Someone was talking about fear in a class today, and they mentioned how much more fear there is when you get married and have kids, because you have more people relying upon you. And while there is no doubt something true in this, it bothered me. Here’s why:
Our isolating and elevating of the nuclear family has led to this kind of thinking, that the only people that should demand something of us are our nuclear family members. We don’t need to shoulder anyone else’s burdens or feel responsible for them.
The NT, however, speaks much more frequently and strongly about the church, the new family of God, than the nuclear family. We are responsible for one another and bound to each other in ways that transcend and relativize our commitment to our immediate family.
Our brotherhood and sisterhood is not merely a spiritual reality, it makes material demands upon us: to feed, clothe, & care for each other; to uplift the marginalized among us; to have our commitment to each other be so strong as to witness to the world the truth of the gospel.
The sentiment behind the statement I heard today is probably true. We do feel the weight of obligations to other people when they are immediately related to us, and we don’t feel that weight to others.
AND YET the reality of a church supernaturally created and sustained by God is that it totally reorients our life, relationships, and obligations. We are not our own, and neither are our families.
So this person was right that single people *can* live with no obligation to take care of other people. But in the church, they cannot. And nuclear families in the church cannot live as if they have no obligation to those outside their family, either.
The scary thing about our isolation of the nuclear family is that one of the earliest & most central functions of the church is lost: to take care of the marginalized and the poor. This includes widows and orphans, and it also includes singles.
We need to work harder in our churches to instill this ancient idea: we belong to each other. As a single person who belongs to a church, I am compelled to give up my “freedom” and take on obligations, and the families in my church should be extending their obligation to others.
I, really and truly, want to feel that people in my church rely on me. And I want to be able to rely on them. What an incredible witness to an increasingly-isolated world, that we are a people who choose to widen our family to include others, especially the lonely and forgotten.
