In Search of the Perfect Adventist Family
by Loren Seibold | 13 August 2024 |
I was for many years a frequent writer of essays for mainstream Adventist publications. I learned what Adventist editors wanted me to say about most topics.
Including about Adventist families.
I would start with familiar Bible texts about what an ideal family should be, bulked up by a bit of Christian-friendly psychology—principles of communication and developmental stages, for example. I kept in mind as I wrote the image of the ideal family that had cast its glow over the culture I grew up in: the loving mom and dad and attractive children, who go to church together and who all get along beautifully, with occasional gentle lessons learned.
(Like June and Ward Cleaver, but the Adventist version, which included family church attendance, vegetarian meals, and home-baked bread, but omitted the pearls for mom, morning coffee, and the cocktail and pipe for dad when he gets home from the office.)
That the family was God’s invention is traditional Adventist fare, as is the notion that God has an ideal kind of family in mind. But then there’s this: what happens when families don’t stay together? When anger, abuse, or infidelity mars the happiness of even the best-intentioned families? What do we say about those whose children behave badly? What do we say to single people who don’t follow the strict guidelines for sex outside of marriage?
Even today, these situations rarely merit mention by the church—they officially don’t exist. (Much less LGBTQ families; we are only in the early stages of admitting that LGBTQ people even exist.)
Ideal families
My wife and I were talking about this recently. How many Adventist families have we known that are even typical, much less, ideal? We could think of a handful who had the basic schematic for the good Adventist family: an intact marriage, both partners in church, clean, well-dressed children. Even there, it isn’t always clear that means a blissfully trouble-free outcome.
But clearly, atypical, non-ideal families exceed the perfect families. Which is not to denigrate them, but just to ask: how many families are there that match the Adventist ideal? How many even have the starting point to achieve the perfect Adventist family?
Frankly, as I look back at the apparently-perfect families I’ve known, they’ve all turned out not to be perfect on closer inspection. As a pastor, you find out things you don’t even want to know—and it tends to diminish one’s idealism. I’ve met many Adventist families that want to look perfect. But almost none that actually are.
(Most people are unaware that even James and Ellen White came to a point when they quietly separated and were, practically if not legally, no longer husband and wife for much of the last part of James’ life.)
Cautionary examples
Come to think of it, how many ideal families do you see in the Bible? Come on, name them. Old Testament? I can’t think of even one. They were all disturbingly dysfunctional. Most would be illegal today.
New Testament? As far as we know, Jesus was a single man, so marriage is one good example he never set. Apparently some of the disciples had wives, though there’s no mention of tender romantic relationships. Of their children, if they had any, we know nothing.
Anyway, the disciples seem to have rarely been at home, so who knows how their kids turned out?
Timothy had a noteworthy mother, but no father is mentioned. The apostle Paul was a great theologian, but let’s not forget that he actually discourages people from forming families, and those who don’t follow his own example in this he writes off as lacking self-control. As for pastoral care, he wrote to congregations dealing with sons having sex with their father’s wives—which beats anything I’ve had to deal with in any church I’ve pastored.
The Bible is disturbingly factual. It’s about well-intentioned but flawed people. It recounts messed-up families, suffering, and violence. The gospels demonstrate perfect love in Jesus, but taken as a whole the Bible paints a dark picture of human nature.
In the transition from Bible to church, we gloss over much of that. We interpret the worst stories as cautionary examples, and insist that there’s still a clear path to the ideal family laid out in the Bible.
But is there? Where do you find the model for the perfect Adventist family?
Expectations
I’m raising questions here not about having a happy home and good family, but about Adventist idealism.
We Adventists like, now and then, to celebrate forgiveness and changed lives: nothing excites a camp meeting crowd like a dramatic conversion story of a reformed drug addict or atheist or satanist. But that only counts after it’s all over and resolved. We’re better than we once were, but we’re still not very good at owning up to the brokenness of those of us in the community of faith.
We preach forgiveness; we just don’t want anyone to actually need it—at least for anything important.
Yet congregations are made up of broken people. I’m not speaking hypothetically, but from my own experience as a parish minister for 40+ years. In my churches I’ve had many divorced people. Others who struggling with depression or even more serious mental illness. Alcoholics and opioid users. Abusers and abused. Family members with behavioral or learning disabilities. Adventist children who, defying all their training and expensive parochial education, turn wild and dissolute. Couples that just can’t get their lives together, financially or emotionally. Lonely single people, sneaky living-together single people, and even promiscuous single people. The man or woman we suspect is secretly LGBTQ but no one wants to ask.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church contains people like that. Lots of them. Perhaps most of them. At best we try to ignore them. We’ve never specifically made a space in the pews for them, unless they pretend to be more perfect than they actually are. A few of them might land in a congregation that loves them even when they’re honest about their struggles. I don’t think we can count on that, though.
The church’s view of family, like much of what we do in religion, is more aspirational than honest. It is a kind of escapist fiction, not a path to improvement.
So how do we make Christians’ families better? As popular as the God-wants-you-to-be-happy-and-rich preachers are right now on the evangelical circuit, I’ve not personally seen any fast-track to life improvement, 2 Corinthians 5:17 notwithstanding.
Erring on the side of grace
So as a pastor I have tended to err (if it is an error—some have told me it is) on the side of realism. Many times through the years I’ve told my congregations, “There are no ideal lives.” Every person, I say, no matter how good they look, has a heartache that keeps them awake at night, a sin that they fight against and sometimes don’t overcome, and (to be blunt) a few screws loose.
Most of the families in most Adventist churches would relate more to a discussion of family disappointments, than being apprised of God’s perfect plan for their lives. For most of us, it’s only God’s grace that keeps us going day by day. And I would suggest that it’s only after we’re secure in that, that we can start making some moderate progress in being better people with better families.
What I’m talking about here is not unfamiliar territory. It’s that well-trampled junction between idealism, which any person who lives and works out in the church-on-the-ground (as opposed to a denominational office) will admit rarely holds up to close scrutiny; and honestly admitting human need and failure, which is realistic but disturbing to our ideals.
One part of the church still holds to the expectation of dramatic human improvement, even perfection. Meanwhile a large segment (including some of the same people) are subsisting on grace and forgiveness, and not making much progress at all. And whose fault is that? Why hasn’t 2 Corinthians 5:17 come true for all of us and all our families? Do we blame the people, or the expectation, or God?
Realism, not idealism
I admit I don’t know the answer. The ideal family is a worthwhile goal; no one, to my knowledge, sets out in life saying, “I’m going to enter into a sad, bitter marriage, and after some years of fighting and failure, we’ll end it, though not until we’ve brought several children into the world who, after listening to their parents fight for most of their childhood, will end up shuttling between two houses until they get old enough to go out on their own and repeat the process.”
Of course not. We strive, as we should. Even after we’ve failed a few times, we try to recover and grow.
Perhaps what I’m sensing is that the bar is set too high. Our Adventist family theology addresses a tiny aristocracy who have good families, or at least pretend they do—not the vast number of others who look on with a mixture of envy and hope. (Studies show that well-off and college-educated families hold together better, because they don’t have to struggle as much. Matthew Stewart wrote in the Atlantic that “[Income inequality] turns marriage into a luxury good, and a stable family life into a privilege that the moneyed elite can pass along to their children.”)
It seems to me that more Divine grace, more acceptance of people based on God’s full acceptance, would do the most good for families sunk in quiet desperation.
The good news is more powerful than good advice.
Loren Seibold is the Executive Editor of Adventist Today.
