The Church as Family

Rev. Christina M. Neilson

September 30^th, 2007

When I graduated from high school, all I wanted to do was get out of rural MN and move to some kind of city. I was tired of the confines the country life offered. I didn’t want to work in the corn canning factory the rest of my life. I was not ready for marriage and children. I wanted adventure and higher learning.

After my great journey in college and life in the theatre, I wanted even more. I needed to move out of state. I got married, sold my car and motorcycle, quit both my jobs and got rid of all my fat clothes. I moved to Florida with my new husband who was in the military.

It was all quite exciting. But then it started to rain every day. I was working in a nursing home with a college degree- couldn’t find a theatre job which had been so abundant back home. I missed my friends and family. I felt isolated in the big city. If I hadn’t already been married, I would have moved back. I missed being part of a small community where people know each other. Even though the military partly filled that need, I never completely felt like I fit. It was much more “high society” than my working class self could fit in to.

For many years I felt isolated. We moved a lot. I lost track of old friends. We tried the military churches, which were wonderful communities, but the theology felt wrong to me. I knew I had to find something else.

Several years later we finally settled down and I found the Unitarian Universalist church. I could hardly believe it. It welcomed my theology. It was filled with people of all types that I could relate to. There were great discussions, meaningful connections at circle suppers. I even loved the committee work. I found friends. I found an extended family. I found a community of faith.

This is the best that church as family has to offer. The church that Marie Fortune describes in her book. It encourages trust, emotional intimacy and respect for one another. The church offered commitment to mutual goals. The church models the good things we learn in our families of origin.

But I wonder – is family the right metaphor for Unitarian Universalists? Is family the best symbol for what we are trying to build? Trust, intimacy and mutual respect are all good things, although in all honesty, it cannot be said that all of us learn them inside our families of origin. (I’m reminded of the familiar cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker years ago, depicting the annual convention of folks from healthy functional families – 4 or 5 people in a giant empty auditorium!)

But family can be a dangerous model for a church, especially a liberal one. Families have parents, who are the heads of the family, and the church-as-family can have negative implications. If the church is a family, who gets to be the Mom and Dad? When parenthood is projected onto an authority figure, lay or ordained, there are a couple of different ways things can go. It can incline some members toward excessive deference, wanting to be “good obedient children” or preferred and privileged “Daddy’s girls” or “Mama’s boys.” Even more likely in the Unitarian Universalist context, some members will tend toward automatic rebellion and resistance toward the parental figure.

Marie Fortune warns of another danger in the family model: that it raises unrealistic expectations of emotional closeness. It is not necessary for congregations to feel like family in order to be strong and healthy. It is simply not possible, even in a very small church, for every single member to feel part of a family, and it is inherently dangerous to try. Not everyone who joins a church wants the church to provide their friends, let alone their new family! Those whose needs for intimacy are being met outside the church may feel intruded upon by an expectation of family-like closeness.

Others, left out of the loop, will suffer the pain of exclusion and disconnection, feeling like perpetual outsiders in a congregation of insiders. Still others, having had negative experiences in their family of origin, will be at risk for inappropriate and harmful church relationships, replicating the only kind of family they know.

There’s also the issue of time – it takes a tremendous expenditure of both time and energy to make something not-family into family. As Marie Fortune and others have said, for many reasons, it is far better to work on our real families, instead of trying to reinvent them.

Family may not be the right metaphor for Unitarian Universalist churches for another reason – damaging patterns have permeated family life from the dangerous and unhealthy currents in American society. There are families that value members based on who makes the most money. This is true not only in middle-class families where the parent who makes more becomes the decision-maker, but tragically it also happens in ghetto families where drug-dealing youngsters become family power-brokers. Churches that fell into this pattern would most value the opinions of the biggest donors, and challenging decisions would be vulnerable to folks who withheld or threatened to withhold donations.

Another negative aspect to the family idea is the way sexism is still internalized in families through division of labor by gender. In many families, the men see housework and childcare as something they “help” with, not as the shared responsibility of being a family. Churches organized this way would have mostly women as Sunday School teachers, pot-luck organizers, while important and respected jobs such as board trustee and finance committee would be held by men.

Yet another disadvantage is that family implies a certain size. Even for those ethnic and cultural groups that encourage large extended families, a family is still smaller than a small sized church. Striving to make the church into family can be an unconscious effort to keep the church from growing above a certain size – because after that, it would lose that “family feeling.” A church over 100 adult members cannot feel like family, and should not try – unless, of course, it wants to lose its members.

Then there’s the Unitarian Universalist principle of democracy. Few families – even liberal ones – organize themselves democratically. I don’t know about your families, but in mine, we certainly did not take votes! In most families, either Mom or Dad (or Mom and Mom or Dad and Dad) alone or together make all the big decisions and the kids like it or lump it. Although in most families some sort of consensus is desired, we have few models of democratic family polity; few of us have experienced it. Churches that viewed themselves as “family” would be challenged to keep congregational democracy a reality.

Saddest of all, too many of us are like the point of The New Yorker cartoon – we don’t actually know what a healthy family looks like, feels like, or acts like. Too many of us experienced emotional, physical, or even sexual abuse by a trusted family member. Too many of us matured in families where members abused alcohol or prescription drugs or illegal substances. Too many of us lived through the divorce of our parents or other relatives, or saw relationships so ugly, that we wished they would divorce. Too many of us come from families where there were “taboo subjects,” family secrets that could never be discussed. (In my family the rule was, “Don’t tell your father”.)

Too many of us come from families where patterns of behavior are repeated without knowing how they started. There’s a familiar story of a family where the end of the ham was always cut off before baking, and no one knew why. Daughter asked mother, mother asked grandmother, even the great-grandmother was consulted. Finally, it was learned that long ago, when the great-grandmother and grandfather were first married, their first house had a very small oven, so small that a whole ham could not fit, without first cutting off the end. Churches that had this pattern would repeat certain actions as “what we always do” without knowing if it was still necessary or positive.

Finally, there is the trouble of being close because we’re “kin,” because we’re related, because, after all, “blood is thicker than water.” Families can close ranks against outsiders but make allowances for each other’s shortcomings. Some of us have had the painful experience of trying to break into such a family, where one not related by blood ever feels at home and where none of the kinfolk ever need worry about being challenged or held accountable for their misbehavior.

As we enter our twentieth year and make intentional efforts to invite former members back into the fold, we may re-live all kinds of dynamics that played our before. Sometimes its good that people have moved on. They may have been toxic to the church. And yet, since you began as a family sized church, those of you who have been around for a while may experience feelings of abandonment because they left the church. Although, maybe those who left felt rejected because they were never part of the “in” crowd. They weren’t “family” or “kin”. Be aware that an array of emotions may hit you. We don’t always know why people leave. We try to get that information, but it’s not always easy to access. They just didn’t feel like they fit.

Most families are not diverse, consisting of only one or at most two ethnic or cultural groups. Churches that cling to a family metaphor would be challenged to accept people who were different in beliefs, or culture, or life experience.

And for those fortunate few whose families are perfectly healthy and do everything right, expecting the church to be family would be a constant disappointment, since there’s not a church in the world who could live up to it!

It’s true that the concept of family must itself change, to become more inclusive, embracing those not related by blood, marriage, or adoption. While this is true, we must agree that this ideal family is an ideal to work towards, not a goal already achieved. Most of us, for good or ill, perpetuate what we learned in childhood. So it is not at all surprising that many church-families, are like many real families, and therefore dysfunctional, hierarchical, sexist, insular, and homogenous.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that it’s wrong to form family-like relationships in church. In the ideal Unitarian Universalist church, the entire congregations would consist of many interconnected and overlapping family-like circles.

What’s basically antithetical to our movement is to expect that an entire church will become one family. This is where violated expectations and disappointed hopes inevitably arise. As a metaphor for church in the Unitarian Universalist context, family is not open enough, not realistic enough, not diverse enough, not mutual enough, and not democratic enough for Unitarian Universalists. But if we’re not family, what are we? What should we be striving for?

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