Community: The Goal of Family Ministry
By Diana R. Garland
[Dr. Diana Garland is Director of the Baylor Center for Family and Community Ministries at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. This article is excerpted from her forthcoming book, Family Ministry, to be published by InterVarsity Press.]
- Communities are Not Always Geographically Defined
- Family Members Do Not Share the Same Communities
- Communities are Not Always Supportive
- The Costs of Community: Are they worth it?
- Implications for Ministry
A family`s most immediate social ecology is the community. If "home" is the first layer of habitat for a family, then "community" is the next layer. The people in our community know us. They are people we can borrow from or who will take care of a child in an emergency, the persons from whom we can obtain news and gossip so that we know the significant and not so significant information that gives shape to our lives, the persons who can help us find a new medical specialist or someone to work on our car. The community also consists of organizations that care for us and know us, as well as those to which we contribute. These are represented by the bank teller who remembers our name, the church where we have served and been served through the years, the children who were members of the scout troop one`s spouse led.
Community includes the physical environment that also, by being familiar, communicates a sense of belonging. The smells of the river or the factory or the pine trees down the street are, like the smell of Grandma`s house, part of the canvas of daily experience so familiar that it is hardly noticed until we are absent. We know the streets and do not need a map to find our way around. We sit in the same pew on Sunday and look at the same stained glass windows from the same angle, and can predict who else will sit where. We know where to find tomato sauce an in the grocery store without having to consult the store directory.
We hardly think about or recognize community until it is changed, or we leave. Upon return after a long absence, the sights, smells, and greetings from familiar people may flood us with emotion. All these point to the familiar niche that community is. It consists of people, organizations, and physical environment that keep us from depending solely on the persons within our family to meet all our personal, social, physical, and spiritual needs, and who communicate, "This is your place; you belong here."
The African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" became a political slogan pointing to the importance of community for children, but it does not quite go far enough. All persons, both children and adults, need community. Because children are dependent on others for their survival, their vulnerability in the absence of community is more apparent. As James Garbarino has pointed out, children are like the canaries miners used to take with them into mine shafts. Canaries are particularly sensitive to poisonous gasses, and if they succumbed, the miners knew the environment was dangerous (Garbarino, 1995). Like canaries in mine shafts without adequate fresh air, children "succumb" without adequate communities of nurture and support. Adults, too, however, need to live in community. Some seem to need community more than others, but even self-sufficient adults seek the company of others and need a community when they become in, injured, or threatened.
Anyone who has moved from one community to another can testify to the vulnerability that families experience when stripped of their community. The simplest activities require greater effort; a trip to a grocery store or a laundry may require thirty minutes of preparation time spent with the telephone yellow pages in one hand and a city map in the other. It takes twice as long to find needed items in a strange grocery store. The very simple forms of mutual aid that typify functional communities are missing. There is no known neighbor who can watch one child while the other is taken to the emergency room for stitches. And which doctor is "good"? Informal sources of communication do not exist; and often, what a family needs to know about its immediate social environment, like who the best doctors are, is only available through informal channels.
After 27 years of living in Kentucky, we moved to Texas last year. Normally, I pride myself on being resourceful and competent as co-manager of our household. Suddenly, however, formerly rather mindless and insignificant tasks required a lot of thought, and threatened to overwhelm me with a sense of being alone and vulnerable in a new place I did not know or understand. When we were preparing to leave on a trip, there were no neighbors I knew to ask to pick up our mail and keep an eye on things while we were gone. I cleaned out the refrigerator before we left, but there was no one to whom I could give the half carton of eggs, the piece of cheese, and the fruit, so I had to throw them away. I didn`t know any teenagers in the neighborhood whom I could ask to cut the grass and water the potted plants. These are very small issues, I thought to myself. What if I was ill and needed help in caring for a toddler, or my husband was in an automobile accident and I needed transportation to the hospital? Who could I call on to help me?
Connections with others shape and reinforce a person`s sense of competence and mastery. Not only does the experience of moving to a new community describe loneliness; it also describes a sense of vulnerability to being unable to handle everyday life stressors with competence. In situations of difficulty, a community can provide a family with social support and tangible aid.
A community also provides opportunities for a family to serve others. Serving others contributes to a sense of competence. Families are strengthened through their efforts to make the world a better place, and the community is their most immediate world. Those efforts include everything from participating in the community`s recycling program, tending the home and yard to make the community more attractive, providing leadership in community organizations, and helping others with social support and tangible assistance– even if it is only sharing leftover groceries before a trip.
The personal sense of security derived from social connections not only helps us to manage life stresses but also, when needed, to muster the courage to make changes. A community provides models of others who have dealt with similar circumstances. It helps a family to have community connections with others who have cared for an older family member with Alzheimer`s disease or an adult child with AIDS. A family with newborn twins may discover other parents of twins in the community happy to pass down strollers, other baby equipment, and helpful advice. Years ago, when our toddler son was discovered to have serious allergies to wheat gluten and dairy products, I was at a loss. There are few typical toddler-type foods that do not contain one or the other. A close friend at church, however, knew someone who had a child with the same allergies. She put us in touch with one another, and soon I had tapped into a whole network of parents who had helpful advice and recipes for home-baked toddler biscuits and other foods that did not contain wheat or dairy products.
Communities are Not Always Geographically Defined
Historically, communities have been defined geographically as the social and physical surrounds of the family household. The concept of "neighborhood" conveys that sense of geographic community. Th neighborhood included the other households and social institutions with which the family shared a particular geographic location. Indeed, neighborhoods still do function as communities, in some places more than others. Neighbors still help one another with care of their physical property and can often be called upon in an emergency.
With the move of work and schooling out of the household and the consequent daily travel of family members out of the immediate physical neighborhood, however, community has taken on more of a social/functional definition than a geographic definition. Magnet schools pull children from all over a region, replacing neighborhood schools. Children no longer walk to school through a familiar neighborhood of people who at least know them by sight. Now they ride school busses to regional schools located sometimes miles from home territory and far from easy involvement of parents and others in their community. Regional shopping mans have supplanted small local businesses. Lower prices and much larger selections in mega-stores inadvertently have led to end the community relationships that existed in neighborhood shops frequented by the same customers. Bank machines operated from a central location have replaced neighborhood banks. Regional sports leagues have displaced informal sandlot neighborhood play. Adults, like children going to regional schools, travel far from their neighborhood for the day`s work and play.
One can imagine a time-exposed aerial photograph of a family`s daily movements which would provide a map of the family`s community–to various places of employment and schooling, to shopping centers and grocery stores, to visit friends and family in other neighborhoods, to a fast food restaurant for a family meal, to soccer practice or ballet lessons or the pediatrician. A family`s automobile is the family encapsulated, moving from one node of community to another, often through "foreign" (not-part-of-the-family`s-community) territory. The streets of the neighborhood used to be the place where neighbors met neighbor s and community developed and functioned. Now streets are passageways that connect geographically separated nodes of community life, but they themselves are not locations of community.
As a consequence of all these changes, the neighborhood and the community have become separate entities. Particularly for middle class families, their community is often flung over a much larger region. Before the advent of the automobile, the symbols of community might have been the front porch swing, the unlatched kitchen screen door open to a neighbor stopping in for a cup of coffee or to borrow an egg, the drug store soda counter on the comer where people gathered "just to talk," the park bench. By contrast, today`s symbol of community might be the mini-van, transporting the family to the various places where the family receives community services and makes its own investment in the community.
This is particularly true of families with school-age children who require parental transportation in order to play with friends, play sports, take music lessons, and so on. During this period in our own children`s lives, many mornings I felt like we were going on a trip rather than just living the day. Indeed, each day was a trip. Bags had to be packed for school for children and for work for parents, for the gym for a parent getting some exercise on lunch hour, for soccer clothes for the child with practice after school, for the other child`s violin lesson. Many families leave the household not to return for ten or more hours. The automobile becomes the place where clothes are changed, meals are eaten, and important family conversations are held. In many families of . school-age children, it seems a far distant past when the family was rooted in the household, when children and parents came home to eat lunch together, when children played across the back yards of the neighborhood rather than at appointed times at a regional soccer center, when birthday parties were held on the family picnic table rather than at the man`s pizza and game center.
Families in which all members drive themselves, however, often do not have this connection in the family vehicle. Instead, family life is a set of community nodes with no connection to one another. Adult family members may meet one another for lunch or dinner, and the restaurant table (or the church supper) replaces the kitchen table as hub of family life. Many middle-class families take two or three cars to church and other activities, meeting and leaving one another there rather than coming and going together.
At the same time, perhaps this mobility and scattered community points to the much greater significance of place given the family home today. "Cocooning," or staying in the home with videos to watch and a pizza delivered, has become the recreation of choice for many families tired from all the running to connect the dots of their scattered lives.
This "cocooning" has also moved community into a new dimension without geography–that of
"cyberspace." Instead of gathering on the street comer or park benches or barber shop, Internet "buddies" gather in "chat rooms" via the world wide web, without ever leaving home. There they write messages back and forth to one another. This kind of community seems one-dimensional and impoverished when compared to a community where people see each other and touch one another, where babies are bounced on knees and arms are thrown around one another`s shoulders. On the other hand, many persons who otherwise feel isolated and alone in their geographic communities seems to find significant support and connection via the electronic community. Persons struggling with debilitating and rare physical illnesses can converse with others in the same struggle who live half-way around the world. A young man for the first time confronting issues of homosexual orientation in his life can talk with others dealing with the same issues in the safety and seeming anonymity of e-mail and on-line conversations.
It should also be noted that families living in poverty, who do not own an automobile, much less one for every family member`s use, often live in more geographically constrained communities. The vitality and support of the walking community is very important for the health and well-being of these families (Vosler, 1996).
Family Members Do Not Share the Same Communities
The last vestige of neighborhood as community has been rapidly fading since women began joining the workforce. The demise of neighborhood as community began, however, when work first began being separated from home, and men packed lunch boxes and left home not to return for most of each day. They began developing collegial relationships in the workplace-away from the neighborhood–and neighboring decreased. Those women who were still working in the home became the primary contact point for the family with its neighborhood/community. They still prepared lunch for children coming home from school; they served as volunteers in school and church and civic organizations; they visited with and cared for neighbors. Men increasingly relied on women to be the community connection for the family.
As women joined the workplace, however, the final reliable community contact began to fray. In the thirty years from 1960 to 1990, the proportion of families in which men are the sole breadwinners declined from 42% to 15 % (Wilkie, 1991). Schools began serving lunches at school. Those women still working at home found themselves in empty neighborhoods, except for senior adults and latchkey children who returned at the end of the school day. Women in the workforce also developed friendships through their places of employment, the places where they spent much more of their time than the neighborhood.
The friendships adults formed in the workplace are individual friendships, however, not family friendships. Work colleagues may have never seen a person`s home or know who else lives there. One research study found that only about 25% of community relationships of one spouse are included in the community of the partner (Milardo, 1989).
Therefore, it is not simply that the changing ecology of family life has flung community more widely; it has endangered the very existence of community for many families. The most vulnerable families are those for whom mobility has meant moving from one location to another. Rodney Clapp (Clapp, 1993) has suggested that the image of family life, particularly in the American suburbs, which is where our society tends to think of family life, is no longer the sturdy, intricately rooted tree. Instead, it is a hydroponic plant that floats on the water`s surface and easily adapts when moved from one tank to another. Trees contribute to and are nourished by their environment; they cannot be uprooted without serious damage both to the tree and to the ecological niche from which it is removed. Hydroponic plants, on the other hand, can be moved with little effect either way. Rootless suburban families attempt to substitute for community with several single-purpose pseudo- communities. Pseudo- communities are voluntary associations formed around shared interests–children`s sporting leagues, self-help groups, Bible study.
These pseudo-communities are often engaged in by individual family members, not by the family as a whole. Each family member has his or her own set of outside relationships. These relationships are more tenuous and less supportive of the family as a group. As Clapp says, "If I play racquetball with you once a week or sit in your reading group once a month, what business is it of yours if I cheat on my wife?" (Clapp, 1993, p. 50). Pseudo-communities bring together those who are socially, economically, or culturally similar. Their chief purpose is to enjoy being with those who share common lifes-styles (Brueggemann, 1996). Self-help groups such as twelve-step programs or weight-monitoring groups are "pseudo- communities" because they are based on one dimensional commonality rather than the multi-salient relationships that characterize a community.
Families are not hydroponic. They function best when they are deeply rooted and nurtured as families and not just as collections of individuals. We need the community to know us as a family. That is why marriages are public events; there is wisdom in publicly acknowledging the creation of a family as an entity. Betty Carter, a prominent family therapist, has argued that we are experiencing a massive collapse in America of community. "The current red herring–that divorce and any family structure that diverges from the traditional breadwinner male/homemaker female is causing social breakdown–is exactly backward. It is social breakdown–disappearance of community–that is undermining even strong and devoted families" (Carter, 1995 pp. 33, 35). We have lost the informal sharing of work, recreation, resources, and help in times of need. We have also lost the spiritual sense of belonging to something larger than our own small, separate family unit.
Carter has admonished family therapists to broaden their assessment of families to include their connections to the community. Part of a good assessment should be asking the questions: Is this family contributing anything beyond their own circle? Do they belong somewhere, besides sitting around their own dinner table (Carter, 1995)? it is not just that families need communities; communities also need families to nurture and socialize their members for effective community participation.
Communities are Not Always Supportive
Of course, just as families do not always function in the most optimal ways but may become stuck in less creative and even harmful patterns of relationships, so do communities. Communities may isolate and shun rather than support families, communicating to a family a sense of not belonging rather than a sense of place. A community may add to rather than share in the burden a family is trying to bear. One of the most significant ways churches can minister with families it to develop strong, functional communities. Even the best of communities, however, are not perfect. And all communities have significant costs as well as benefits for their members.
Just as families are nurtured and stressed by their community environments, so communities are nurtured and stressed by the larger society which is their environment. An inner-city slum is often a dysfunctional community because of social forces far beyond the members and physical resources of the community. Suburbs, city communities, rural towns and villages all are influenced by larger factors such as government policies, the practices of national and international corporations, and the pollution of water and air by communities far distant from them.
The Costs of Community: Are they worth it?
Stephanie Coontz describes her experience of parenting during a visit with Hawaiian-Filipino friends on the island of Lanai:
My child was still in diapers, and I greatly appreciated the fact that nearly every community function, from weddings to baptisms to New Year`s Eve parties, was open to children. I could sit and socialize and keep an eye on my toddler, and I assumed that was what all the other parents were doing. Soon, however, I noticed that I was the only person jumping up to change a diaper, pick my son up when he fen, wipe his nose, dry his eyes, or ply him with goodies. Belatedly, I realized why: The other parents were not keeping an eye on their kids. Instead, each adult kept an eye on the floor around his or her chair. Any child who moved into that section of the floor and needed disciplining, feeding, comforting, or changing was promptly accommodated; no parent felt compelled to check that his or her own child was being similarly cared for (Coontz, 1992, p. 2 10).
To mainland Americans used to hearing almost total responsibility for their own members, this picture seems almost idyllic. But this reliance on the community does not come without a price. It means trusting others with our precious children, and that may mean knowing that others will not respond in just the way we would. How would the author have felt if someone else had disciplined her child more harshly than she considered acceptable? Reliance on community also means caring for other people`s children. It means more responsibility for others, and less for ourselves, more freedom from having to do it all ourselves, but also less control. There are good reasons that Americans have embraced family autonomy and responsibility. There is much greater choice and freedom, although the cost is lessened support and nurture from the community.
The swapping of services and tangible resources carries obligations. Accepting help carries with it the expectation that the help will sooner or later be reciprocated, one way or another. Perhaps this obligation is that from which the middle class has sought freedom through its financial resources. For this reason, many families would much prefer purchasing the help they need–a carry-out meal during family illness, for example, rather than a covered dish dinner from a Sunday School class.
Obligations may even become codified into unwritten principles of etiquette. The covered dish dinner obligates the recipient to, at the very least, write a thank-you note and participate in similar care for others in time of need. In some communities, if the recipient is able to do so, the baking dish in which food has been offered in a time of crisis is returned "full" to its owner. That is, the recipient of the initial care prepares food to return in the dish as a way of saying "thank you."
The costs of living in community create costs that are easily overlooked by persons weary of having to bear life burdens virtually alone. Most families with children today are adult-deprived; there do not ever seem to be enough hands and hours to do the chores of household management, caregiving to dependent members, and nurture of shared life. Yankelovich has suggested that our society seems to work on a1urch and learn" principle. We have lurched from work embedded in community relationships to individual hedonism, only to learn that it resulted in isolation and the loss of community (Yankelovich, 1996). Before lurching back toward embracing more community, its costs must also be recognized. Community does not mean simply being supported in times of stress and crisis; it also means supporting others. It means not only receiving welcome support and advice; it also means being the recipient of unwelcome advice and meddling on the part of well-meaning, or not so well-meaning, community members. One young mother described her despair at the constant stream of family members and friends to the hospital where her child was critically ill. I just needed some time to be alone with my husband," she said. When neighbors share, items shared are sometimes damaged or not returned at all. That is the cost of community. In some ways, communities are like children; they disrupt, stress, and bring high price tags that are often not considered beforehand. On the other hand, they can bring a sense of fulfillment, rootedness, and even joy.
Implications for Ministry
Congregations can be a significant extrafamilial physical and social environment for families. The church as a physical environment can be an extension of the home, a place where families eat and play and talk and worship and serve others together in a context which supports and values their commitments to each other. It can also be a place where family members can gain privacy from one another and can find peer groups and friends who give balance to family life.
Congregations can help families cope effectively with life stressors, helping them to discern what is reasonable and not reasonable to expect of themselves, providing a community where they can talk with and receive mutual support from other families dealing with similar stressors, being the community which together takes on those social and cultural systems that are creating dis-stress for families.
Families need to be rooted in a community, whether that community is a geographic neighborhood or network of physical nodes scattered geographically. Congregations can serve as significant community "nodes" where families can be nurtured and can contribute as families, not simply as individuals.
Brueggemann, W. G. (1996). The practice of macro social work. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
Carter, B. (1995). Focusing your wide-angle lens. Family Therapy Networker, 19(6), 31-35.
Clapp, R. (1993). Families at the crossroads: Beyond traditional & modern options. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.
Coontz, S. (1992). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. New York: Basic Books.
Garbarino, 1 (1995). Raising children in a socially toxic environment. San Francisco: JosseyBass.
Milardo, R. M. (1989). Theoretical and methodological issues in the identification of the social networks of spouses. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 51, 165-174.
Vosler, N. R. (1996). New approaches to family practice: Confronting economic stress. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Wilkie, I R. (1991). The decline in men`s labor force participation and income and the changing structure of family economic support. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 53(l (February)), I I 1- 122.
Yankelovich, D. (1996, Sept. 10- 11, 1996). Keynote address. Paper presented at the Religion and the American Family Debate, Chicago.
