Defining the “Good Family” in Local Congregations 175
having more programming for dual-earner couples, for gay and lesbian members and
families, and more intergenerational programming that does not take a nuclear family
with children as the organizing unit.
There is a fundamental irony here. There is diversity in family rhetoric and,
among Protestants, this is organized along a left/right “culture-wars” dynamic. Religious
tradition is also strongly associated with some differences in the practice of family min-
istry. More conservative traditions have congregations that are the most flexible in how
they organize their programs, and evangelical Protestants do more ministry for nuclear
families with children, as well as more ministry for those experiencing painful family
disruption. Liberal traditions encourage daycare, lesbian and gay members, and official
rhetoric that sends the message that “God approves of all kinds of families.”
However, in practice the vast majority of local congregations of all traditions orga-
nize much of their ministry – programming and practice – around the nuclear family
with children. The last two lines of Table 13.2 show that most congregational programs
are still organized around gender and life stage groups, and most often these are tradi-
tional life stage divisions that foster movement through a traditional life course with
the nuclear family with children at the apex. The only widespread changes in fam-
ily ministry have to do with accommodating dual-earner and blended families with
children, both widespread contemporary forms of the nuclear family (with babysit-
ting, daycare, changing the time and timing of programs, and counseling for couples
directed at keeping the family intact).
And informal rhetoric indicates that across the board, the traditional nuclear family
with children is still considered ideal for many members and leaders. Intergenerational
programming brings members together regardless of family type, but focus groups sug-
gest that this is often done to make families with small children feel more connected to
broader, extended-family-like connections. Evangelicals minister to the divorced and
single parents while using a language of “brokenness” that affirms the nuclear family
ideal. Liberal Protestants affirm they have gay and lesbian members, but very few pro-
vide formal ministries directed to these members, or offer joining ceremonies or other
symbolic affirmations of gay and lesbian lifestyles. And the time-bind rhetoric exhibits
a nostalgia for the ideal family of the 1950s and early 1960s that many women in our
survey of community residents named as something that either keeps them out of a
local church or has sent them searching in the past for a more supportive congregation.
With some variations, the nuclear family with children still serves as a kind of
“anchoring schema” for local congregational life within the mainstream religious in-
stitutions which embraced the familism of the postwar suburbs in the 1950s (cf. Sewell
1992; Lakoff 1996). And, even in traditions in which the official rhetoric rejects the
male-breadwinner form of this family as an ideal, informal rhetoric embraces this more
traditionally gendered version of the family.
Looking at the distribution of programming and ministry practice by congregation,
rather than across religious tradition, this becomes even more clear, and reveals three
profiles of family ministry in the congregations of these four communities:
“Standard package” (15 percent). These congregations have the standard package of
ministry that was in place in the 1950s, with Sunday School/religious education, some
kind of youth- or teen group, and a women’s ministry (cf. Nash and Berger 1962).