The Table Briefing: Blended Families

By Darrell L. Bock and Kymberli M. Cook

[Darrell L. Bock is Senior Research Professor in New Testament Studies and Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. Kymberli M. Cook is Assistant Director of the Hendricks Center and a PhD student in theological studies at Dallas Theological Seminary.]

Stepfamilies have a bad reputation. They have had it for a long time. Many fairy tales chronicle children’s struggles under a stepparent’s selfish demands. Stories like Cheaper by the Dozen demonstrate the sometimes comedic, sometimes heartbreaking reality of kids having to learn to live with other kids and other parents. It is rarely anyone’s ideal situation and is often presented as a home life outside what it means to be “normal.” Ron Deal, director for Family Life Blended, has spent much of his career challenging that narrative and equipping blended families to live godly lives. The Hendricks Center has hosted Ron several times to talk through the realities of a societal majority of “non-traditional” families and practical implications for the Church.

Leave It To Beaver Is In The 8%

The definition of what constitutes a “normal” family in society and particularly in the body of Christ needs reorientation. Historically, society viewed a typical family as consisting of one man married to one woman living with their biological children—oftentimes with the man as the sole breadwinner. At a recent cultural engagement chapel at Dallas Theological Seminary, Ron pointed out this understanding accounts for less than 8% of the current families in the United States. In an earlier podcast, he attempted to normalize a more “nontraditional” home life, “We estimate in our ministry that easily one third of all weddings in the US today, at least a third, are giving birth to a blended family. It could be as high as 40%.” He and Darrell Bock, executive director of cultural engagement at the Hendricks Center, tackled this reality that the Church seems to bypass.

Deal: Fifteen percent of first marriages in today’s culture form blended families. If you’ve got one little pathway into blended family living and that’s all you can imagine, then you are missing a large percentage of the people in your church. I still have pastors go, “I’m not sure how many divorced-remarried couples we have.” Well, how many widowed remarried couples do you have? How many first marriage blended families? You’ve got to widen your lens. This is 40% of families raising children.

Bock: Right. That’s the statistic that gets me. 40%. There are almost as many first families in the way we traditionally think about it as the amount of blended families that we have surrounding us.

Deal: Let me just broaden it a little bit. If we think of nontraditional families as blended families, single parent families, and single adults, that group of people, those three categories are larger than first married traditional families in the United States. Nontraditional is the new traditional. If you’re preaching and all you can imagine when you say the word marriage is a traditional couple, if you’re preaching and talking about relationships and all you think of is married people, not single people, if all you can imagine in parenting is a two-person couple raising their kids versus a bioparent, stepparent raising kids with a coparent in the other home versus a single parent raising [children]. . . . You are not talking to the people in your community.

The blended family structure Ron presents includes those who remarried after divorce or the death of a spouse or a marriage involving at least one spouse with children born prior to wedlock (40% of all births in America currently). The key marker is the coming together of families that involve children that are not biological for at least one spouse. This type of homelife represents an enormous portion of the current family structures in the United States.

Deal: There’s 100 million people in the United States with a step relationship.

Bock: That’s what, 33 percent?

Deal: It is a third of Americans. . . . They have a stepsibling, or they have a stepchild. 100 million, okay. That does not count the people that are grandmas or grandpas who have a son who’s just married a woman with two kids and he became a stepdad and grandma’s trying to figure out how to help her son. Right, she just wants to bless them and wonders, How do I do that? It doesn’t count those people. So real fast, this is a lot of people we’re talking about. This is not a niche ministry.

Bock: No, this is a whole section of your church.

Deal: From a household standpoint, the stats are these. Forty percent of families, that is if there’s a couple who’s married with children in the house, full-time or part-time, forty percent of them are blended families.

The next question people ask me is what percentage of people in the church are blended families. And the answer is we don’t know. Nobody’s ever done the math, done the science to find out. I can tell you that I think, conservatively, my guess is about a third. It depends on what kind of church you’re in, what part of the US you’re in. But it’s pretty safe to say 20 to 30, 35 percent.

I had a conversation with somebody just the other day, a church in a metro Denver, middle-class suburb, and they did the math in their church, and 47 percent of their families are stepfamilies.

Implications For The Church

These societal realities present a need for local churches to reconsider how they serve blended families that are widely present in their communities. First and foremost, churches should take intentional steps to understand this family structure. There are unique layers of complexity in the life of a stepfamily. Ron and Darrell present the sheer number of relationships as one example.

Deal: Let’s draw your genogram. Here’s what your family’s going to look like. If you were to ask the couple, all right, you got two kids. He’s got one. So what’s your family going to look like? Oh, well, it’s going to be the five of us. Yeah. There’s the math, there’s three kids, two adults, the five of us. And then you say, okay, let’s just start filling in some other spaces and all of a sudden, well, there’s a former spouse over here and grandparents who want to continue to be a part of the kid’s life.

And then we have maybe another former spouse over here who’s deceased, let’s say, but still lives on in the heart and mind and soul of everybody, because that person’s always your parent your whole life. And so they’re kind of the ghost parent, if you will. And so that’s a dynamic at play, and we have grandparents over there. You start drawing it. When you get three generations done, all of a sudden people are going, it’s not the five of us. It’s three households, or it’s two households. And it’s this many adults parenting these three kids and this many sets of grandparents trying to influence these kids. Darrell, I interviewed for the Family Life Blended Podcast, my podcast, not too long ago, I interviewed a couple and the day they got married, there were twenty-two grandparents connected to their children.

I can’t even begin to tell you how they got that many, but that just goes to show you how complex it can become. . . . And then you just point to one of the children and say, now tell me what you think it’s like to be this person between these relationships and this relationship and this triangle over here and moving between homes. And what’s the climate like [in a different home] versus the climate that you want to create in your home? And all of a sudden parents go, “This is a lot. And I need to think more deeply and more carefully and compassionately about what my child is experiencing and will experience as a result of our wedding.” This is not a guilt trip. . . . What we’re trying to do is help them see it from another person’s point of view and begin to anticipate what it means to them.

One ministry for local churches, Ron shares, is the unique need to simply recognize these realities as a part of how they build their communities.

Deal: If I can be candid, we haven’t handled it [this reality in the Church]. We have marginalized and ignored stepfamilies, for the most part. Not because we wanted to or because we’re mean. I spent twenty-five years of my life in local church context; I get how hard ministry is in a day in and day out basis. It’s not that we’re trying to ignore anyone. It’s just we’re busy. And honestly, I think for a lot of ministry leaders they just never thought about it and they didn’t realize that there’s something unique or different here.

Yet even if the unique situation is identified, the pain present has often not been handled well. Some situations do present the clear presence of sin in the family’s past. This must be handled with a delicate balance between grace and truth.

Deal: Darrell, maybe this is the place where we pause and talk about the elephant in the room because I think, as ministry leaders, that elephant is, “Well, I feel a little weird if I somehow talk to nontraditional families as if they are okay to be in our fold, that somehow I’m saying it’s okay. Sin in the past brought them to this place, decisions they or somebody else made, and we’re blessing sin somehow.” I really get that and I really appreciate the mindfulness that leaders have. We never want to be perceived as going soft on sin. The cross is far too important for us to go soft on that, but mercy is never wrong.

I just sometimes wish we would stop talking about only one side of the coin. Yes, an invalid divorce is a sin, and yet, on the other side, we are called to mercy, not just a little mercy but to love mercy. According to Malachi, we are to love mercy, love kindness, because this is who God is. You look at the example of Jesus over and over and the people that he dealt with, “Why does he sit with tax collectors and sinners? Why does he sit with divorced people and remarriages?” Because he loves mercy. We’re called to that. I think we’ve got to find our way to teach truth and be the church that loves people wherever they are, however they come.

Bock: That’s a great observation. That’s a challenge in a variety of kinds of relationships that we see in the Church, how to deal with who we are and lift up the standards and commitments of holiness that the Church is supposed to uphold on the one hand, but then how do we live as people who actually understand that everyone who’s in the church is a forgiven person.

Deal: That’s exactly right.

Bock: My problem might not be your problem, but we’ve all got problems.

Deal: Amen. Amen. We’re all sinners in need of a hospital.

Whether sin is present or not, all the instances of blended families represent profound pain. This loss must be recognized by the Christian community and handled thoughtfully if truly helpful ministry is to take place.

Deal: Because of the shame issue that a lot of blended families deal with, I found—I’ve been doing this, wow, I’ve been working specifically with stepfamilies for over 20 years. They’re the hardest people to get in the room. If you offer a class, a workshop, or a conference, they don’t show up in droves because they’re not sure they want to go there and be that vulnerable and transparent with their story.

Bock: It opens up all kinds of pain.

Deal: It just does. It does. It really does. And so understandably, they’re tough to get in the room. But once you get them there, they bond faster than anything you’ve ever seen. They’ve finally found somebody who has a similar story to them and they can be honest about it and open about it. And together, we’re figuring this out with God’s grace, and we’re feeling rooted in our church and supported by our church. And it is fun to watch.

The teaching in churches should reflect the widespread presence of blended families, demonstrating sensitivity to areas of pain and offering carefully considered points of application. This approach presents a message that better reaches those families and offers an example for the whole community. The church leadership has an opportunity to categorize this type of family structure in a healthy manner. They can help their local congregation appreciate the complexity blended families face and create a more welcoming environment.

Bock: A lot of times when you preach on a Sunday and you’re preaching a message, you talk about the family and family dynamics and that kind of thing. But I’m going to propose something here that I think often goes on that walks into this area, and that is I think we tend to do it in a Leave It to Beaver mode.

And what I mean by that—I’m sorry for the young people that didn’t get that illustration—the point is here’s the Cleaver family and you’ve got the one family with the two boys, and it’s the ideal family picture. And we preach out of that mode or we talk about relationships in the context of the single marriage. And as you’ve already pointed out, maybe a third of my audience isn’t even there.

Deal: Right.

Bock: They’re somewhere else. They’re in a different reality. And the more I consistently preach only out of that one lens and I never go to the other place, the more dislocated a significant portion of my audience feels.

Deal: Now, let’s talk about a tension that exists in this. Because we’re the people who preach the ideal. And we should.

Bock: Right, right.

Deal: I am a number-one believer that we’ve got to teach God’s blueprints for the family better, stronger, louder, harder than we ever have in the past because we are moving further and further away from it.

Bock: The pressures are all pulling you in different directions.

Deal: Within the secular society, and even within our church family. So we have to do that. And we have to then live with that tension of saying—and yet, if this isn’t you . . . you know, that’s really the redemptive—I mean isn’t this what it’s all about?

Bock: Well, the fact is that we preach in a fallen world. And the gospel operates in a fallen world. Grace manifests itself in a fallen world.

Deal: Nobody would be in the church if there wasn’t sin. Everybody there is imperfect.

Bock: That’s right. So in the midst of teaching the ideal, it seems to me it’s incumbent now and again to have a sidebar that communicates that I know that this hasn’t been the experience of everyone, and some of you find yourself in this place. Now, what’s the best way to operate biblically if this is where you find yourself?

And you’re off and running. And in the process, we’re back to the things we talked about earlier. Not only have I connected with a portion of the audience that up to this point I haven’t been connecting to, I’m perhaps making them feel a little less marginalized in the process, but I’m also educating my entire community about the kind of community they’re living in.

Finally, ministry leaders must seek to connect with the individuals in blended families by directly acknowledging their situation. The family’s unique needs must guide pastoral care rather than expecting those in blended homes to naturally contextualize their own applications. This need is deeply felt in the areas of premarital counseling and discipleship, but Ron suggested children’s ministry as a place where the need for this is particularly acute.

Deal: Imagine somebody in her situation having a children’s pastor come alongside her.

Bock: Who knew the dynamics.

Deal: And say to her something to the effect of, “This is hard. It’s not supposed to feel good. And it makes all the sense in the world to me why it’s so hard for you to like your stepmother because you miss your mom.” Wow, just think about that. Connecting it and putting words on it.

Bock: She was searching for what it was.

Deal: But if somebody gave words to it and said, “I think this is what it is,” and then they went so far as to say, “You know what, you don’t have to embrace your stepmother like you did your mother. There is only Mom in your life and there is a certain, special space in your heart that is only reserved for your mom. And your stepmom will never even try to go into that place, and you don’t have to put her there. She is another adult who cares for you, just like your teachers at school, just like a youth pastor.”

Just imagine somebody who is able to step into that space, put words on her experience, help her get some perspective and then give her permission to not have to like her stepmother and do away with Mom.

Darrell pointed out this level of ministerial engagement may seem like a lot of work. Indeed, it will likely require ministry leaders and theologians to put themselves in an uncomfortable position of addressing their own familial pain or an unfamiliar home structure. It will require sermon sidebars. Premarital curriculum will need to be adapted. There will be difficult conversations about extramarital sex. Youth leaders will need to learn the children’s complicated genogram. Discipleship will need to include massive amounts of relational wisdom. Yet for one third of the Church, it seems like a worthwhile investment.