Today, in ways that were varied and intriguing, the subject of family came up. I spent most of the day in The Dalles as a guest of a very large family. Not having come from a very large family myself, it was fascinating and more than a little overwhelming to be surrounded up close and personal with so many little people. What was particularly intriguing was just how often and how forcefully the theme of family kept on making itself clear in the course of the day, as well as which families kept on popping up in conversation.

As I mentioned earlier, I do not come from a large family. This is true both in absolute terms and perhaps more importantly when it comes to church family. Both my father and my stepfather were the only members of their family in the Church of God, bringing no large clans to be related to by blood or marriage as far as the church goes (though my stepfather’s family is reasonably large, at least, and one in which I have gotten along fairly warmly). Neither of the families that my mother’s relatives married in the church have been particularly large, but at least one of them was a local elder’s family, which gives us perhaps the only claim to fame as far as ordained people in my family, if it is acceptable to consider such collateral relatives (who would probably not consider me to be a desirable relative, not that all of my blood relatives do either) as family. Suffice it to say that for all of my family’s gifts and service to the Church of God, my family has lacked a certain skill in politics, a deficiency I certainly share.

Not all families are this small. Some families in the Church of God have an almost Habsburg-like tendency to connect themselves to other large families so that over the course of only a few generations the Church of God more closely resembles the family lines of Middle Age royal and aristocratic houses than it does to the more modest lines of my own recent family background. For example, in the brief time I have been in Portland I have noticed that there are several large families that as a result of good marriages and a high degree of fertility have managed to make up a large proportion of the congregation. In such an environment, perhaps it is an advantage to be an outsider who brings new blood. Given my own interests in genealogy, I am very intrigued by those who share my love of understanding family connections.

In the mid-1980’s, a leader of the Worldwide Church of God who desired to show himself to be an inclusive sort of fellow started a wide campaign that was based in large part on the song “We Are Family.” In a very real sense, all believers are relatives as part of the Family of God, though possessing the same heavenly Father and the same elder brother Jesus Christ, regardless of our blood and ancestry. In an equally real sense, though, it does not take very long for human institutions to become hopelessly connected so that we are family in a very real sense, so long as a family is sufficiently large, sufficiently inclined to matrimony, and good at forming marriage alliances both locally and further afield. It only takes a few generations before we all become family, and before a given world becomes a bit inbred, as indelicate as it may be to say that. Regardless of how you put it, though, the importance of family is a difficult matter to overstate, especially for those of a strategic and logistical standpoint, as a large and united family is a source of great enjoyment, comfort, and influence, which is a very good thing, no matter what the last names of the large and complicated clans you happen to be a part of.