Why families need community

I was just on Wendy McDonnell's Family Matters show this past Sunday to talk about defining roles in the family unit, and it occurred to me as I was driving home that we had perhaps left the definition of family too narrow. We had discussed how the family unit can include extended family but forgotten how sometimes roles in the family can be played by people who are not really family at all.

In many families, for example, a friend might come to help do some work around the house or a counsellor might provide conflict resolution or a pastor might help people grieve a loss or a coach might take the place of an absent role model.  In each of these cases, and in many others, we find that the little boundaries we put on the family unit are not quite as neat as we might like to think. 

The truth is that every family has places where it cannot meet its own needs, places where it needs someone from outside to provide it with support.  In other words, not only does it take a community to raise a child, but it takes a community to make strong families that can survive a failed marriage or a lost job, that can find a way to cope with stress and sickness and even death.

Our families are only as strong as the communities around them, and so there is a real need for us as families to build our communities whenever we can.