the book explores specific programs and services designed to minister to families in the congregation and its neighborhoods. It gives examples of family resource programs, family life education programs, community development efforts and family advocacy.

Resources

In writing this book, I have drawn on my own experiences as a social work educator, as a researcher and consultant in family ministry, as a member of several congregations in the different places I have lived, and as a family member in both my childhood and adulthood. These experiences have shaped my understanding of families and congregations, and your knowing those influences in my life will give insight about my perspective on families, family ministry and congregational life.

For more than two decades, I served as a social worker providing counseling services to families in various public agencies and then in several religiously affiliated settings, including a Baptist residential child care program, a pastoral counseling agency and a residential treatment program for adolescent girls. Overlapping my counseling with families, for three decades I have also been a social work educator in a seminary and now in a Baptist university, teaching students who want to provide professional services to children, families and congregations. Nothing challenges someone to think about what one knows and to attempt to organize it coherently more than trying to teach it to someone else.

I have also served as a consultant in family ministry to congregations with a diversity of denominational and nondenominational stripes and spots. My consultation with churches raised so many questions for me about families and congregations that I conducted several research projects to understand the families in American congregations and how congregations can minister with them more effectively. This was made possible by generous funding from The Lilly Endowment, Inc., Louisville Institute, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the A. L. Mailman Foundation, and the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. This research has had a profound influence on my understanding of families in congregations. Although published elsewhere, I will be drawing on that research.[1]

Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, was my community of faith and safe haven through most of the twenty-eight years my family lived in Kentucky and my husband and I were raising our children. In the early workings of the first edition, they let me try out my half-baked ideas on them. I learned a great deal about what it means to be a church from the giants in the faith who graced that congregation decade after decade. During the denominational conflict that swirled around us that eventually led to our move to Texas, I came to appreciate deeply a congregation’s role as advocate and prophet. Crescent Hill has modeled both. Since we left Kentucky, Crescent Hill took on a new adventure of becoming a multicultural congregation. You will find the story of that adventure in the chapters that follow. Our current congregational community is Calvary Baptist Church in Waco, where I have learned more about the joys and struggles of building relationships between a congregation and its neighborhood.

My own family experiences have enriched my life with the daily challenges of living faithfully and lovingly with my beloveds, and being overwhelmed by their love and care when I have least deserved it. Family living teaches experientially the meaning of grace and love, of anger and sin, of forgiveness and reconciliation and covenant. I will frequently share in the pages to come stories from my family’s life together. You will read stories about my life as the wife of David, the mother of John and Sarah, the daughter of George and Dorsie, the daughter-in-law of Ruth and Ned, the sister of Elaine, the sister-in-law of Lou, the aunt of Amanda and Sydney and their husbands David and Josh, the sister-in-love of Martha and Margaret and Alice, mother-in-love of Matt and Abby, and now grandmother of Aurora and Azalea. Too many times to count, I have experienced God’s grace through these beloveds. I want my readers to know that in every case I have gained the permission of my family members to share the stories I tell, at least of those who are still living. As for the stories of those who have gone on before us, I think I know that my loved ones would smile at my telling you about our life together.

Acknowledgments

There is no way I can adequately thank all those persons and congregations who helped give shape to this book. The congregations and many families who shared their lives with me as a consultant and researcher have enriched my understanding of families immeasurably. More than 20 years ago, Bob Dempsey asked me to become the family ministry consultant for the churches of the Montgomery Baptist Association. I learned a great deal about congregational assessment and family ministry planning with the support and collaboration offered me by Bob and the congregational leaders of Baptist churches in Alabama. It was in my work with them that most of the ideas in the earlier version of this book took shape. Subsequent work with other congregations and in my own research projects has built on those earlier foundations.

Lilly Endowment, Inc., and Louisville Institute provided the generous research grants that made possible the research on which this book is built. I am so grateful for the encouragement and support I have received from Chris Coble, Craig Dykstra and Jim Lewis. You will see me pulling from this research in very direct ways throughout the book. But more subtly, my ability to immerse myself in the life of so many different congregations as a researcher also gave me the opportunity to immerse myself as a worshiper and fellow Christian in ways that have enriched my work.

Countless students in the Baylor School of Social Work graduate program have been subjected to the requirement to read my book; they have given invaluable feedback for the past twelve years, and I am so grateful. In addition, the following students helped with the research for this second edition: Christen Argueta, Flor Avellaneda, Ashley Hinton Hanna, Amber Lehmann Myers, Rachael Linthicum, Brianna Springer and Sarah Whitmire. The book is much stronger for their input. Professors in other institutions who have used the book as a text have also generously shared feedback and invaluable recommendations for this second edition. They include Grear Howard (George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University), Steve Lowe (Erskine Theological Seminary) and Verna Weber (Cincinnati Christian University). The Rev. Carol McEntyre read the manuscript carefully in its entirety and gave me invaluable insight and constructive critique from the perspective of a visionary congregational leader. Other church leaders who gave invaluable input include Sarah Bush, Gerry Hutchinson, Gary Long, Tom Ogburn and Andrew Trujillo.

I serve as dean of the School of Social Work at Baylor, and this book is testimony to the amazing colleagues that enable me to take time away to work on a project like this. It is unusual for a dean to be able to continue with research and scholarship. I am not unusual, but my colleagues certainly are. I disappeared for weeks at a time to write, and they all so ably carried on without me that it almost hurt my feelings. In particular, Drs. Rob Rogers, Jon Singletary, Gaynor Yancey and Dennis Myers provided outstanding leader­ship in my absence during the summers I was writing. Jeanie Fitzpatrick, assistant to the dean, has perfected forging my signature and making deanly decisions better than ones I would make. I am grateful to Provost Elizabeth Davis who blessed me with her support and encouragement for this project.

Jim Hoover of InterVarsity Press shepherded me through the first edition and since then has been a patient and warm encourager in the long process of deciding to revise the book before placing me in the capable hands of Drew Blankman.

I have been especially privileged to have spent more than forty years married to an outstanding New Testament scholar and teacher. David and I have written and spoken together on the topics of marriage and family life, and I borrow shamelessly from his knowledge of Scripture. David has been a constant source of vision, support, encouragement, laughter and love; this book would never have been written had he not been my partner all along the way.

Despite this wonderful host of colleagues and advisers, responsibility for the limitations of this book remain with me. I offer this as a beginning effort. So much more could be done. But there comes a time to write it down so that others can react and build upon and replace it with something better.

The Context of Family Ministry

1

Our Genealogy

A Brief History of the American Family

When I first conceptualized this book, I planned to begin by exploring biblical texts that serve as a framework and foundation for my approach to family ministry. What the Bible says about families and about the mission of the church should surely be most fundamental in shaping family ministry. To begin this way, however, suggests that my interpretation, and even my selection of passages that seem most significant for family ministry, are more enduring and bias-free than is most certainly the case. I approach the Bible with specific questions and concerns that are shaped by my life experiences. We all do. Our interpretation of Scripture always comes through the filters of social and cultural experience. There is no way to stand above or beyond one’s culture and community to interpret Scripture free of these filters, nor would it be somehow better if we could. God has historically worked in ways that are concrete and relevant and is still doing so in today’s world. The church is shaped by its current social context, and in turn seeks to speak to that context.

Therefore, I decided to begin instead with an exploration of the history and current parameters of the concept of family in Western thought that have been the frame for my experiences. Perhaps, if we could stand outside history, outside our own place and time and experiences, a historical examination of the relationship between church and family would be unnecessary. But history keeps us humble. It reminds us that we are always contextual. Seeing how others’ views and concerns have been shaped by their time and their experiences helps us to know, if we cannot really see, the limitations of our own perspectives. History also provides windows into how others at different times and places, who have lived through experiences similar to or different from our own, have integrated Christian teachings with family living.

Fighting About Family

The family is a powerful political concept in today’s culture. Everyone is profamily, even though there is sharp disagreement over what the family is and what being for it means. What one group believes will strengthen and help families is seen by another group as a frontal attack on family values. The family has such enormous symbolic potential because American culture views families as the basic unit of civil society. Virtually everyone has been shaped in profound ways by their own personal experiences in one or more families. In addition, beliefs about gender roles and the place of children and aging in society are intertwined with our religious beliefs and personal experiences of family.

Much of the conversation about families swirls around an underlying lack of consensus on a definition of family. Some define families sociologically, describing the kinds of actual families in today’s world, while others define families morally/ethically, as what families ought to be. The definition of who is family is indeed important, because being identified as family brings with it societal rights and expectations. For example, hospital intensive care units often limit visitors to immediate family, and zoning laws in a community may limit who can reside together in a single-family dwelling to family members. The tax codes give breaks to persons recognized as family. Society holds people who are family responsible for one another legally and economically. The argument over who is allowed to call themselves family is not, therefore, an idle one. Definitions have the power to shape that which they appear to be simply defining.

For the never-married mother and her children or adult housemates, however, their relationships operate as family, and thus, they believe, deserve recognition as such. Whether or not others agree on the moral issues underlying their family’s composition is beside the point, from their perspective. Not to recognize their relationships as family feels marginalizing and dismissive of their daily reality.

Both definitions are important as we think about family ministry: the sociological reality, the current reality in people’s lives, and the normative model, the expectations by which we evaluate ourselves and others. This chapter explores the historical processes that have shaped American families, and a sociological description of families today. To put it another way, Gillis (1996) has suggested that we all have two families: one that we live with and another that we live by. We would like the two to be the same, but they often are not. The family we live with almost never matches the image we live by of what family life ought to look like.

The sociological term nuclear family describes a household consisting of a married heterosexual couple and their children. In popular American culture, the nuclear family is considered the historically traditional family. An understanding of the traditional family may carry the additional stipulations that (1) this is the first marriage for both spouses, (2) there are no children of either spouse from other unions, and/or (3) the wife is not employed outside the home. In fact, the traditional family has little foundation historically.

Kinship and Households

Kinship and households have been important social structures for all of recorded history, but throughout Western history, different meanings were attached to those structures than we now attach to the term family. According to Frances and Joseph Gies (1987), no European language had a term specifically for the mother-father-children group before the eighteenth century. In particular, families held together by affection, not by economic/social necessity, and families with boundaries separating them from the rest of the community only became possible in the last few centuries.

People have always had kinfolk—mother, father, children, siblings—but the cultural meanings attached to these relationships are new. Marital love and the special relationship between parents and children have existed from the beginning of civilization. But spouses and their children were simply not considered the basic family unit as they are today (Guichard & Cuvillier, 1996). In the Roman world of biblical times, the Roman familia referred to an entire household, and among the wealthy and powerful, the familia could include hundreds of persons: children, servants, slaves and even livestock. The household belonged to the paterfamilias, the head of the household (Brundage, 1987). A clan was a group of persons who claimed a common ancestor. The identity of the Israelites as sons of Abraham and their division into tribes reflect this clan structure. A clan existed independently of its members and could own land and exert political power (Gies & Gies, 1987).

Most members of the early churches probably lived with persons we would consider family (spouse and children), but those families were embedded in a larger household. Therefore, there is no name for the nuclear family unit (husband, wife and children) in the New Testament. Instead, the New Testament refers to the household when talking about personal/domestic life. In order to understand the sociological context of New Testament teachings concerning relationships with children, parents, spouses and other household members, we need to understand what ancient households were like.

Ancient Households

A Hebrew household ranged between 50 and 100 people and was the primary place of economic production. The only limit to the size of the household was the ability of the householder to support the members (Tidball, 1983). Paul draws the term steward or commission (oikonomos) from well-known household roles related to household economics, and he uses this term to describe himself and the other apostles (1 Cor 4:1-2; 9:17; Eph 3:2; Col 1:25). In early Christian history and on for centuries, the house was not the place to escape from work but rather the place where much of the work was done. It was not the place to be free of a public role, as it is today, but rather the place where that role was carried out. For most people, work and home, family and work colleagues, religious expression, and the ebb and flow of daily life were intertwined in the same world of existence—the household.

Whether the household’s function in production was farming or home industry, the home was open to the community. Employees, slaves and outsiders doing business with the household were in and out of the household, sometimes living there as well as doing business there (Skolnick, 1993). As places of production, households were busy, noisy places, with many people coming and going; the domestic threshold had very little meaning. In today’s society, we think a family needs a house to live in, but in those days it was the reverse: a house had to have a family (Gillis, 1996).

One’s very identity and even survival depended upon membership in the household. Therefore, those without a household—widows, orphans, sojourners (and those who left households to follow Jesus)—found themselves in perilous situations. There was no one to care for them, and there was no Social Security. The Old Testament equates righteousness with incorporating these hopeless ones into the family/household (Zech 7:9-10) and unrighteousness with neglecting them (Job 31:16-32) (Gowan, 1987). Defining righteousness by the extension of family boundaries foreshadowed the radical and inclusive definition Jesus would give to family.

The role of adoption. Having a male heir was of great importance in Roman culture; it was the means for ensuring the continuation of the household and care of its members. If no son had been born, the householder could choose to adopt a son and make him his heir. Adoption was thus familiar in the New Testament world and was considered a treasured status (Tidball, 1983). To be adopted meant to become an heir to ruling the household. Paul used this image, so powerful in his world, to communicate the new relationship a person can have with God through Christ (Rom 8:12-25; 9:4; Gal 3:26–4:7; Eph 1:5). According to Paul, this adoption by God gives us the status of joint heirs with Christ (Rom 8:17). Adoption by a householder brought with it important privileges in the present as well as the future. Paul wrote that adoption by God similarly brings us significant privileges now and in the life to come—freedom (Gal 4:7-8), glorification with Christ (Rom 8:17) and the redemption of our bodies (Rom 8:23). Just as Jesus’ life and teaching gave hope that through him, every follower could have a new family, Paul’s explicit language of adoption spoke the reality that in Christ, every follower could claim the treasured status of adoption.

Slavery. Slavery was widespread in the Roman Empire. A third or more of those living in major cities were slaves, and they were owned not only by the wealthy but also by persons of more modest means. Slavery was simply the means of organizing labor at the bottom end of the economic continuum. Slaves were often better off, if they had good masters, than were free persons in a society without social systems of care for the poor (Dunn, 1996). In addition to slaves, households included former slaves who had been freed. When a slave was freed, his or her relationship with the master did not come to an end. The former slave promised loyalty to the household and its well-being. The householder promised to care for the social and economic needs of the freed person and the freed person’s family (Tidball, 1983).

According to Tidball (1983), the relationship between a freed slave and the master may have been what Jesus was referring to when he told the disciples that they were no longer servants but friends: I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father (Jn 15:15). Jesus was calling up in the minds of his hearers this household image, not the casual relationship of limited shared interests that people often mean by friends in our society. Similarly, Tidball points out that this was the meaning carried by the Jewish leaders’ warning to Pilate that if he released Jesus, he would be no friend of the emperor (Jn 19:12). Releasing Jesus could be construed as disloyalty on the part of Pilate in his relationship with the emperor.

Religion. The ancient household expressed its solidarity by sharing in a common religion, that of the head of the household. Not only did this bind them together, but it also differentiated them from other households who worshiped other gods. In Roman society, worship took place primarily within the household. It is in this context that we read of the conversion and baptism of households such as those of Cornelius (Acts 10), Lydia (Acts 16:13-15), the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:31-34), Crispus (Acts 18:8) and Stephanus (1 Cor 1:16).

Implications for Family Ministry

Our cultural understandings of family and community are no more divinely ordained than were those of the Roman world, and that is, perhaps, a most important reminder. It is how we live in the structures in which we find ourselves that points to God’s grace and love. Our families and communities today are similar to those of ancient Palestine in at least one significant aspect: they provide us with experiences that equip us to understand God’s relationship with us. We can imagine based on our own family experiences what it means to be adopted by God. We can imagine in our hearts what it would be like to have no family and then to be gathered in and placed in the most honored and loved family position, that of heir. Although we have not actually experienced slavery, our own heritage of slavery and slave ownership gives us images of what it would be like to go from being a household slave to a friend. Families give us a grammar of emotional experiences through which we can experience and express God’s love and care.

Yet ancient households in the New Testament were starkly dissimilar from our American families. We struggle with the seeming lack of individual autonomy implied by whole households converting and being baptized, such as that of the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:33). Our culture’s individualism, so much in our very bones because we are creatures of our place and time, conflicts with the thought that persons were folded into the community of faith without apparently deciding as individuals to take this step. We have trouble accepting our communal nature; we think of ourselves as individuals who make autonomous decisions, particularly in the area of religion. The fact that the ancients came to faith with all their households confronts us with the fact that we come to faith and walk in faith as part of cultural units sharing daily life together. The relationships we have with the most intimate people in our lives, whether in the household of 2000 years ago or in traditional or nontraditional families of today, give shape to our faith. Obviously, then, the lives of families together must be of central concern to the larger community of faith.

Shifts Toward the Nuclear Family

Between the 6th and the 9th centuries, Germanic invasions in Europe led to the disappearance of large-scale slavery, and peasant agriculture replaced the large household unit as the basic unit of economic production. As a consequence, for the first time, nuclear families became the basic unit of society (Brundage, 1987) and sometimes included older generations, unmarried adult children, and widowed or unmarried siblings of the couple (Toubert, 1996). The family was still an economic unit; everyone worked together to produce what was needed and to provide a surplus to meet the demands of the regional lord in exchange for policing and protection. There were no salaries, profits or division of labor; everybody worked (Fossier, 1996). Men and women were on equal standing, at least within the family. Sometimes nursing babies were sent out to another woman (a wet nurse) who would feed and provide care for them because the mother had to work in the household, even though babies raised outside their own homes were more likely to be abused or neglected and had a much higher level of infant mortality than babies cared for by their own mothers (Burguiere & Lebrun, 1996). The economic well-being of the household trumped any one family member’s needs, including infants.

Households of the nobility remained very large. In thirteenth-century England, Thomas of Berkeley’s household consisted of more than two hundred people. The patron’s rule kept this large group together. Other men in the group pledged themselves to the patron in exchange for being provided food, shelter, clothing and protection. The patron, in turn, had responsibility to provide care for those who had thus committed themselves, but also had the right to beat them (Duby, Barthelemy & de La Ronciere, 1988). The household head was duty-bound to perpetuate its existence by producing offspring. A wife who did not produce heirs was readily put away. Reproduction meant expansion of power; consequently, every noble household constantly sought to add more relatives, allies and servants. Today we think of the poor as having the greatest numbers of children, but before the nineteenth century, the largest households were those of the wealthy (Gillis, 1996).

Household heads negotiated marriages of their children and other dependents. The young man and woman were simply asked for their consent (Duby et al., 1988). By the twelfth century, it was common practice to allow only one son in a noble lineage to marry. At the same time, nobles tried to marry off all the daughters that they could, in order to form alliances (Quale, 1988).

Nevertheless, at least in the lower classes, the meaning of family was shifting from an extended household to a nuclear family, with dramatic implications. Emotional bonding among members was becoming more significant in the household defined predominantly by marriage. Children became the responsibility of parents rather than a whole household of adults. Spouses had privacy with one another, and with that privacy came increased expectations for spouses to meet one another’s emotional and social needs. Instead of a number of adults—servants and relatives and business partners—with whom a woman or man could talk over the daily interests and concerns of life, in the nuclear household there was only the marital partner.

Even during this early period of the nuclear family, many persons lived in other kinds of arrangements, whether due to early deaths of partners or late marriage. Many men delayed marriage until they were 30 or older, and many never married at all, because they did not have the economic resources to support a wife and children (Bresc, 1996; Brundage, 1993). Research indicates that economic factors had far more influence than culture in controlling the size of households and the age and even possibility of marriage (Sovic, 2008)—and they still do.

Colonial America

From this historical background, European settlers came to colonial America, where economic realities continued to define the family unit. In the 17th and 18th centuries, households in the colonies often were much larger than the nuclear family, including servants and apprentices, as well as numerous children. Death frequently redefined families. Slightly over half of all children born lived to become adults, and 1 out of 10 women died in childbirth (Beales, 1991, p. 43). Only one third of marriages endured more than 10 years. Unlike today, the death of a spouse was not something to be expected as one approached old age but a part of what we now regard as the prime of life. Those who survived often married two or more times. The frequent remarriage of widows and widowers meant that households often included stepchildren. For example, a man who married at age 25 might lose his wife when he was 35, after she had borne him four or five children. He might then marry a young widow with one or two children of her own, and together they would have several more children, resulting in a chain of marriage and remarriage (Scott & Wishy, 1982b, p. 4).

Households also took in orphaned cousins or other more distant relatives. In the American South, almost 20% of children were orphaned before their 13th birthday, and more than 30% were orphaned before the age of 18 (Coontz, 1988, p. 84). Families also often brought in older children and young adults as servants and apprentices and, if they were not needed at home, sent out their own children to work in other households (Skolnick, 1993). As had been established as the pattern in Europe, only those who owned or were given property by their fathers were allowed to marry, meaning that servants, slaves and apprentices could not marry at all (Beales, 1991; Hawes & Nybakken, 1991; Scott & Wishy, 1982a). Fathers clearly wielded considerable power, and in the rare case of divorce, received custody of children. Courts enforced obedience to the householder by household members and could also punish householders for failing to exercise authority over wives, servants and children (Coontz, 1988).

Frontier America

The economic changes that America presented brought changes to the structure of families. For centuries, families had been bound to place, but no longer. Free land in the expanding country enabled young men to escape dependence on their fathers and families to escape community constraints (Skolnick, 1993). Nuclear families frequently moved far from kin, with only sporadic contact. The patriarchal, hierarchical worlds previously experienced by immigrants from other continents and by Colonial Americans disappeared. Young people began choosing their own mates based on personal attraction rather than family property and connections (Hawes & Nybakken, 1991; Quale, 1988).

Slavery and Family Life for African Americans

Economic factors created the circumstances that led to the racial and ethnic diversity of American culture. Europeans and Asians immigrating to the United States came largely to search for economic opportunities. Africans, on the other hand, came unwillingly, abducted into slavery from Africa. Not all Africans came to the colonies as slaves; some simply immigrated. But it was predominantly slavery—a rapidly growing economic institution—that shaped African American family life. Family life was very different for slaves, but only in small part because of the cultural differences between Europe and Africa. Slaves often courted without their owners’ knowledge or approval, but they had to obtain the owners’ consent to set up a household. No southern state recognized the legality of slave marriages or the legitimacy of slave offspring, but some owners allowed ministers or priests to perform slave marriage ceremonies. By the 1850s, most owners were allowing slaves to have a Scripture wedding rather than a simple broom-jumping ritual. Nevertheless, the owner’s and slave community’s recognition was the only legitimacy given slave family life (Malone, 1992). Nearly 75% of slaves lived in households with parents, children, cousins or siblings. Although the parent-child unit was the vital core, the real strength of the slave community was its acceptance of all types of families and households as functional and contributing. Western African cultures viewed kinship as the way of relating in community, regardless of marital and biological relations. So children of slaves on plantations were taught to call older adults aunt and uncle and to relate to community members as family (Chatters, Taylor & Jayakody, 1994).

Unlike free society, wives in slave families had equal or near-equal status with their husbands. This brief look at the beginnings of African American family life suggests the significance of economic forces in shaping families, especially those in the most powerless situations.

The Industrial Revolution and Beyond

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century was another economic shift that profoundly affected how families were defined. For the first time, economic productivity was separated from the household; men, women and children left home for work in newly built factories. Initially, the work unit was actually the family, growing out of the historic understanding of the family as the production unit of society. Factories hired entire families with one contract, and in turn would pay the family wages and provide a house for them to live in (Perrot, 1990; Scott & Wishy, 1982a). Families were no longer working as partners with one another in the front-room shop or in nearby fields, however, and over time, work became an individual, not a household or family, pursuit.

Of course, individuals had always been sent out to work; for example, children who could not be supported in the household had been sent out as servants or apprentices. But previously, those who were sent out were subsequently attached to other households in which they served or were employed. Before the Industrial Revolution, farming had been the economic support for many families, and farming was the prototype of the household industry. It was all hands on deck, with the schooling of children and the worship in the church and other outside involvements scheduled to fit around the family’s work. School met during the winter months, when the family’s work was quieter and the children could be spared. Church met in the late morning, so that the family could complete its farm chores first. The sacred 11:00 worship hour in many congregations today is a remnant of this era, when families had to milk the cows and do other daily farm tasks early in the morning.

Individual work gradually replaced the family’s business or farm. Household members were now productive only as employees in the workplace selling their labor. With this shift, the work of family members had little relationship to one another except in spare-time hobbies (e.g., gardening and other economically useful part-time pursuits) and in the pooling of earnings from labor. The paycheck deposited into the family’s bank account replaced work in tandem with other family members as the individual’s contribution to the economic welfare of the family.

At first, this move from the household to employment outside the home was reserved for men and the poorest of women and children. Those women who could afford at all to do so stayed behind in the home, gardening, educating children, sewing and cooking. Nevertheless, the economic value of their contribution to the household gradually began to shrink. Homemade candles were replaced by the purchase of electricity, medical care by the medical professions, and production of clothing and food products by growing garment and farming industries.

The concept of breadwinner resulted from this shift. No longer did the family grow and make or earn their daily bread together; one member was supposed to go outside the family and earn enough to support the rest. The family wage, that men working full-time should be paid enough to support their wife and children, is a concept that both developed and then virtually disappeared in the twentieth century (Goldscheiter & Waite, 1991). The purpose of the family wage was to pay a man enough to support a nonworking spouse and nonworking children. The goal was to end child labor and to ensure that children had mothers at home to tend to them (Quale, 1988). By the end of the twentieth century, however, there were laws to ensure equality of pay, regardless of family circumstances, so that women and men were entitled to equal pay for equal work.

With the separation of the world of work and the world of family, the function of the home was recast as a haven from the work world rather than the place where work took place. The division between household and work became not only a reality but a model of the way things are supposed to be (Lasch, 1980). This separation carried moral overtones; the marketplace was considered dangerously corrupting. The men who spent their days in that world were saved by constant contact with the world of the home, where women acted as carriers of the religious values that could counteract the destructive tendencies of the market (Hall, 1990). The advantages of the extended household became liabilities, and so households became smaller. Fewer households could afford servants because their service was no longer economically productive.

Children as Economic Liabilities

The child labor laws passed early in the twentieth century symbolized these economic shifts. Many children, particularly poor children, had been working incredibly long hours, often in dangerous and debilitating positions in factories and mines, in order to help support their families. Now their economic contribution had to come second to their schooling.

Indirectly, this shift in economic status was one more factor leading to declining birth rates. Children were no longer economic contributors to the household; rather, they were economic liabilities, dependents rather than two more hands to work in the family business or another paycheck to contribute to the family’s support. Not only did young children not make an economic contribution to the household, but they either kept an adult caretaker from doing so or added a cost to the family of purchasing childcare. The mutual interdependence of the family in shared work was lost. This was not true for everyone, of course; many rural families and small businesses retained the old interdependence. The norm, however, had been changed.

The proportion of families with dependent children in the home began a steep decline that has continued. In previous centuries, most parents died before their youngest children reached adulthood; child rearing was a lifetime task. Today, most adults spend less than one third of their adult years from age 20 to age 75 or more in childbearing and child rearing. In addition to the shift of children’s status from a family economic asset to a liability, the development in the mid-twentieth century of reliable birth control meant that children became optional for the first time in history. Increasingly, the parenting of children is expected by our society to take place only in households that can afford them. That is, a family must have the economic resources for one adult to absent themselves from economically productive work to rear children, or alternatively, must have sufficient earning capability to pay someone else to provide childcare. Childbearing and child rearing have increasingly become a very expensive hobby, or leisure-time activity.

The Family as Consumer

Although today’s smaller family is still a primary economic unit, it is no longer as an economic producer so much as it is an economic consumer. Today, family members pool their income and draw from the common pot for making purchases. Big-ticket items—cars, refrigerators, houses—are bought to serve the family unit. Families purchase their food rather than growing it, and they purchase their clothing and furniture and other household goods rather than producing them. Family members have to integrate and coordinate their spending, but not necessarily their work, in order to function effectively.

The loss of economic production as a function of family life is not just a functional loss for the nuclear family; it is also a loss of an economic tie between generations (Goody, 1996). Adult children no longer depend on parents to provide them with a trade or a family farm (although they may hope for help with the expenses of their own or their children’s college education). The lengthening lifespan has meant that children are unlikely to inherit their parents’ resources until they themselves are approaching or beyond retirement age. At the same time, senior adults no longer depend on their adult children to support them; they are expected to accumulate enough savings to support themselves until death.

With economic production removed from the family and consumerism now a primary family function, what sense of purpose many families feel comes from their joint consumption—taking the boat out on weekends, buying and furnishing a house, traveling, or entertaining. When I have asked families to describe what gives their family a sense of meaning or purpose, many tell me about a special family vacation or their plans to travel or the retirement from employment they are anticipating. These exper­iences are relatively isolated and segregated from day-in and day-out living, however. Instead of providing a guiding purpose for all of a family’s activities, they further segregate the meaningful moment from the round of daily happenings. Monday through Friday are endured because they bring the promise of a weekend or because they provide the financial means to pursue a family dream. Family members remain isolated from each other in their work and school activities—the vast majority of their time—and share only in periodic leisure pursuits.

The Family’s Primary Focus on Nurture and Attachment

The function of the family now is to provide family members with nurture, love and attachment to one another. The family is the place where individuals can express and meet needs, where acceptance and belonging are available for each member simply for being a member, where members take care of one another in times of need. Families also provide wraparound services to supplement what is available to family members elsewhere. Education no longer takes place under mother’s supervision but in a community school, although there is the exception of the growing homeschooling movement. Even the child in a community school, however, may need a little extra supervision or tutoring to make the best use of that schooling, and the family is expected to provide that help. Medical care is dominated by professional health care providers, but it is the family that provides the daily nursing through an illness.

All family members are perceived as needing the consistent nurture and love of a family to whom they feel attached. Families are supposed to be there for one another in a crisis. The recent development of family leave policies in some workplaces is recognition of this important function of family life. As important as consumerism has become, few families hold together for the sake of the house, let alone the refrigerator. The most significant function of marriage, and the family of which it is perceived as the center, is to meet one another’s needs.

The Household as Private Enclave

The move of economic production outside the household also resulted in increased family privacy. No longer is there an array of clients, servants and employees, apprentices, and extended family in and out of the household as a part of their daily work. In fact, in many of today’s households, even the family itself is absent for a majority of most working days—a stark change from the farm family or the family business located in the household. In many neighborhoods, there is no one there for nine or more hours a day.

An interesting way of following the changing functions of marriage and the family over time is to trace the development and changes in the structure of physical living and working space for households and families. Until the eight­eenth century, privacy was not a guideline for building houses. All the family’s activities took place in the shared space without today’s walls of privacy. For example, in colonial America, most homes consisted of one or two rooms, with perhaps a sleeping loft upstairs (Shammas, 1983). The largest room was called the hall, and it was here that members of the household spent most of their indoor waking hours. A huge fireplace provided heat and was used for cooking. Cloth production, carpentry, food preparation, business dealings, farm management, schooling, eating, entertaining, recreation, conversation, sleeping and sexual relations all took place there (Cherlin & Calhoun, 1996).

Reviews for Family Ministry

[sc4-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A massive book with so so many different helpful approaches. Garland's model for ministry is a Family Life ministry that is best described as a blend of the family-integrated model and Christian social services. Her biblical foundation of the family is excellent, but one does have to wonder about some practices which smack of liberal Protestant social gospel and lack a clear evangelistic message. I think there's value in helping others but when that helping lacks the Gospel then we have a problem as Christians.