putting family ahead of church

Earlier this month, I was ordained an elder in Community of Christ, an event I anticipated in an earlier post. A couple of weeks later, I carried out some of my first duties as a member of the denomination’s priesthood by performing the confirmation for a friend of mine who was joining Community of Christ, also from a Latter-day Saint background.

There’s a lot that I could write about these two events (my ordination and her confirmation), but there’s one thing that I want to share in particular: I was almost late to the confirmation service. Well, not really—I had hoped to be there 30-45 minutes early and was only 20 minutes early, so I was later than I meant to be, but I wasn’t late late. The point that I want to make here still stands, though: I was later to the service than I had planned to be largely because I was coming from a family outing.

My family really likes a particular art fair that takes place in Lexington every summer. This year, it was scheduled the same weekend as this confirmation service; because the service was a couple hours away from where I live, being part of the service meant spending all of Saturday afternoon and evening traveling to and being at the service and then staying the night because driving home right after would have gotten us home too late. All of that meant that Saturday morning was by far the best time for us as a family to go see the art fair, even if it meant that it might get me to the service a few minutes later than I had intended to be there.

I don’t like being late to things, but even with a certain base level of anxiety eating at me, spending the time with family at the art fair was clearly the right decision. I’m committed to being a priesthood member in Community of Christ, but I’m also committed to never letting it get in the way of my family. We’re a mixed-faith family—one of the driving factors for my joining Community of Christ in the first place was because as much as I love the Latter-day Saint tradition, I felt like I could no longer balance my personal religious practice with being present for and unwaveringly supportive of the other members of my family. There were other factors at play, too, but it was important to me that I be willing to put my family ahead of my church.

Don’t get me wrong: The importance of family is a regular theme in Latter-day Saint settings, too. That said, there’s always an underlying assumption that that’s true so long as that family meets Latter-day Saint ideals. Once mine no longer fit that mold, I realized that I—to quote Jana Riess’s excellent column on “the stubborn faithfulness of liberal Latter-day Saints”—had “internalized some beautiful values for which we are grateful and which have guided our decisions in life,” even if those decisions don’t seem in line with church teachings.

So, yes, putting family first is something that I learned (and that I appreciate having learned) from my Mormon roots. Yet, that lesson is going to play out differently in my Community of Christ priesthood service than it might be expected in a Latter-day Saint priesthood context. I’m not going to be late to my kid’s birthday party because I was at a long meeting about establishing a new congregation in the area. I’m not going to limit my availability for visiting-from-out-of-town relatives because I can’t miss yet one more aspect church service that’s being asked of me. I’m certainly not going to tell a family member who’s coming out to me that I’m always going to defer to church teachings on gender and sexuality.

I’m not going to do all of this perfectly. Well, I think I can get responding to a coming out right pretty consistently, but when balancing church meetings and family time, I do want to show up for both and there’s always going to be some tension there. I know from the beginning, though, that I’m going to err on the side of family. Church is important to me, and I want to make Community of Christ part of my life for the rest of my life. Yet, I’m only in this church in the first place because of a commitment to put my family first—that commitment isn’t going to change now that I’m serving in priesthood ministry.

• macro
• Communities
• family
• priesthood
• Community of Christ
• Mormonism
• Jana Riess