All And The Family

The experience of natural families within Christian communities has been of central importance to people who desire to share a life that holds the promise of growth for children, parents, and single adults. At the annual meeting in February of the Community of Communities, a circle of communities of which Sojourners Fellowship is a part (see "A Community of Communities," January, 1980), Sojourners convened an informal discussion on this topic. Members of several different communities participated in the conversation found below.

Joe Roos (Sojourners Fellowship): Let's begin with looking at how community life and natural family life affect each other. How do they nurture each other, and how do they conflict?

Virgil Vogt (Reba Place Fellowship): I've been impressed over the years at how necessary the larger community is to the health and growth of natural families. Members of the natural family need other people with whom they can work out tensions and struggles so that the natural family does not carry those burdens alone.

People need to get the message that family is important. A community can give the necessary words of encouragement so that the competition of the society and all that we are involved in—jobs, recreation, education—don't make us neglect family.

Margo Farra (Community of Celebration): My husband, John, and I share a common desire about what to do with our life and our family, and the community is an outlet for that vision.

John and I can't give our four children all the love they need. We can't contain all of our brokenness, all of our needs for love and acceptance, just in each other. Making a way for people to come in and be a part of our marriage and our family enables our children to feel more loved and accepted.

Another advantage of community is that my children don't feel totally responsible for my happiness, because my life is a creative one, and my gifts are being developed in the community. They can see all facets of John and myself.

And natural family can be a real gift to a community as it sees us being accountable for one another—as it sees the love and responsibility that natural brothers and sisters feel toward one another.

Elmer Fischesser (New Jerusalem Community): Parents constantly tell me that the gift of community has been to deepen their marriage relationships, their ability to communicate and to love one another. And they see this deeper way of relating being passed on to their children.

Jackie Sabath (Sojourners Fellowship): A great gift to my husband, Bob, and me from the community has been its willingness to support and uphold us in our experimentation with mutual parenting of Peter, our two-year-old. If we were out on our own, we would feel much more pressure to make it alone financially and emotionally, and find it much easier to fall into traditional roles.

Faith Beerens (Christ's Community): As I think back over the past ten or eleven years, the thing that stands out most in my mind is how our children have benefited from having been exposed to so much in a creative and constructive way. My children are going to be more well-rounded and more prepared for what they'll encounter as adults than we were.

Jim Tamialis (Sojourners Fellowship): In community I've had to come to terms with my limitations as a husband and father. A community puts pressure on a family to look at how it relates within itself. That's difficult. But as we have had to face these things, I have felt my family held together by the community. And I'm a better husband and father.

Steve Bisset (Menominee River Fellowship): Having other adults relating to the children has not always been an easy thing for me. But the community has affected my inbred image of family as I have had to "let go" of my son Joshua by allowing other adults to have a primary place in his life and by resisting my desire to make him into my image. I needed to find the freedom to see him as a gift to others and not my possession, and to see other adults forming his life in a way that doesn't separate us as father and son but actually enhances the relationship.

Margaret Wilson (Bartimaeus Community): When our community came together, ours was the only family. Our sons were eight and eleven years old. Our family had been established for a long time, and we were trying to reverse the patterns of an upwardly mobile lifestyle. Most of the others in the community were single, in their early twenties, with a great deal of idealism but not much experience.

My husband and I felt that we were more of a problem to the community than an asset, always dragging it down with our needs as a family. It's only been in the last few years that we have begun to see our family as a gift to the community. And I think the community is seeing that too.

Elmer Fischesser: Family has always been a very important concept in our community. We have taken the experience of family and tried to incorporate it into our community structures, sensing that our understanding of spiritual family would be nourished by our knowledge of natural family.

Our community began as a group of young, single people—somewhat independent and very idealistic—and in the last five years has become a community made up primarily of families. This movement toward building family units has had an effect on the community as people discover their needs for security and an environment in which their children can grow to be loving individuals. We have come to realize that our pastoral responsibility for adults has to be offered to the extension of those adults—their natural families.

Margo Farra: We share our household with two single adults and a young married couple without children. I have to say that if people want to live in our household, then they have to know that there are four kids and that life centers around them—at a very rapid pace. That means ballet lessons and volleyball, parties to chaperone, toilet training. Our communities have a strong commitment to family, and when we forget that, things start to break down. Too many years of my life I gave too much to other people, and my children have suffered. A better situation is one in which people can come in and become part of the commitment that I feel to my children.

Jim Tamialis: That marks a great deal of pain that I feel from the past in relationship to our kids. When we came to Sojourners, our sons were just barely one year old and about three months old. We put them through a lot, hoping that they would fit in. We brought a lot of people into our household and into relationship with them without understanding the implications of it.

One of the positive things that we've gone through in the community is our recommitment, or perhaps our first solid commitment, to tending to the needs of family in community. That doesn't mean we bend the whole community around family; there's a give and take that is very important. For example, the size of a household can be a factor. It's easy for kids to get lost in a swim of adults.

It's really freeing for me to know that I don't expect people who come to live in my household to be a Tamialis and relate to my children as Barb and I do, or to bear the same responsibility for them. I've heard painful stories of people who have come into a household and were expected to be an appendage of the family and who had trouble maintaining their own sense of identity.

We need to be committed to others in their singleness, their struggles, extending ourselves to them as much as we're asking them to extend themselves to us. And we've seen the joy that they experience in giving to our children in creative ways.

Jackie Sabath: Our communities are characterized by our commitment to the gospel and the meaning of the incarnation and the cross. A deep part of that meaning is forgiveness. Because of the depth of my and our community's understanding of the gospel, I am able to more readily offer and ask for forgiveness from Peter, and to know that there's a real response going on already in our relationship. I think that as he and the other children grow—and I've seen it already in our community's older children—they're going to experience that forgiveness and reconciliation more between themselves. I see that as a real gift to all of us, but particularly to our children.

Faith Beerens: Community provides a choice for children as they see our energies given to people in response to Christ's mandate to be concerned about the oppressed and those who are poor. They have an example to look at as they decide where to invest their lives. They see our energy as a family not only directed toward our small circle but also to a larger group of people who have been drawn together by God and are committed to one another.

Jackie Spann (Church of the Messiah): That has been for me one of the most important benefits of the community to our family. Sometimes, however, the pressures of outward ministry take us away from family. Yet this is also a positive pressure not to be turned in on ourselves. There has to be a balance.

Margo Farra: There's a security in our call. I feel that there is a call on my life and on John's, and somehow God has got to make sense out of that. We've got to do our homework in relationship to one another and our family, but I also entrust a great deal to God.

Virgil Vogt: Christian families struggle to live out moral values and lifestyle choices that are different from the rest of society, and it is very beneficial for the health and welfare of the family if there are others around who are also at home with those values. It's particularly helpful if the community is large enough to have peers for the children.

Joe Roos: What are some of the tensions that our choice for community has raised in children? What about those in smaller communities who don't have much peer support for handling the difficulty of different values?

Jackie Spann: Our children have experienced a lot of tension. Our black children have experienced it in their school because they are harassed by their black friends for living with whites. All our children experience direct peer pressure about the different way we live, but they also have an unspoken desire coming deep from within to want to be like other kids.

Margo Farra: I can remember when John and I came into this lifestyle after having been a family for ten years—it hurt so bad my eyelashes ached. All of a sudden, there were these people observing our relationship with each other and our children, and the enlightenment that brought was almost unbearable.

But I think about something my daughter Jody told me during her first week of school in sixth grade. She didn't have a new outfit to wear every day, and the kids asked her, "Are you poor?" And she said, "No, we're not poor; we just have a lot of people that we care for."

I will always, and I think we must always, remember the pain of that first love for our new life. And when our children talk about the struggles they're having with it, we must really listen in a way that they know that we know what they're talking about. We need to be able to say, "Here are our values; here is what's important to us; can you bear it with us?"

Joe Roos: The experiences of our children in our neighborhood school, where they are the only non-black students enrolled, have brought home to me the importance of taking the pastoring of our children as seriously as we do one another. We have made a deliberate choice to live differently from most of our backgrounds. Some of the adjustments are very hard. But, unlike our children, we have the emotional maturity to cope with those adjustments.

Jackie Spann: Listening to our children as they try to figure out their world is a particularly important role. I guess you could say it's a very important ministry.

Steve Bisset: I think another important ministry that we try to make a habit of is praying for our children. As simple as that may seem, taking our children seriously means a commitment to pray for them. In many ways I think they are—whether they're aware of it or not—in the thick of the battle already in terms of values and choices that they have to make. They are more "in the world" than we are. That fact should encourage us to enter into prayer for them, so that they'll know in their small ways as children God's grace in difficult situations.

Faith Beerens: Christi, our oldest daughter, is fifteen. I'm finding that the tension she is experiencing is making her open to talking with me.

One of the most difficult things she faces is the downwardly mobile monetary choices we have made. It's hard to know when to hold the line about what we believe and when to respond from the generosity of our hearts and say, "You deserve the very best." I want my children to receive the message that they are very loved and cared for.

Christi and I have been able to talk about these things, and more and more I'm seeing how, deep in her heart, she treasures our life, our church, and what we stand for. But the thing she repeatedly says to me is, "I'm alone. I am all alone."

I feel a need to pray constantly for discernment, understanding, and wisdom about how to walk through this with her. When she talks to me about our choices and about not having the things other people have, I am driven back to asking myself, "Where am I?" I'm leading her into all that she is standing against, and it's taking all the resources I have in relationship to the Lord and other people to walk that path myself, while at the same time trying to hold her hand and say, "Walk with me."

Jackie Spann: It has been hardest to exhibit a true spirit of generosity or freely transmit my values to my children when I am unresolved in that area myself. It is very important not to pass a law on to our children. The most generous thing we can do for them is to enter into their struggles. This can be very threatening for us as parents and as communities. When some of our choices for lifestyle are challenged, we will often find that there is more that God has to heal and transform in our hearts and souls.

Virgil Vogt: I think different ones of us have said this, but I just want to underscore the point that our children pay a tremendous price for the life that we live by virtue of being so different. This comes especially at developmental stages, in which acceptance and being like others seem most important.

Steve Bisset: It's at the point of the pain we feel for our children that we have so many questions about the choices we have made. I have a suspicion that in the long term, grappling with what it means to be different is going to be very important for our kids, because it's so basic to what it means to be a follower of Jesus. It will breed a maturity in them, and maybe help them avoid having to go through what we had to in order to learn that being a Christian means being unlike the world.

Margaret Wilson: I'd like to share an example of that. Our move to a low-income neighborhood was very hard on the children. There was violence among the neighborhood children, and I remember feeling tremendous pain, thinking we had done the wrong thing, and wondering why we were putting our children through so much.

But the fruits have come. Our youngest son, Brent, has a racially mixed friend who is rejected by the neighborhood. After Brent witnessed a difficult interaction between his friend and his parents, he came home and said, "Oh, Mom, I feel bad that he is having to go through this hard time. I'm really glad we moved down here so that I can be his friend." Brent has seen a bit of conversion here. And that is a gift.

Jackie Sabath: I'm sensing that Peter and any other children whom God might give us are going to be a primary source of conversion for me. I don't know any of the specifics of what this means, but I think it has a lot to do with learning how to entrust Peter's life to God in a world that's bent on destruction. We're called to live life, to create life, to nurture life; and yet when we look down the road and see what's ahead of us, that's a very scary path, and it almost seems foolish. It took me a long time to decide to have children, because I felt that I didn't have the faith to have them. I can see how God is going to use my children for my own conversion, and as a sign of hope for the entire community.