The Church As Forged Family: A Reply to David Brooks

Editor’s Note: The following essay from Andrew Walker is the seventh response in the Institute for Family Studies' symposium on David Brooks' essay on the nuclear family. 

David Brooks has written a masterful essay on both the history and state of the American family. It is so good, in fact, that I intend for it to be required reading in my family ethics class at the seminary where I teach. 

There is much in his essay worth commenting on, but I want to focus my comments on one area in particular—Brooks’ reflections on what he calls the “forged family.” This is a form of family relationship defined less exclusively by biological or bloodlines, and more by the chosen family—the “fictive kin”—that one surrounds themselves with amid the sundries of life. Brooks describes this arrangement as the type of family defined by “determined commitment.” 

These are the networks of thick relationships born of spontaneity and organic development. They cannot be so much planned as much as they naturally arise through the vicissitudes of life. They are the people who have your back no matter what, the friends you end up sharing holidays with because, well, why wouldn’t you? This is not meant to displace the biological family, as much as it is to accent or fill-in the areas where thick familial relationships fail to take shape. The use of such language as “forged” is as telling as it is vivid: to speak of something being “forged” is to speak of something having been refined, purified, and tested by trial. The ingredients of that which is forged imply a new substance has taken shape, which means new families.

Undoubtedly, trial and tribulation are unique catalysts for the types of relationships that sustain and nourish common life. A lost job, a miscarriage, a divorce, a diagnosis—all provide a platform for our networks of relationships, biological or not, to step up and offer the resilient backdrops necessary to carry people through hardship.

Brooks then offers a number of examples of how the “forged family” is making appearances throughout American life. He points to the many examples where the pressures and humdrum of daily life force people to rely on each other in the unlikeliest of ways.

What I want to suggest, however, is that Brooks’ call for the “forged family” can already be found in an institution so familiar to us that its routineness makes us blind to its offerings. I am speaking of the local church—not the abstract, universalized “the church.” The church remains a pillar of American civil society, and while it has traditionally played an irreplaceable role in forging community, as church participation has declined and the spiritually fluid increase, people are now able to seek forged families elsewhere. And while those who seek it elsewhere may find it, there is no other institution more apt to be the central force in forging family and social connections than the local church.

By “local church,” I mean the supposedly declining, not-worth-imitating, and discardable institution that almost everyone can find something to complain about, but who rarely seem willing to put in the effort to reap the harvest of forged relationships. It’s all too common of a refrain, especially for those flirting with a new church, that the church lacks “community.” But the person who complains about not being able to “find community” in the local church is honesty not really looking for it. Because in looking for it, stages of awkwardness and possible offense have to be worked through. Sure, not everyone can be each person’s best friend. But I’ve yet to find a local church where the people who were really looking for thick and forged relationships were not able to find it if they really get involved.

This model of church-as-forged-family cannot be the province of only married families like ours...the local church is uniquely primed—and in fact called—to be the forged family for the unmarried, for single parents, and for the fatherless.

I write about this church paradigm from a personal (and what I hope is a temporary) experience. My family recently relocated from the Nashville area to Louisville, Kentucky where I teach at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Though we have countless friends in Louisville, we are still without a local church. Not yet having a church to call home is an example of experiencing even minimal accounts of loneliness and isolation (all of which, I want to add, are normal in a season of transition). If anything, our move to Louisville is teaching us how the absence of a local church home can make a new town seem even more foreign and dislocated from normalcy. This is because our church is our family. This is especially pronounced considering that we live five-to-seven hours away from in-laws and grandparents. For us, church is not only an option, it’s a requirement. It orients us to our community and brings ballast to life’s uncertainties. 

The backdrop of our current predicament is having left a church in the Nashville area where our family thrived. It was the centripetal and centrifugal force for our relational networks. Our church relationships drove us closer to one another and more attached to our church. There were a number of years where it was common for us to be with people from our church family three to four nights a week—from the spur-of-the-moment restaurant outings, to the after-church meals, to discipleship groups, reading groups, to service projects, to the number of people who had the passcode to our front door and an open invitation to raid our pantry. For now, that is gone, but the promise of relationality and the gift of the church means that new friendships of similar depth can just as easily be on the horizon (with no intention of displacing our Nashville friends!). Such transmutability from one location to the next is but a demonstration of the church’s brilliance.

No amount of central planning can configure a web of such relationships. There was no conscious choice to form the types and depth of relationships we had (and still do, from a distance)—they just happened.

But this model of church-as-forged-family cannot be the province of only married families like ours, as if enlarging the bank of reserve childcare is what forged family is all about it. No, as Brooks’ essay reminds us, the local church is uniquely primed and, in fact, called to be the forged family for the unmarried, for single parents, and for the fatherless. It is there that the fatherless can find a fatherly example. For the person desiring family life, open seats at the married family table provide a glimpse into the beautiful chaos of raising children. And it is in the church that young marrieds can learn from older married couples (a gift my wife and I are particularly thankful for). It’s why faith and healthy marriage go together. 

To understand the church as a forged family is to understand it is as a place of welcome, habit, and nurture—a place where those without a spouse, or those who experienced a breakdown in a marriage or parenting relationship, can find grace and acceptance and the warm embrace of family.  

To understand the church as a forged family is to understand it is as a place of welcome, habit, and nurture—a place where those without a spouse, or those who experienced a breakdown in a marriage or parenting relationship, can find grace and acceptance and the warm embrace of family.  

What we experienced in Nashville, and what I am hopeful the Lord will provide us in Louisville, is an embodied reflection of why the New Testament depicts the local church in familial terms. The New Testament church is a “forged family” by virtue of the calling it has for itself. The New Testament does not describe fellow Christians as “colleagues.” I would venture that the New Testament model is far more than “neighborliness,” as well. We are brothers and sisters. While Jesus did not dispense with the foundations of the biological family (Matthew 19:4-6), Jesus made it clear that a new family is forged in their quest to follow after him (Mark 3:31-35). Members of a church are to care and look after one another in patient, long-suffering love (Galatians 6:10; Ephesians 4:2). We are “members of the household of God” who are “being joined together” (Ephesians 2:19-22). And these verses are nothing to say of the manifold numbers of verses in Scripture teaching the biological family how to relate to one another. 

The nuclear family is necessary. This is a matter of simply reality born of Genesis: Man and woman are called to multiply and exercise dominion. But it is a mistake to believe that a solitary man and solitary women united together in their socially-isolated marriage is sufficient for all their needs. Families need families. Of course, kids depend and rely upon their parents, but research shows that parents nestled in a church community are more likely to thrive, endure, and promote an ecology of personal and social flourishing. This is not coincidental: the Genesis portrait of marriage is one of culture-formation, not just home-formation.

What David Brooks’ laudably describes as the “forged family” is available to everyone, for in knowing Christ as Savior, “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). For in knowing and experiencing the fatherhood of God through the local church, we are offered a family forged by his love that we are called to share with others.

Andrew T. Walker is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. He also serves as Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement. You can find him on twitter: @andrewtwalk.