Growing Up Different

In the fall of 1973, Gene Beerens and Faith Apol Beerens founded Christ's Community in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Gene has been a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church for 18 years and is executive secretary of the Community of Communities, an ecumenical circle of Christian communities in the United States. Faith has offered her gifts of pastoral counseling and music to the ministry of Christ's Community.

They are the parents of five children. Kristi, 20, and David, 18, are planning to move to the Washington, D.C. area in early 1987, where they will attend the University of Maryland and relate to Sojourners Community. Lisa, 15, is in 10th grade and plays the violin. Jodi, 9, likes to play softball and sing and is in fourth grade. Jamie, 6, is in first grade and enjoys fishing with his Dad.

The Beerens family has been a friend of Sojourners Community for many years. They have much to offer out of their experience of community, inner-city living, and growing together in faith. Faith, Gene, Kristi, David, and Lisa were interviewed by Joyce Hollyday in their home in Grand Rapids.
-The Editors


Sojourners: How has living in community nurtured you?

David: I think by growing up living in an extended household with several adults, we were always able to relate to an adult on a one-to-one basis. Adults weren't these people who towered over us. It was more a friend-type relationship, and through that we got to have several people whom we related to as we were growing up, not just our parents.

How many years did your family live with other people in your home?

Gene: Our experience began in Terre Haute, Indiana, in January 1971, when Lisa was born, until the fall of 1983. So it was 12-and-a-half years of living this way. It began with a couple of people, and at one point there were 16 people in addition to our natural family.

Faith: I was very keenly aware that our children were being influenced by many other people, whom in many ways they admired; there was considerable role modeling going on in our family. The children saw people with a variety of interests and talents. Their experience was broadened because of the other people who lived with us.

David: Kristi and I once made a list of everyone who had lived with us and there were a hundred or more names on it. So I think we're able to accept other people, because we have seen so many types of people.

Gene: One of the things that many of our friends and relatives were concerned about was that if we lived in an intentional community, our children would be isolated from the world. I would assure people that they weren't being isolated and that, in fact, much of what was happening in the world was passing through our family life.

Then immediately the concern would become, "Well, aren't you afraid of the impact that having people with different economic and racial backgrounds, sexual orientations, or psychological needs in your home is going to have on your children's lives?" I would much rather have my children exposed to these things within the context of a supportive family environment, where there is a lot of freedom and . honesty to talk about them.

Our children have matured very rapidly in their understanding of not only the differences in society but the factors that shape society and its underlying values. This has been the reflection we've gotten from their teachers. They're amazed at the adaptability, flexibility, and openness our children have because of the way they've been exposed to so many different people, ideas, and values. They are also amazed by how well the children have sorted all of this out and by how well their own value system is shaped already. And it isn't just a parroting of our values--they've really grappled with these issues in the context of our family life.

Faith: It wasn't as if our home was devoid of difficult situations. There was struggle with relationships. But I think what the children saw was adults being able to respond in life-giving ways, in creative ways, and in ways that weren't threatening to them.

Our family has been very influenced through having people live with us--especially in the area of reconciliation and forgiveness. I think our children have grown up less awed by and afraid of conflicts or things going wrong or people doing harmful things, because they know they can respond in a helpful way, in an understanding way.

Lisa: I have noticed that with my friends. If we ever get into a fight or anything, they usually just ignore it. I am usually the one to call them up and tell what happened from my side and try to work it out with them.

Faith: In our family, as we've grown to know each other in a much deeper way, I've seen a real continued willingness to go to one another and say, "What did you mean?" or "I feel disturbed by that," or "I feel hurt by that." And I think it's true even of Jamie and Jodi, especially as I see Jodi interact in her classroom. She is very sensitive to when something is amiss in relationships and quickly goes to the person and says, "Let's talk about this. Let's sit down with the teacher, and let's get this worked out." The children really have acquired the sense that when something is wrong in relationships, it reflects on the whole of life, and there are many things that will be affected if we don't tend to the problems in relationships among us.

David: I think it's even gotten to the point where we understand each other in the family so well that, for example, when Kristi and I argue about something, I can understand what she is saying, and she can understand what I am saying. We are able to accept our differences and just say, "That's you; I can understand that." We are very different people. But we can go on from that, and we don't have to put the relationship in jeopardy because of it.

Gene: I don't want us to give the impression that we're all like peas in one pod. We are very, very different people. Faith and I have totally opposite personality profiles. The children have different combinations of those profiles, and it takes an incredible amount of communication to keep our relationships together because we are all very strong, different people.

I think another thing the children have learned is to have the freedom to challenge the status quo. An example is a high school class Kristi and David had.

Kristi: In a history class, we were told that we were going to do a new activity. It was a simulation game, but we weren't told it was a game. We were given unfair labor assignments.

David: The teacher just made the students work and work and work with hardly any reward for doing it.

Kristi: I was trying to get a group of people together to challenge this, and the teacher would say, "Well, if you don't come, it will be a mark against you. If you don't do the work, you'll fail." Finally it seemed worth taking the risk and not going to class. So we organized a group of students and started holding picket signs and striking outside the door of the classroom.

David: Kristi and I led our unions, respectively, from our classes.

Gene: While the other kids in the class were getting "A's," they were getting failing grades. Kristi would come home and say, "I'm not sure this is a game." But she carried it out, and eventually the teacher brought the group in and told them, "This is the dynamic that happens in labor relationships."

David: I got an "A" for that class! Kristi: Me, too.

Gene: I'm thankful that they were able to respond and provide leadership in that kind of situation, even though it wasn't clear that it was a simulation game.

David: This gets back to what we said earlier about having other people in our home as role models. For me that was really important, because somebody was always here affirming who I was as a person. That conveyed a real sense of self-confidence to me and to Kristi.

Kristi: It gives us a better self-image and the ability to take risks and speak out when we feel we have something worthwhile to say.

How has living in community nurtured your Christian faith?

Kristi: In our household I saw a lot of people struggling in their own different ways to be faithful to God's call in their lives.

David: As we were growing up, our parents didn't say, "This is our faith. This is what we believe. This is what we want you to believe." It was never like that. We were able to see just from experience. I think that's where our religious faith comes from--just living in a situation, seeing day to day the kinds of principles and morals and beliefs that the group of people had who lived here. Coming to really understand that and see the value in that is where our faith has developed from, even more than going to Sunday school or being in church.

Your family has made the choice to live in the inner city. Many people say it's all right for adults to choose that, but it's a hard thing to ask your children to live with that choice. Were there times when you wished you didn't live this way, or when it seemed very difficult?

David: I was about 6 years old when we moved here, and there was a lot of children on the block to play with; so it didn't strike me as being real traumatic. But for a long time we could only go about a block away from the house. There was a group of kids who were pretty rough and would pick on younger children, stealing our bikes and that kind of thing.

Once when I was about 10 or 11, a few kids came over and started giving me a hard time. "Roots" had just been on TV, and they were all upset about the way black people had been treated. They made me sit on the curb, and they just yelled at me for a long time. I couldn't do anything. It was something you had to live with.

And last year I was walking home from a babysitting job just down the street, and I got mugged. I had very hard feelings about it, but I've come to accept it. There's still a fear of living in the inner city, but by living here, I've been able to see what the black culture is like and to understand that. That has given me the insight to deal with the fear. I think that's made the difference in being able to accept what happened to me. I still can't say that I'm not prejudiced, because there is still some of that fear; but I look at a lot of my friends, and most of them just can't accept black people at all.

Kristi: For me, living in this neighborhood has been a real learning experience. For two years, while I was attending a Christian high school that is basically an all-white, middle- to upper-class school, I worked at a fast-food restaurant here in the neighborhood. I was the only white employee until David worked there for a while. It was a struggle being in both places, hearing the prejudice and racial jokes at school and defending all the people I was working with, and then being judged by the kids at school.

But the positive side was getting to know a lot of black people with whom I hadn't had a lot of close interaction before. I came to have some really close friends from work, with whom I spent a lot of time. I learned a lot about black culture and grew to feel comfortable and accepted in situations such as weddings and potluck dinners where I was the only white.

Gene: By choosing to live in the inner city, Faith and I have taken some risks, and the risks haven't only been our own; the risks have been there for our children, too. But we believe that God is calling us to be in this kind of a risk-taking situation, and the outcome is that our children are exposed to things from which they would otherwise be totally isolated.

How has the economic choice you've made for a simple lifestyle affected your family?

Gene: We've tried to help other adults with whom we share economically to be aware of the fact that our children have not made the kind of commitment to simple lifestyle that we have. Although we certainly want to have our example help shape our children's values, we don't want to impose things on them. So we've tried to find a balance between having them learn to live with less and giving them freedom of choice with their money. We've wanted them to find their own level of commitment as they grow in understanding.

David: Being in high school, I've appreciated not having been forced into economic sharing, because high school is a very different world. It's a lot harder for us, because every day for eight hours we see other kids with their nice clothes and nice cars, and we go over to their beautiful homes.

Kristi: Living where we do helps us see that we really don't have so little as we might think. We see people who have so much less than we do. We see the broad range, from rich to poor, and it puts things in perspective.

Lisa: For me, school is the same as living in this neighborhood, because my school is in the inner-city area. Most people at my school don't have that much more than me--it's either the same or less. So it's not like I feel I don't have anything, and I can see there are people who have a lot less than me at our school. That will change when I go to Christian High School.

Gene: I think there is a real advantage in the fact that they experience the tension at the high school level. They are learning how to live, on one hand, with the choices we've made as Christians, and, on the other hand, they see how the rest of the world lives--both the inner-city poor and affluent, suburban America. They're right in the middle of that tension all the time, and that makes it very difficult for us to know what our level of subsistence should be and how much pressure to put on our family around these issues.

We certainly haven't made great strides in being downwardly mobile. But we're trying to put the brakes on, instead of just rushing headlong into greater consumption and upward mobility. We're saying we don't need to feel rich in order to feel like there is substance to life. There is more value to life than what we own or what we are able to buy.

Faith: The kids have seen how we've chosen to spend our money--for conferences, visits to other communities, trips to India and Central America. We made the choice to spend money so that Kristi and I could travel to Washington, D.C., last year, where we participated in Peace Pentecost and the civil disobedience action at the South African Embassy. When the children see these choices, they see what things we value.

Gene: How do you children feel about the possibility of making this kind of a choice for yourselves someday? Do you feel like your experience has been one that has made you say,"I'd never consider this," or do you think you could freely choose a life that's not upwardly mobile?

David: As much as I can see the value of an economic-sharing system, I know it would be hard, especially if you had a good job and were in a position where you were expected to be that upwardly mobile type of person. But that's not to say that I'm not open to it. I understand very much the value of those choices.

Gene: Do you feel at all that you've been deprived and need to choose a more financially secure future?

David: No, I haven't felt deprived. I just know it would be very hard, unless you were in a situation like an intentional community. If you're out living in America, it would be a very hard choice to make.

Kristi: I think, after the exposure to the choices my parents have made, that I couldn't choose the lifestyle of an affluent American. I could see down the road choosing economic sharing. It would be hard. But since we have lived this lifestyle, it would be even harder for me to just go ahead and choose to live the opposite way, because I know inside that this is a good thing to do.

Why did you decide after 12-and-a-half years to leave the extended household style of living and live together as a family?

Gene: Faith and I sensed that there were some things we were missing as a natural family that we wanted to experience. One was that, as helpful as it was to have other adults around, a lot of our time was being spent relating to those adults. As our children grew into adulthood, we needed to take a lot more time to develop the kind of adult-to-adult relationships with them that we had with other adults. That has been very important.

The other thing was that, with so many adults around, there were certain areas of family responsibility that the adults were quicker to see and respond to than the children. Once the other adults weren't there and Mom and Dad couldn't meet all the responsibilities, the children had a choice: Either Mom and Dad go under with all the responsibilities or we, as children going into adulthood, take some responsibility for the family. That was a difficult transition time, but I see our children now taking a lot more responsibility for the things that are necessary for family and household maintenance--and doing it not because they have been told to do it but because they see the importance of it.

Lisa: I remember when people moved out. We had fights about who would help with the dishes every night; with 25 people it had always been covered. But we would have had to face that when we moved out on our own anyway, and I'm glad we had to face the responsibility much earlier.

David: The other thing about having people live here was that, because Mom and Dad were so busy at the church at that time, I developed stronger relationships with some of the other people in the house. Dad was still my Dad and my authority figure, but we didn't have a strong relationship. When our family was on its own, that was awkward at first. But we've come a long way from that.

Kristi: There was a tension when we had a lot of people living here because of how hard it was finding family time among all the meetings and schedules and everyone's commitments to every kind of ministry under the sun. On the whole, though, it was a really positive experience. The hardest thing for me was having people whom I had gotten very close to leave. These were people who were like family to me.

David: Even now there is still a lot of tension, because back when there were all those people, you didn't have to relate to everyone in the family in the same way. Now you have to deal with everyone in the family, and you have to try to maintain good relationships with six different people. That takes a lot of time.

How does your history affect your own thoughts about raising children?

Kristi: I can't imagine myself being capable of handling what you two handled, Mom and Dad, with having all those people living with us and trying to raise kids at the same time; but I think that would be the ideal way to live.

David: The way I was brought up with all those people and the things that were stressed in our life have a lot of value now. I don't know if that is exactly how I would raise my children, but I can see the value of growing up in that kind of environment.

What is the most valuable thing you learned through your years in community?

David: For me I think it is interpersonal relationships. To have really good, deep personal relationships with other people brings me a lot of happiness, and that's important to me.

Kristi: I think the most valuable thing has been a different way of viewing life, a totally different way of seeing things.

Does that feel lonely sometimes?

David: It can. Last year I went through a pretty hard time. At school it felt like I was totally lost with a different frame of mind about everything. With all the experiences and values I had been given, it was hard to find that the world is such a difficult place to live these values out. Eventually I worked through the conflict I felt.

I've always had this gnawing feeling that God has something fairly substantial planned for my life. I kind of want to do the Jonah thing and run and say, "Not me, Lord--someone else." I look at what I've got, and I wonder, where is that going to take me?

Kristi: At times that feels like a really heavy weight. There are so many experiences and so many important things we've been exposed to. I wonder sometimes, what choices are we going to make, and are we going to make the right choices, and are we going to be able to stand up to the seduction of our culture? With all the the experiences we've had, I've had this concern about doing something of lasting value with my life.

Faith: There has always been a sense of meaning and fulfillment and purpose to life outside of this home. There has always been a sense of mission, or calling. Part of what we hope to give the children is the sense that that is important along with the quality of life in our family.

Gene: Because of that sense of mission and vision, we can see our family as a means toward God's kingdom, instead of seeing family as an end in itself, as that thing that we serve, around which everything else revolves. In the process we have experienced a richness of family life that we wouldn't trade for anything. We've been willing to sacrifice family, and God has given us a rich gift back. In the scriptures we read God's promise: If you follow me, I'll give you many friends and much family. And it is true. It's really true.

It just seems that, somehow, in our putting God's kingdom first and being faithful to the call of the gospel on our life, God has led us through perilous waters. It isn't because we read the "How To" books on Christian family development. And it isn't because we have all the answers. When you seek first the kingdom and try to be faithful, the Lord will lead you through the difficult places and give you the insights you need.