The Family is the most
essential human community
FAMILY
1. The Family is a Covenant Relationship:
the family is God’s greatest institution for sanctification.
• We are all born narcissistic, (preoccupied with self). A focus outward must be learned.
• You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.
• The family is forever. Friends come and go.
• The fact that there are more single adults in society today than in recorded history has profound implications for society.
• The family is the first (and often only) place we experience unconditional love, where we know we belong, where we first see that love is not a limited pie, where no one needs be left out.
2. The Family is an Inheritance across the generations:
Our families all pass some positive legacies to us down through the generations, but both blessings and curses can naturally extend down through a family’s generations. Our society is forgetting the blessings of the extended family.
3. The Family is the primary place where an individual’s calling is expressed, championed and supported.
4. The Family holds the primary God-given responsibility (and authority) for raising and training of children.
Families can delegate some or all of this authority for educating children, but they remain responsible. When families abdicate their primary responsibility for their children in abusive ways, other sphere’s of society, particularly government, may then exercise their secondary responsibility for children.
5. The Family is the most essential human community:
The nuclear family reflects God’s triune nature as the essential model of community (authority without domination). It is the universal model for all other extended communities and organizations.
Allan Robbins
June 2003
