Resources

As the debate continues around marriage, questions are being raised about how redefining marriage impacts family.

A brief that addresses a United Church understanding of marriage [PDF: 9pp/78 KB] is available on this website.

Some questions to explore around family issues: What kinds of relationships within family do we seek to honour as church? What is family? What makes a family strong and healthy? How do we nurture and support the family relationship?

What Kinds of Relationships within Family Do We Seek to Honour as Church?

In the 1980s, the United Church studied many issues relating to relationships and human sexuality, eventually affirming "that God's intention for human relationships is that they be faithful, responsible, just, loving, health-giving, healing, and sustaining of community and self" (32nd General Council, 1988). These qualities of relationships are to be sought and supported in our families and in our marriages.

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What Is Family?

In the late 1980s, the Sexuality, Marriage, and Family working unit described family in the following terms:

By "family," we mean persons who are joined together by reason of mutual consent (marriage, social contract, or covenant) or by birth or adoption/placement.

Families are intended to provide a secure environment for nurture, growth, and development, and to contribute to the spiritual, social, psychological, sexual, physical, and economic wholeness of their members.

Responsible procreation is a function of many families, though this option is not open to some families and not selected by others.

Churches and social organizations can also provide family-type relationships.

As we respond to God's offer of covenant love through Jesus Christ, we discover what family can mean to us as Christians.

(This description was revised in 1987 by the Sexuality, Marriage, and Family working unit. It was reviewed in 2004 by the Faith Formation for All Ages working committee.)

Families in society and in the church are incredibly diverse--two parents with children; a divorced parent with primary custody of children; foster parents with foster children; a couple with children from other relationships; grandparents who have custody of grandchildren; a lesbian couple; a never-married couple who have a child; a couple with no children; a gay couple who have adopted children; a teenager of alcoholic parents who takes responsibility for his/her siblings; an adult child and an aging parent living together; grandparents living with children and grandchildren--the configurations are multiple, and yet all would name themselves a family.

Just as families today come in a variety of configurations, so did the families in the Bible.

• Abraham and Sarah were the heads of a large extended family--counting 318 men. Include women and children and you have a very large family. (This does not include the network of family established in Abraham and Hagar's relationship.)
• Rahab was the matriarch of her family of father, mother, brothers, slaves, and others.
• Mary, Martha, and Lazarus made up a household of siblings.
• Timothy lived with his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois.
• Elizabeth and Zechariah were a small family having only one son.

In The United Church of Canada, we seek to honour the diversity of families that make up our faith community. And we seek to support and strengthen families so that they may be about the tasks of living in loving, caring, just, and mutual relationships.

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What Makes a Family Strong and Healthy?

To be a strong, healthy family is not to be without struggles and challenges. Family strength is not about the absence of problems but about the family's ability to endure and adapt to troubles and to rebound from crises with ongoing commitment to one another and the ability to meet one another's needs. Diana Garland (Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide, Intervarsity Press, 1999) names these characteristics as foundational to strong, "healthy" families:

• commitment to one another and a sense of connectedness with one another
• adequate time together, which is spent effectively in meeting family needs, working together, and recreation
• effective communication and conflict management
• sufficient expression of appreciation and encouragement
• agreement on and competence in the fulfillment of the roles and responsibilities of family life
• shared spiritual life that gives meaning and purpose
• involvement in, support from, and contribution to the community and larger world
• positive family identity and shared life story
• ability to cope with crises and developmental changes

These strengths can and are lived out in a variety of family configurations. All kinds of families deal with issues of conflict, communication, roles, change and how to cope with it, and crises. The question is not so much what is the structure of the family, but how do we as church enable the family to grow in these strengths so that all its members are nurtured?

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How Do We Nurture and Support the Family Relationship?

The United Church of Canada seeks to support families and those who minister with families by providing resources to nurture and challenge them to grow with and care for their members. In baptism, we claim identity as members of the family of God, brothers and sisters of one another. We are called to live out the call to be family to one another and to nurture relationships so that when we face struggles, crises, and changes in the faith community, we are able to endure and meet one another's needs. We do so trusting in God's love, which created us in love and longs for each of us to know life in all its fullness.

For resources to support and nurture family life, visit the Family Ministry webpages.