I grew up in a large and wonderfully complex family. The story of our family is much too long to be adequately told in a single blog post, but here is one quick version: My parents had a stable life-long marriage and formed a blended family with four adopted children and three children born to them. It was a great setting for growing up from my perspective. I learned early in my life that other people matter and that they have impact on your life. We don’t always agree. We have to work through our disagreements. My father used to say, sometimes frequently, “You can’t resign from a family.” Learning that there are commitments that you can’t back out of was a good life lesson for me.

Now, from the perspective of more than six decades, I find myself continuing to be amazed by my family of birth. A lot has happened in those years. Both of our parents have died. One sister and one brother have died. All of the seven children have married. Five of the seven have been through a divorce, some more than one. There is at least one grandchild from each of the seven children and many great-grandchildren as well. Most of us have moved many times and four of the seven have lived significant portions of our lives in other states. Of the seven I’m the one who has moved the most and I’ve been living in the same house for 20 years now, so we probably aren’t as mobile as some families. Currently the five remaining siblings are living in just three states. There have been times when we have been more spread out.

As one might expect, I have more contact with some of my siblings and less with others. We have more and less common interests. The same is true with my nieces and nephews. Some are well known to me and I have regular contact with them, others are more distant and I see them infrequently.

We are very different in terms of our choice of vocation and our lifestyles. None of us chose paths that led to wealth, but we have all figured out how to make our way in this world.

There is nothing particularly distinctive in the fact that we have a lot of differences in our family. That is common in families that are smaller than ours.

Some of the grief in our family is old. It has been over 40 years since our sister died. We lost our father more than 30 years ago. Some grief is newer and less processed. Our brother died in 2010 and our mother in 2011. What I have realized in the time since our mother’s death is how key her presence was in keeping our relationships strong and alive. She lived in our home for the last few years of her life and during that time my siblings made the trip to South Dakota to visit her. Since her death only one of my sisters has come to visit us and she has not been able to visit as much as she did when our mother was alive. It is clear that the job of remaining in touch with our family has now fallen on our shoulders. We can’t expect someone else to take that responsibility.

And, as I have said, we are a wonderfully diverse group. We have different levels of familiarity and comfort with technology. I have siblings with whom I send text messages and exchange e-mail on a regular basis. I have siblings that change their phone numbers often enough that I’m not always sure what number to call. I joke, though somewhat seriously, that I have a brother who doesn’t seem to know how to dial a phone. If I want to talk to him, I have to push the buttons. He may not even know how to answer the phone, but on occasion one of his family members will hand it to him and we get to talk.

I have nieces and nephews from whom I’ve never received a letter - a strange development in a family that was marked by letters. Our mother used to type family letters using carbon paper and send them out in bulk to keep everyone informed. But the world is changing. We have new and convenient ways to communicate. Pictures of our grandchildren circulate via e-mail and text attachments. Some of us use FaceTime or Skype to talk and see each other.

This family was a good place for me to learn many things that I use often in the church. Our church family is complex with lots of differences. We have to use many different forms of communication to remain close. Some messages come by phone, some by e-mail. Recently we changed the distribution of our monthly newsletter. At one time in my pastorate the newsletter was a print document bulk mailed to more than 400 addresses. Now we print less than 100 copies. Most of our members receive the newsletter via e-mail. It can also be accessed through the church web site. No one had a web site when I began my pastoral ministry. There were no classes on electronic communications and the digital church when I was in seminary. But we still have members who depend on the printed newsletter to keep them informed. They want to receive it in the mail and read each copy carefully. Our family needs to take those differences seriously and use different media to carry our message to different people.

A church really is very much like a family. And we all grew up in different families and bring different expectations to our relationship. Like our families, the church is wondrously complex and sometimes frustrating.

The lesson I am still learning is how to take responsibility for keeping the family together and keeping in touch with everyone. It is all about relationships and relationships thrive on regular contact.

Fortunately we have each other to share that responsibility.

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