Extended Families
How to Begin an Extended Family
If you want to start an extended family, just let Kathleen Heck and Debbie Lydon know. Please let the church office know who is in your group, the name of your extended family, when you meet and if you are willing to receive new people.
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A Reflection from Rev. Wayne Arnason
about Extended Families
West Shore Church has had Extended Families since the early seventies. They were initiated as an innovative idea for creating intentional intergenerational family-style groupings of church members for mutual support, pastoral care and socializing. Very few congregations in the UUA have seen their extended family structures survive for thirty plus years. The fact that some of West Shore’s Extended Families have survived that long and that new ones have been created is testimony to their importance in the lives of the people participating in them.
Our existing Extended Families seem to have a schedule of social events at least quarterly and often monthly. These events are sometimes built around holidays. They can include recognition of special events in the lives of members. Extended Families have sometimes worked on service projects together, both for the church and for the larger community. They have been tremendously important as an informal network of support for their members in health or personal crisis. The ministers hear about the activities of three to five Extended Families from one year to the next, and get invited to occasional events, which we enjoy attending.
If you have read this brief description of the value and importance of Extended Families, and think this is something you’d like to participate in, you are probably assuming that the church’s professional or volunteer staff can tell you how to get involved in one. That is not the case, however. Our Extended Families prefer not to have staff involvement in directing new people towards their events and their intake process is not something that the ministers or the staff manage.
As a minister of the church, I have found this frustrating, but after several efforts to encourage people we know who are involved in Extended Families to publish their intake procedures and their meeting times, or even to establish a contact person who will speak to new people interested in Extended Families, I have given up. The reality is that our Extended Families act like families! They invite people in through affiliation, not through any application process. You get in because you are invited! It is usually because you get to know somebody who comes to a particular Extended Family and they invite you in. About five years ago, some church members who wanted to be part of an Extended Family decided to start their own. They asked for advice from the ministers, and publicized their startup, but once it got started, this new family went its own way like all the others. So if you want to be part of an Extended Family, my advice to you is ask around among the people you know in the church, and find out who is in one. Ask about whether they have any openings or whether you can visit. Maybe you can get in one! Let us know if you do!
Back in the 70’s, when Extended Families started up, some people will remember experiences living in communal houses. Often, these large houses that people shared had several cats living in the house too. Some of them were identified with particular house members, but sometimes it wasn’t clear who had originally brought that cat in! Being cats, these members of the household did their cat thing independently, quietly, and gracefully, pretty much resistant to anyone who tried to control them. The Extended Families are West Shore’s house cats. We love them.
