Better Homes & Families Pt 1: How Does Your Garden Grow?

Well, this is a pretty important conversation because all of us in our various walks of life, we come from a family.

Mmm.

We have our own family contexts, you know, in terms of, so Gemma, you and Joe, you have your own address.

Yes, that's right.

So you've got your own outstation of, you know, the troop family there, as well as being part of a larger context, your family of origin, Joe's family of origin.

Yep.

You have your family and that's kind of, your family's a little bit more like Danielle's.

You might need a whiteboard for people to understand the way it all blends together, but you do.

And I have my family, my family of origin, plus my kiddies and spouse and all that sort of jazz.

So as people who are part of families, we can talk about families.

But secondly, we work with a lot of people and therefore our people-related interface gives us some unique insights in a way.

They're not more unique than others, but just by sheer scale of mass population and we see a lot of the interrelated effects of family life in people's other bits of their life.

Gemma's our youth pastor, leads a cranking youth ministry, EC Youth.

Yeah.

But we have a lot of variety.

We've got a patchwork quilt of types of people in our youth ministry because there's community kids, there's church kids, there's church-ish kids, there's Christian kids, there's Christian-ish kids, there's pagan kids, there's drug dealers, there's whatever.

So not our leaders though.

But you definitely get a front row seat into what things are like when you're a teenager heading towards a young adult based on your family of origin.

So there's some interesting data you've got there that we've talked about the demographics of our region and our area before.

Bethany in your pastoral ministry and as leaders we deal with issues all the time and we're a multi-generational Church which means sometimes we deal with issues in the same family across multiple generations as well so therefore what we want to do over the next little while and in fact our extended meditation on better homes and families is helping people make the most of the opportunities they have yeah that the future is a better outcome because of the choices they make in their private world when it comes to their relationship network and especially their family yeah so yeah who who does this apply to well it applies to you if you're married mm-hmm it applies to if you've got kids it applies to if you're not married because you might want to be one day yeah And if you're not married, there's three reasons why you're not married.

A, you're called to be celibate and you're not ever going to be married.

B, you are planning to but it hasn't happened yet.

Or C, you were married but now you find yourself not married anymore.

And therefore, even if you're not currently married, this will apply to you in multiple ways because you should also have a good head around...

The things that work well in families, they also work well in workplaces.