God's Family is devoted to bringing every person, every child, every unmarried and married adult, deeply, fully, and fruitfully into life in God's Family, his Church.
God is family. All life is family life.
All are called to life and love in God's family.
As a single person I've come to believe that family is not important. Family is beyond important. Family is all there is.
Our culture is moving away from family life at a dramatic pace (since 1970 the marriage rate has halved and the divorce rate doubled as the birthrate plummets, etc. etc.), replacing it with the life of the individual, what I like to call "radical privacy," drawing from Justice Blackmun's ruling in Roe V. Wade. I know about radical privacy. It landed me in solitary confinement in jail and then living on the streets, known to the few who did know me only as "Lonesome Dave." This, for me, was the simple, brutal, consequence of life outside of family, life in pursuit of my self only, my own desires only.
You can read the story of my journey from drug addiction into Christianity here. Now I'd like to skip ahead to the journey of my last few years of life in God's Church.
I've always been drawn to those who are most left out, most excluded. That led me for a period of several years into singles ministry.
I came to realize that almost everything at Church is directed toward families, and that is as it should be, as it must be. The thing that is often missing is an effort to draw singles into that family life and help them form families of their own.
Humans were not designed to survive on our own. Family to family is the model, right from the very beginning. A man leaves his mother and father and cleaves to his wife and the two become one flesh. Family to family. Simple. That's the model. There is no model, no historical and certainly no Christian paradigm of people surviving apart from family, surviving on their own.
Perhaps you are thinking of exceptions? If you ask monks in a monastery why they are there, the number one answer they will give, by far, is the fellowship among the monks. Perhaps you think of religious hermits? Those very, very few called to this life are those who are living the communion of Saints so profoundly that they are never truly alone, and they discern this call with the help of a spiritual director, not alone, and they are less than one in a million anyway.
Perhaps you think of those who are not called to marry? The vast majority of those who make a permanent commitment to not marry are called to live in religious communities. The rest are called to live the fullest and richest possible lives as part of God's Church, his family.
This is the way all of us who are not married, and who remain open to marriage, are called to live. We are called to live in God's family. We ought to strive to be part of our biological families to the fullest extent possible. Unfortunately, given the fractured nature of modern families, that is often very difficult. The thing we can be sure of is that we are called to live the fullness of family life in God's church even as we seek our vocations, the families we will form.
This is the key piece so often missing from our lives and ministries, and even from our searching for spouses. All of this, everything about our lives, is intended by God to take place within the context of family and extended family. This is one of the great themes of scripture, and especially of the Old Testament, of God's covenant with his people, that God deals with us as family, and we respond to him and to one another as family.
This is the theme of this website and of my life and work. It took me a long while to come to this point. I only realized in the last few months (it is April, 2007, as I write this) that I must rework all of my outreach efforts to flow from this theme.
It seems to me that this must be the theme for all life, and for all ministry. Children's and teen ministries ought to form youth toward their vocations in family life, and in God's family. Ministry to families ought to form them into life in the extended family of God's family. The autonomous, self-reliant nuclear family held up as the ideal in America is certainly not the Biblical model. Families ought to rely on each other, and on the larger Church family. This is life; this is how we were made to live.
Yes, there is a place for the individual-the place is the family. Without the individual there can be no family. But, and this is the piece we've been missing, without the family there can be no individual.
I will continue to work on adapting this site from its previous state as the "God of Desire" site. The "God of Desire", dating and courtship, material will remain as a subset of the larger site. I ask your prayers and your help as I strive to become more a part of God's family, and to invite others to do the same.
"I will not leave you orphans. I am coming to you." --John 14:18.