Family? What's that?

My recent rant on the subject of family reminded me of a Scripture Union Council weekend some years ago where we spent a long time trying to define what ministry to "families" might be, and even longer trying to define what a "family" actually was. Some time later I did a course on "The Family" in history as part of my degree where we began with a similar discussion but came no closer to a definition. Even after completing the course and studying families in early modern Japan, medieval England, Renaissance Italy, the Caribbean during slavery, the Russian pesantry and North American Indians (among other contexts) we were still no closer to a definition, if anything we were further from one. There is just so much variety! Every definition has problems with it. In the end I think my conclusion is this: family are those people who we consider our selves related to. We know what we mean when we talk of "our family" but everyone's opinion is likely to be slightly different. I'm not pretending this definition is any better than anyone else's, and it certainly has plenty of problems with it.

Recently I was reading the section at the end of Colossians chapter 3/ beginning of chapter 4 that in my Bible is entitled "Rules for Christian households." It talks of three relationships within the household: husband to wife (and vice versa), parent to child (and vice versa), and slave to master (and vice versa, today this might be at least partly covered by saying employee to employer).

I wondered how these applied to modern households. Many people, of course, still live in households which contain one or two of the relationships described (I hope no one in this country has slaves in their household, although for the well off live-in nannies or other servants are still part of their employer's household). For those who do live in "traditional" households, the commands to husbands to love and respect their wives or parents not to embitter their children still sound like good advice to me. (I'm not advocating unconditional female submission to male authority here, just in case you were wondering. There's a lot more in the passage than that and I very much doubt it was what Paul meant anyhow. But that's for another time.)

But as I said yesterday, I live in a shared house where none of us (I imagine) would say we were a family or related to each other except as friends. And this style of household which was unknown in the first century AD is not uncommon in the twenty-first. So how could these rules apply to us, and households like us?

I think the key may be in something Jackie Cray said in commenting on this passage on the WordLive site. (if you don't know it, take a look. It's great!)

"Whatever role we find ourselves in, we are to live for the Lord, serving and living peacefully (in harmony) with others."

And that certainly applies to housemates- helping each other, not getting cross when the washing up starts to accumulate or someone's playing their music too loud, trying to reach amicable compromises when things really do go wrong, cutting people a bit of slack when they've had a bad day...the list goes on. It's the attitude that Paul's trying to get across here, not the specific relationship. It all goes back to Jesus' command: "Love your neighbour as yourself." Or again "Love one another as I have loved you." Do that and I don't think you can go far wrong, whether it's your mother or father, son or daughter, husband or wife, employer or employee or housemate or friend or that bloke at the office that you really can't stand that you're loving.