Dear all,

When I was growing up, I had a very clear idea of what my family was: my parents, my brother and me. For people living in a big city at the end of the Soviet era, having more than two children was almost unheard of. Having a house was positively miraculous, so families living in small flats were small and fairly independent.

My idea of ‘family’ has since expanded for a number of reasons. When I moved away from home, it very quickly became clear that my friends now also were members of the family. My closest friends are still very much my siblings. When I met my now husband Michael, I discovered that family can be huge, fun and also quite chaotic, with lots of uncles, aunts and cousins – a very different model to the small and ordered family of my childhood. When I joined the church, having moved to Norfolk, I gained some extra family members in the shape of fellow parishioners. These relationships are also, I am sure, life-long. At this stage, my idea of a family as a nuclear unit was significantly challenged.

Being freshly married, I am now at the point of thinking of my own family and what it is going to look like. The marriage service says: ‘Marriage cannot exist on its own. God’s call of husband and wife … is part of the call to love all people’. Marriage is between two people, but it can only exist within a network of supportive relationships. A Christian vision of a new family is not as an isolated unit but as a new branch of a big tree rooted in Christ. Celebrating the Eucharist in Barnard Castle church as part of our marriage service was a beautiful reminder of this. I did not even realise just how meaningful it would be until after it happened. It was a privilege to start a family from a place of such overwhelming support and absolute certainty that we are not alone. It was a moment when the meaning of what a church family is really made sense and when the unity of one Christian body felt real.

Perhaps the challenge of the notoriously difficult Biblical passage in Luke 14 about ‘hating your father and your mother’ is in that invitation to expand the horizons of what we understand as family, to venture beyond the nucleus many of us are so used to, to let the Christian community become part of the family too.

Ana