For many, families are loving and supportive relationships. For others, families can be a source of conflict and hurt. Navigating both realities as a church is important.

It’s the holiday season (“so hoop-de-doo and dickory dock,” to quote Andy Williams). Many stores are already playing Christmas music and the few that aren’t are bound to start sooner or later; Halloween decorations have been taken down and replaced with either Christmas or generic fall decorations for Thanksgiving. It can be a magical time of year. It can be a hectic time of year. And for those with dysfunctional families or who are alienated from their family of origin, it can be a very hard and sometimes lonely time of year.

Family Estrangement

There are many reasons why families can become strained or distant, as shared in Fern Schumer Chapman’s article in Psychology Today “What Research Tells Us About Family Estrangement,” including “emotional [or physical] abuse, mismatched expectations about family roles and relationships, clash of personality and values, neglect, issues relating to mental health problems, [and a] traumatic family event.” This is frequently heightened among LGBTQIA+ individuals, with a study showing that roughly half of LGBTQ+ individuals are estranged from at least one family member. Sadly, this is an understudied topic that has only received academic and professional attention relatively recently, with one of the first major studies on the topic being released in 2015.

There are many reasons for this, including the amount of shame and grief that frequently are a part of these situations, not to mention the ways in which societal and familial pressure can lead people estranged from their families to keep these feelings and details of their relationships private. When people do open up about family estrangement, they are often met with pressure to reunite with their families, lectures on the importance of families, or minimalization of their experiences.

Holidays and Estranged Families

The holidays are a particularly hard time. Everything from commercials to movies to holiday songs emphasizes the importance of family and family traditions during the season. There are so many films and stories about an estranged family reuniting or moving past differences in time for Thanksgiving or Christmas. This creates immense societal pressure to reconnect, forgive, forget, and reunite. People who have had to make the typically heartbreaking decision to distance themselves from a family member, or whose family has rejected them, can have these existing feelings compounded by the family-first messaging of the holidays.

Church, Community, and Holidays

So how can the church community accompany those estranged from family, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas? There is some overlap with a previous blog post on how to accompany families experiencing grief through the holidays, which may be a helpful read. Additionally, my podcast Horror Nerds at Church has an episode titled “The Queer Holiday Survival Guide” which gives advice aimed at LGBTQIA+ people and their families about specific advice they can follow to make it through the holidays. In preparing for this blog post, though, I asked many of my friends and colleagues what they wish their church or faith community would know or do to honor their situations, and their responses overwhelmingly were to just acknowledge the complexity of family relationships and estrangement.

So many of the people I’ve talked to have sat through worship services and other programming that lift up the goodness and blessing of family without giving space for those who have complicated feelings. Just acknowledging in prayers, preaching, and programming that there is a diversity of ways that people experience family, ranging from a source of trauma to a source of joy, can be very empowering and help people going through tough family estrangements feel seen and loved.

How to Help

Creating a support group, if your church has the resources, may be especially helpful, even if it only meets a few times during the holiday season. Having a space where participants can name what they are going through and share their stories without fear of judgment or pressure to reconnect with their families can be a great resource.

For youth and children, create space to share the goods and bads of spending time with family.

• Sharing highs and lows is an easy way to create this space.
• Offer time to have conversations with the child or youth
• Plan creative activities like journaling or drawing, where they can name fears or worries before or after the holidays and process what happened can be a huge help.
• Middle and high school youth can brainstorm ideas on how to survive the holidays, such as having a text thread of friends they can vent to without judgment during stressful times.
• Throughout the year, when Bible stories come up in the lectionary or in programming that feature dysfunctional families, make sure to name them as such and talk about the ways they are dysfunctional and can cause harm.

Finally, pay attention to the use of family as a metaphor. Many congregations, youth groups, and other social groups refer to themselves as a family. For some, that can communicate close-knit bonds, caring for one another, and support. But for others, these metaphors can instead recall conflict, trauma, and abuse. Consider using expansive or adaptive language and metaphors for your community and encourage others to do the same.

However your faith community celebrates the holidays, make sure to provide a safe space for people without families or with complex relationships to families a safe space where they can be seen, participate, and feel welcome.

Peace and all good,

Pace Warfield

About the Writer

Pace C. Warfield (they/them) is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA where their research interests include Reformation history and queer theological anthropology. In addition to their studies, Pace has worked in children, youth, and family ministries for over fifteen years at various congregations throughout the country. Pace has previously written blog posts for We Talk, We Listen, the diversity blog of the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, on mental health and the holidays called “Waiting for Snow” and a Lutheran approach to LGBTQIA+ systematic theology called “The Queer Ground.” Additional resources they have prepared on loss and the holidays are the podcast episode of Horror Nerds at Church “The Queer Holiday Survival Guide” and their post “Queering Grief” on their personal blog. They live in Hopkins, Minnesota with their partner and two dogs.

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