What Is a Family?

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For years, the church has debated same-sex “marriage,” surrogacy, and the growing commercialization of children as though they are separate issues. They are not. Every one of these debates flows from a much deeper question: What is a family?

Until Christians recover and advocate for the clear, biblical definition of family, we will continue losing cultural ground because we are arguing symptoms instead of addressing the root problem.

Modern society increasingly defines family through adult desire and emotional fulfillment. If adults love each other or want to raise a child together, culture says that is enough. Biology, marriage, and parenthood become secondary to personal preference.

But Scripture defines family very differently.

Biblically, family is the covenantal institution created by God through the union of husband and wife, ordered toward permanence, faithfulness, and the raising of children. Family is not simply about adult companionship. It is about the natural bonds between husband and wife first, then mother, father, and child.

That distinction changes everything.

If marriage is merely about adult happiness, then there is no reason it must involve only one man and one woman. But if marriage is the God-ordained structure through which families are formed, then one male and one female are not interchangeable parts. They are essential.

The same is true for surrogacy and donor conception and also adoption.

Today’s fertility industry speaks almost entirely in terms of adult rights and desires: adults who want children, adults who feel called to parenthood, adults who can afford the process. Missing from the conversation is the child’s right to his or her own mother and father.

Instead, children increasingly become products of contracts and technology.

This becomes especially clear when a same-sex couple or a single individual seeks to obtain a child despite lacking the natural ability to conceive one within marriage. By necessity, motherhood or fatherhood must be outsourced, severed, or purchased.

Christians must be willing to say clearly and compassionately that children are not commodities designed to fulfill adult desires.

Every child comes from a mother and father. That reality is not hateful or outdated. It is rooted in creation and nature itself.

Much of today’s legal and cultural confusion over marriage, parental rights, and reproductive technology exists because society has abandoned the biblical definition of family.

But if we restore that foundation, all of these issues become clearly defined again: what a family is, and what it is not.

Family is not whatever society decides to call it. Family is God’s design — husband, wife, and the children who come from or are brought into that union, bound together in covenant, responsibility, and love across generations.

(Editor's Note: This article was posted first on the American Family News website HERE.)

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