Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 351 | Enfolding Singles in Your Home

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Ep. 351 | Enfolding Singles in Your Home · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:04
  What's up, guys? Welcome back to the 5-Minute Fatherhood segment. We want to talk a little bit about enfolding singles and just a question we get a lot from people who are trying to figure out, okay, you guys talk about family, obviously, all the time, this whole conversation about family teams, but what about singles? And this is really articulated well by something that somebody wrote to us online. They said, hey—
• 0:25
  Friends, question. In conversations about families and family teams, I've had some consistent pushback in our ministry from individuals who are single saying things like, this type of thing continues to marginalize single people and pushes aside like the church has always done. I struggle with this for a whole slew of reasons, but I'm wondering what y'all's thoughts are and or how to handle this type of questioning.
• 0:47
  Also, I remember listening to Jeremy on how single people are brought into the family team. And I'm wondering if there is a video podcast, and we're going to do that right now. So this is a really good question. And this, like I said, is something we talk and get to a lot of times. There's a couple of things that I think are important to differentiate. One is...
• 1:04
  Should we make sure all of our language is always inclusive of every person? Okay, that's one sort of topic in itself. And this has been really, really hard on families. There's a ministry that I was a part of that really shut down all conversations about family because it couldn't include everybody. This has also been—I was listening to a conversation between two psychologists who said that really within the psychological community—
• 1:28
  They've shut down almost all conversation about single motherhood or saying that there's something normative or especially beneficial about having a father-mother intact home because it causes people to feel left out. It causes single mothers to feel like they have already got the hardest job in the world. Why are you making it harder on us?
• 1:47
  And this is a really subtle problem, which is, you know, I want to separate these two problems, but there is a subtle problem that we have in our culture that really didn't exist until recently, which is that we actually avoid and we tear down or we try to ignore ideals that feel like they're somewhat exclusive.
• 2:04
  And this is incredibly dangerous because ideals need to be explored and understood because they give us the opportunity to aim at the right thing. And so what happens when you remove from culture even the ability to talk about ideals, that actually might be somewhat beneficial for that generation because that generation isn't going to have to suffer through the feelings of exclusion that talking about ideals can create and do create, understandably create. The problem is the next generation doesn't know what to aim at.
• 2:33
  And so you've erased from the cultural memory what we're actually trying to achieve, because in the present, people are going to suffer from the feeling of loss that's going to be brought up by that. So that is a huge problem our culture is struggling with right now. And so in general, I would say we've got to be really careful—
• 2:52
  not to destroy ideals, but to try to use language that allows us to be inclusive of others and understanding of others without also trying to avoid talking about what those ideals look like. So that's one sort of segment of this is like, should we talk about ideals? Because they make that feeling. The other thing that this writer is...
• 3:14
  articulating is obviously there is a relationship that needs to be explored between singles and families. And one of the things that I believe that we need to be communicating to singles and to the whole church, as the scriptures say, that God places the solitary in homes or in families. And so we want to create strong families, and then we need to make sure that we are enfolding singles into them.
• 3:38
  And so that is definitely a part of the vision of creating a family, creating an outpost, creating a dynamic family that has the ability to adopt spiritual orphans or enfold singles who are on mission into the family team. They're a part of what we like to call the arm in the outpost dynamic of the family on mission.
• 3:57
  And so this idea that they are excluded or walled off is really part of the problem with the way that people think about family today, which is that it is a nuclear family that keeps everybody out, that is not a part of that original tiny family bond. And that is not historically how the family has been envisioned. It certainly wasn't what was going on in the Old Testament or the New Testament.
• 4:18
  You see that these families were much larger. They were full households that had singles and lots of people multigenerationally from the family in the household. So those are kind of two elements. There's how do we talk about ideals, and there's how do we unfold singles that need to be explored in order for us not to really hurt people as we're having a conversation about family team. But, yeah, Jeff, how have you thought about this tension?
• 4:42
  Yeah, I think you said it all on this one. The only thing I would add is, again, the biblical vision of family is way larger where no one is left out. That's the premise of biblical family, right? So the nuclear family is an idea of family that if you don't fit this idea, then you don't fit. But the biblical vision of a family is, do you have a last name? And then you're a part of a family then, right? Like, that's just, it's as simple as that.
• 5:04
  Now there might be some repair that needs to be done or whatever, or even some, you know, maybe that it doesn't, it doesn't get repaired in your family. So you can unfold it into another family, you know, et cetera. And we know all those awesome, awesome connections, relationships, but yeah, like that, that's, it's so large, like that. And by the way, it's kind of tongue in cheek, but like, if you have a last name, that's everyone, right? So it's like kind of like anyone is part of a family. And so I think that part needs to be redeemed as like a larger, bigger bucket so that then there's more room for people in it. And the scripture does say that for sure.
• 5:31
  That's right. And this is part of, of course, what God does is he says we're all a part of the family of God. He's our father. And so we don't want to destroy or diminish what the family is or expressing it in these micro ways because we are a part of this larger thing and that this is the vision for what God's ultimately building.
• 5:48
  And so this is another cost to not embracing this multi-generational family ideal, because God is saying, look, I want you to relate to me in this way. I want to—this is what I'm building. I'm building a household. All families in heaven and earth derive their name from my household—
• 6:04
  And so this is a spiritual picture of the larger reality that all of us as believers are a part of, and that we need to reflect and experience often through our own families and by unfolding others into our families. And so, yeah, this is a really important topic. The other alternative, and this is what I think is really important to understand, is that there is an alternative to everything we're describing, and that is to destroy all of these family bonds and only relate to people in the church as individuals, right?
• 6:31
  And that is a complete capitulation to our culture. That is not a good path. We are not merely individuals. A lot of our meaning in life and a lot of the direction that we have in life and a lot of the goodness and fullness and abundance in life comes from family relationships. So breaking everything down to the individual level and only celebrating individualism.
• 6:50
  is a disease in our culture that we need to resist and not embrace. So it's important to think about those various movements, and we're going to be seeing people become more sensitive to these conversations because our culture is really embracing a move towards hyper-individualism. We need to also resist that and understand it and talk about it in ways that are healing and helpful to people in our different networks of relationships.