It Takes a Church

by Dawn McCandless

My husband's childhood was very different from my own.  Tim grew up in a small town near Pittsburgh, surrounded by a large network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings.  He also lived in a close knit - both physically and emotionally - neighborhood where he never lacked playmates or houses of refuge when his own parents weren't home.  Eyes and ears were everywhere in the community; supervising, protecting, guiding, caring as Tim was nurtured here for the first seventeen years of his life. He now has precious memories of these years and times spent with influential adults in his young life.

I grew up in Dunlap.  We moved here from Indianapolis when I was seven.  It was the fourth home I had known since my birth. Not exactly a metropolis, the Elkhart-Goshen area felt safe and neighborly enough.  The job opportunity my father had just accepted allowed my parents to move my brother and me closer to their families in Michigan, still three hours away. We built a home in a new subdivision with few existing homes, and I entertained myself playing in the dirt piles of construction sites and selling lemonade to workers from my red wagon.  As our neighborhood grew, my family formed close friendships with a few other families, creating a substitute extended family within reach.  Forty years and many moves later, these relationships remain.

Tim and I are grateful for our childhood experiences. Different as they were from each other, for both of us, family was community; and community was family.  The security this sense of belonging gave us has been foundational.  Yet eventually, we each discovered our need for more and found that "more" in a relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Today, as we raise our own children away from extended family, we still want to give our kids the sense of the community we had growing up.  We are thankful to have a church family that has given us just that. Through our church, we and our children have enjoyed multigenerational fellowship, a supportive environment for the values we hold dear, and the security of knowing a group of people who are "there" for us. On a more intimate level, we have been blessed with friends who have been closer to us than a brother or sister.  Their children have been our children's surrogate cousins.  We have been the "other mother" to each other's children and they all know that we are all watching, praying, and working together to keep them on the straight and narrow path.

Hilary Clinton tells us that it takes a village to raise a child.  While I don’t agree that the village’s government should dictate how I raise my child, I will concede that children are best raised as part of a larger culture than the nuclear family.  That’s why, in today's world, the church is more important than ever to our families. Higher education or job relocations move us away from relatives.  Busy-ness and air conditioning isolates us from our neighbors. An increasingly liberal mindset in our schools means we can't trust them to reinforce the Christian virtues we want our kids to learn. Internal and external pressures threaten the survival of our marriages and families. For our family, our relationship with Jesus, lived out among the community of believers at Sugar Grove Church, has been the solid rock we have built our home upon. More than a catch-phrase, Sugar Grove has truly been our family.

Hebrews 10:25 says "Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching." Paul recognized how much we would need the Body...and more so in the Last Days. More critically than ever, our children need God's church. No doubt, we made many mistakes as parents, and will make more.  But I have never regretted raising them as part of the family of God.