They were both in their eighties. They were members of the church, believed Adventist teachings about God and the end times. They had both been widowed. Officially she lived upstairs, and he lived downstairs. My senior pastor said they would get married, but because of the way their pensions were set up they wouldn't be able to survive financially if they got married. So they preserved the legal and public fiction of difference residences. Was that an Adventist home?

My father is a doctor, my mother a nurse. They sent their six children to Adventist schools. We grew up reading a selection from a devotional book every morning before heading out the door to school. We were vegetarian, movieless, tithe-paying Sabbath keepers. It's been over forty years since the youngest of my siblings was born, and we are all still members of the Adventist Church. I think you could call that an Adventist family.

In their extended family Bob and Karolyn can identify a witch, alcoholics and drug addicts. Among the friends and relatives they bring to our church are Baha'is, and Pentecostals, Roman Catholics and recovering addicts with hardly any religious background who are eager to learn. Bob and Karolyn joke about all the dysfunction connected with their home, but aren't they, too, an Adventist family?

I grew up in the diaspora of the College of Medical Evangelists subculture with a clear idea about what it meant to be an Adventist family. Adventism permeated every aspect of our life-diet, entertainment, career choices, Friday evening and Sabbath afternoon habits, use of disposable income. And family meant Mom and Dad and kids and grandparents and aunts and uncles, most of whom were Adventist medical professionals with kids who went to Adventist schools.

But then, fresh out of seminary, I began pastoring in a large city and was confronted with the staggering diversity of human connections-octogenarian lovers, single moms with preteens, married singles (men or women who shared an apartment with a spouse, but not much else), an old woman who shared a dingy, cluttered apartment with her cat, a middle-aged homosexual who craved not sex but a home, interracial families challenged by daunting societal censure, groups of unrelated immigrants-a couple, a family with a teenager, two singles-packed into less living space than our family of four could have endured. Wasn't their cramped apartment an Adventist home?

I have no problem arguing that the ideal family begins with Mom and Dad and kids who enjoy warm connections with an extended family that shares a common faith. The ideal includes lifelong marriage and happy intergenerational connections. I am an unabashed booster of Adventist family traditions surrounding Sabbath and shared daily worship and a distinctive diet. This form of family life has nurtured many of us.

I believe there is a particular ideal. But the older and larger the church gets, the more we will be compelled to take notice of other sorts of families. God's people live in all kinds of families- "broken" families, "partial" families and even "imaginary" homes (that is households that have arisen out of imagining how best to approximate the magic of home life in a nonfamily setting).

Paul speaks of the church as "the household of God" (Ephesians 2:19). Christians in those days were urban dwellers. When they joined the despised Nazarene sect they were often ostracized. The church became the family the convert lost in being born again or became the family the convert had never had.

This is still God's ideal for the church. We must offer a real home to those whose other home is not supportive and warm. We must provide for those who are harried, scolded, and abused a place where the heart can rest. A place of grace and growth where brokenness is neither condemned nor condoned. The church is called to be the model Adventist home.
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