Build Your Imperfect Family: Five Practices for Healthier Relationships

Family is one of God’s greatest gifts. It is also one of life’s greatest challenges.

Some of our happiest memories happened around a family table. Some of our deepest wounds probably happened there too. All of us have been shaped by our families, and there is no such thing as a family that hasn’t caused pain. Some of us carry scars. Others are still living with open wounds. Many carry sadness because their family is not what they hoped it would be.

That makes family a tender subject. It is also why we need to talk about it.

Recently at Citywide, we have been working through some of the ideas in Build the Life You Want by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey. It isn’t the Bible, and it doesn’t pretend to be. Brooks draws on research into happiness and human flourishing and identifies four pillars of a healthy life: family, friendship, faith and meaningful work.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed about the book is how often the research points towards truths the Bible has been teaching for thousands of years. That shouldn’t surprise us. The Creator knows how human beings work.

When I came to the chapter “Build Your Imperfect Family,” I also noticed something Brooks doesn’t explore directly: the things that build healthy families also build healthy churches. That matters because the New Testament doesn’t describe the church primarily as an event we attend or an organisation we join. It describes the church as the family of God.

God isn’t simply forming individual followers of Jesus. He is building a family.

We Were Not Designed to Live Alone

One of the great challenges facing both families and churches is the individualism of our culture. We are continually encouraged to ask, “What do I want? What makes me happy? What works for me?”

Those aren’t always bad questions, but they become dangerous when they are the only questions we know how to ask.

Families cannot flourish if every person is focused only on themselves. Churches cannot flourish that way either. Both require us to learn to think in terms of “us” rather than simply “me.”

That is deeply countercultural. Consumer culture trains us to evaluate every relationship according to what we get from it. If a friendship becomes difficult, we move on. If a church doesn’t meet our preferences, we look for another one. Even family members can gradually be treated like emotional ATMs—people we approach when we need reassurance, support, money or practical help, but whose inner lives we rarely take the time to understand.

The gospel invites us into a different way of living. It asks not only, “Am I getting what I need?” but, “How am I learning to love?”

Funnily enough, one of the paradoxes Brooks identifies is that we become happier and healthier when we spend less time thinking about ourselves. Jesus has been saying something very similar all along. Life is not found by grasping it more tightly for ourselves. It is found as we learn to give ourselves in love.

Family Is Meant to Be Safe

The Bible begins its picture of family in Genesis, where a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife. A new family is formed through covenant, commitment and faithfulness.

Malachi builds on that picture. Speaking into a world in which men held almost all the social and economic power, he warns husbands not to be unfaithful to their wives. Divorce could leave a woman economically and socially vulnerable, so God confronts men who use their power selfishly. Malachi describes that betrayal as violence against the person a husband should protect.

That tells us something important about God’s intention for family. Those who hold more power are meant to use it to protect and serve those with less power. Family should be a safe place in which people can grow without being crushed, manipulated or exploited.

Malachi also asks what God seeks through the marriage covenant. His answer is “godly offspring.” In other words, family is not meant to exist solely for the happiness of the adults. It should be a place where the next generation is nurtured and helped to become all God created them to be.

The New Testament continues that vision. Interestingly, ancient writers commonly addressed only the male head of the household when explaining how a family should function. The New Testament speaks directly to husbands and wives, parents and children. Children are treated as people with dignity and agency: they are told to obey their parents, and in the very next line fathers are warned not to exasperate their children.

The Bible also extends responsibility beyond the immediate household. Paul writes that those who refuse to care for their relatives, especially members of their own household, have denied the practical implications of their faith. That can be difficult. Extended families are complicated, and most of us probably have at least one slightly strange uncle. Nevertheless, Scripture gives us a picture of people who remain committed to caring for one another.

One clarification is essential. Commitment to family must never be used to excuse abuse. Every family and every relationship contains differences in power, and it is never right to allow someone to use their power to intimidate, control or harm another person. Safety may require firm boundaries, outside help or distance from a relationship. Those boundaries are not a failure to love. Sometimes they are among the most loving and faithful choices a person can make.

The Church Is a Family Too

Our modern picture of family is often limited to parents and children living together. The biblical picture is much broader. It includes the extended household, and the New Testament uses the same language to describe the church.

John writes that Jesus came to his own people, but they did not receive him. Yet all who did receive him and believe in his name were given the right to become children of God. Hebrews says that Jesus and the people he makes holy belong to the same family. Paul calls the church the household of faith and tells believers to do good to everyone, especially those who belong to that household.

Opening ourselves to Jesus means becoming part of a new family.

That is wonderful news, particularly for people whose experience of family has been painful. The church can become a place of belonging for those who feel alone. But it also means the church will have all the complexity of a family.

Churches experience unmet expectations. Churches contain people with dramatically different personalities and backgrounds. Churches can develop negative cultures, avoid difficult conversations and hold on to resentment. The same things that damage families damage churches because both are communities of imperfect people learning to love.

A healthy church will not happen accidentally any more than a healthy family will. Both take prayer, courage, honesty, forgiveness and grace.

The Superglue Brooks Doesn’t Mention

Before considering the challenges Brooks identifies, I want to add something he doesn’t emphasise: prayer.

I have become increasingly convinced that prayer is a kind of superglue holding families together. Often there is someone in a family whom God seems to tap on the shoulder and ask to pray. They carry children, grandchildren, siblings, marriages and prodigals before God year after year. Those people are an extraordinary gift.

But prayer cannot simply be delegated to the recognised prayer warrior in the family. All of us are invited to pray for the people God has placed around us.

Prayer doesn’t always come naturally to me. I get distracted, so I write down the names of friends and relatives I sense God prompting me to pray for. The list helps me return to them deliberately rather than relying on my memory or waiting until I feel particularly spiritual.

Leeanne and I have also tried to make praying together part of our marriage. We don’t do it perfectly. There are times—hypothetically, of course—when we might be frustrated with one another and praying together is the last thing we feel like doing.

Yet those are often the moments when prayer matters most.

There is something vulnerable about praying with another person. It is difficult to remain entirely self-righteous while sincerely standing together before God. Prayer reminds us what matters. It lifts our eyes beyond the immediate disagreement and brings us back to Jesus.

The same is true in a church. Programs and strategies have their place, but a church family cannot be held together by organisation alone. We need to pray for one another, not only when a crisis occurs but as an ordinary expression of love.

Conflict Is the Price of Admission

The first challenge Brooks identifies is conflict.

If you belong to a family that has never experienced conflict, then, let’s be honest, you probably don’t. Conflict is part of life. A relationship with no visible conflict may simply be one in which people have learned to avoid being honest.

Brooks suggests that much ordinary conflict begins with unmet expectations. We expect someone to clean their room, arrive on time, remember something important or respond in a particular way. Often the expectation has never been clearly expressed. We assume the other person should just know.

More serious conflict can emerge when someone appears to reject another family member’s core beliefs or values. That can feel like more than disagreement. It can feel like a rejection of who we are.

Healthy families do need values and boundaries. I remember being about thirteen and trying to mount a philosophical argument with Dad about why McDonald’s was a better option than church. Dad responded by quoting Joshua: “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

I wasn’t especially impressed at the time. Retrospectively, I think he was right.

A family needs to understand what it is about. Jesus had boundaries too. When his mother and brothers tried to redirect his ministry, he refused to allow even his family to set his agenda. Love does not mean surrendering every conviction or allowing another person to control us.

The challenge is to remain faithful to our values without making agreement the condition of our love. Jesus spent time with tax collectors, prostitutes and Pharisees. He did not pretend their differences didn’t matter, but neither did he require them to agree with him before treating them with dignity.

Brooks gives a particularly helpful warning: don’t try to read minds.

Our families live rent-free in our heads. We carry a mental version of each family member, and sometimes that version is decades out of date. My grandmother could return to her family at eighty years old and still be called “Bub” because she remained the baby in the family’s collective imagination.

Whenever we return to our families, it is surprisingly easy to slip back into old roles. The responsible one is expected to fix everything. The difficult one is assumed to have bad motives. The youngest is still treated like a child.

Healthy families replace mind-reading with curiosity. They speak honestly, ask questions and listen again. The person sitting across the table today is not exactly the same person who sat there ten years ago.

Exactly the same thing happens in churches. We stop listening because we assume we already know what someone thinks. Conflict becomes an opportunity for growth only when we become curious enough to hear one another.

Difference Is Not the Enemy

Another source of tension is the expectation that the people closest to us should think like us.

One of the things I’ve learned about Leeanne and me is that we are really different. She can look at a cup, imagine a word printed on it and immediately see a project involving a hundred of them. She can walk into a kitchen and see what it could become. She can also walk into a lounge room and notice that it is messy.

Her brain works differently from mine.

There are moments when I want to have what I consider a very important, deep conversation while she is looking at the messy lounge room. Occasionally I have discovered that helping to clean the lounge room creates the space for the important conversation. Hypothetically, of course.

Brooks argues that healthy relationships do not require complete compatibility. They require enough shared values to function, but what we often need is complementarity. We need people whose strengths meet our weaknesses and who notice what we miss.

This challenges the way our culture approaches relationships. Dating apps often promise to help us find the most compatible person possible. But the best partner is not necessarily a duplicate of us. Our friends may sometimes see who complements us more clearly than an algorithm can.

The same principle applies to church. One of the heresies of modern Christianity is the idea that we should find a church where everybody thinks, speaks and acts like us. That is not a church. It is getting dangerously close to a cult.

The church is meant to bring together people of different ages, experiences, personalities and backgrounds. Difference is not a design flaw in the family of God. It is part of the design.

We need to name and appreciate those differences, then learn which matters are genuinely foundational and which are simply preferences. Unity is not sameness. It is different people learning to love one another around Jesus.

Breaking the Negativity Virus

Families can develop what Brooks calls a negativity virus. Churches and small groups can catch it too.

No single event necessarily causes it. The emotional culture simply becomes negative. Criticism spreads. Encouragement becomes rare. Everyone begins to assume the worst, and eventually problem-solving becomes almost impossible because nobody expects anything to improve.

Researchers describe this as emotional contagion. We tend to absorb the feelings of the people around us. Interestingly, the Bible has recognised this dynamic for thousands of years. We are told to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn because our emotional lives affect one another.

Brooks suggests that if we want to change a negative culture, we should begin by putting on our own oxygen mask. Before attempting to fix everyone else, we need to attend to our own emotional wellbeing. We are unlikely to bring peace, hope or patience into a situation when we are exhausted and overwhelmed.

We should also resist taking every negative reaction personally. Hurt people often hurt others. That does not excuse destructive behaviour, but it can help us avoid treating every sharp comment as an accurate assessment of our character.

Sometimes we also need to change the channel.

I have discovered that when a family atmosphere becomes intense, my instinct is to call a meeting and talk everything through. Strangely enough, that doesn’t always work. Sometimes the healthiest thing is to get in the car and go somewhere. Take a walk. Share a meal. Do something surprising and enjoyable together.

Not every tense moment needs a summit meeting. Sometimes people need space to remember that they actually enjoy one another.

Followers of Jesus are called to become circuit breakers. Paul tells us to bless those who persecute us rather than curse them. Peter tells us not to repay evil with evil or insult with insult. We are not merely thermometers that reflect the temperature of a room. By God’s grace, we can become thermostats that help change it.

Every family and every church eventually discovers that both negativity and hope are contagious. The question is which one we will spread.

Forgiveness Holds Us Together

The people we love most are often the people we hurt most because they are the people closest to us. They see us when we are tired, impatient, frightened and frustrated. They know our weaknesses, and we know theirs.

Families are dangerous places when they do not know how to forgive. Churches are too.

Matthew 18 is largely about holding a community together, and much of it concerns forgiveness. Peter asks Jesus how often he must forgive. Perhaps seven times would be sufficiently generous? Jesus responds, in effect, “Don’t stop.”

We forgive because we have been forgiven.

Brooks describes several ways forgiveness can operate. Sometimes it begins with a direct conversation: “We need to talk about what happened.” Sometimes it requires saying clearly, “You hurt me, but I choose to forgive you.” At other times, forgiveness is communicated nonverbally through a hug, a smile or the gradual restoration of warmth.

Maturity may also mean recognising that not every irritation is a moral failure requiring forgiveness. Sometimes the other person is simply tired, different or imperfect. Occasionally we need to reclassify the offence in our own minds and decide it isn’t the enormous issue we first imagined.

Brooks also warns against counterfeit forgiveness. Conditional forgiveness says, “I will forgive you if you meet all my demands.” That can become another way of grasping for power. Pseudo-forgiveness says, “I forgive you,” then brings the offence back as a weapon in every future disagreement.

Forgiveness does not mean pretending harm never happened. It does not eliminate accountability or automatically restore trust. It certainly does not require the removal of necessary boundaries. Forgiveness releases our claim to revenge; reconciliation and restored access may still require repentance, change and time.

Almost all unresolved conflict eventually becomes unresolved resentment. Families and churches survive because imperfect people learn to receive grace and extend it to one another.

Honesty Brings Things Into the Light

The final danger Brooks identifies is dishonesty.

Often it does not look like an outright lie. It looks like avoidance. We decide the conversation is too difficult, so we stop saying what we really think. We remain polite on the surface while resentment grows underneath. Eventually people can live in the same house—or sit in the same church—while living parallel lives.

The research says honesty reduces stress and deepens connection. Once again, the Bible has been saying this all along.

Ephesians describes followers of Jesus as children of light. What is exposed to the light becomes visible, and what is illuminated can itself become light. The things we keep hidden often cause the greatest damage.

That does not mean blurting out every thought without considering its effect. Paul tells us to speak the truth in love. Both parts are essential. Truth without love becomes brutality. Love without truth becomes sentimentality or avoidance.

One lesson I learned early in leadership was to invite honesty before offering feedback. Asking someone to name my strengths and weaknesses first helps create a culture in which we can speak openly to one another. It also reminds me that I need grace and correction as much as anybody else.

Before saying something difficult, we should examine our motives. Are we trying to heal the relationship, or do we simply want to get something off our chest? Honesty should be used to heal, never to harm.

We also need to think carefully about timing and language. Over the years, I have gradually developed a kind of mental translation guide for Leeanne. The same words can carry different meanings for different people. Loving communication is not merely saying something in the way that makes sense to me. It is doing the work to express it in a way the other person can actually hear.

Honesty takes courage. It can be uncomfortable, particularly in families or churches that have spent years avoiding difficult subjects. Yet truthful, loving conversations help us grow up.

Don’t Give Up

Brooks ends with two simple words: never give up.

That needs to be understood carefully. Refusing to give up on someone does not mean allowing them unlimited access to hurt us. It does not mean removing boundaries or remaining in an unsafe situation. Sometimes love requires distance. Sometimes protecting those with less power must take priority over preserving the appearance of family harmony.

But even when distance is necessary, we do not have to surrender a person entirely to hopelessness. We can continue praying. We can remain open to what God might do. We can refuse to allow resentment or cynicism to have the final word.

Psalm 133 says, “How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.”

The psalm compares that unity to precious oil running down Aaron’s head and beard. To modern ears, that sounds more like a cooking accident than a blessing. In the ancient world, however, oil was a picture of refreshment, abundance and God’s presence. It was like having a long-awaited shower after a week of hiking.

The psalm also compares unity to dew falling on dry ground. It brings life to a place that desperately needs it. “For there,” the psalmist says, “the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.”

Unity is life-giving, but it does not happen accidentally.

Building an imperfect family takes work. Building a healthy church takes work too. Conflict must be handled with honesty and grace. Difference must be appreciated rather than feared. Negativity must be interrupted. Forgiveness must become a way of life. Truth must be spoken in love.

And through it all, prayer keeps drawing us back to Jesus.

None of us gets to choose the family that shaped us. None of us can undo everything that has happened, and none of us will ever build a perfect family or belong to a perfect church.

But every one of us can decide what kind of influence we will be from this point forward.

We can pray rather than despair. We can remain curious rather than assuming we can read minds. We can offer grace instead of keeping score. We can speak truth instead of pretending. We can become people who change the emotional temperature of the communities around us.

By God’s grace, we can help leave our families and our churches healthier than we found them.

In a culture becoming increasingly isolated and individualistic, imperfect people learning to love one another may be one of the clearest ways we show the world where our hope comes from.