Marriage and Family Life

Seeking God Together: Welcoming and Accompanying Family Life from Conception to Death

Thursday, June 6th, 2013 @ 2:20 pm

Inspired by Amoris Laetitia, we have gathered together the key elements of family ministry in England and Wales, in a practical Companion to support the vocation of families.

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‘Seeking God Together’ is founded on the Catholic Church’s vision for marriage and family life, sensitive to the complex reality of family today and structured across nine seasons:

  • Conception to birth
  • Birth to starting school
  • Childhood years
  • Adolescent years
  • Young adults and single people of any age
  • Preparing for Marriage
  • Married & family life
  • Empty Nest and retirement years
  • The Later years

Seeking God Together means:

  • Meeting families where they are – not where we think they should be – building on strengths and accompanying them in a steady and reassuring way.
  • Encouraging a response that often begins with listening to and serving a family’s practical needs, enabling a relationship of trust to develop. This relationship is the seed bed for connecting with faith in God.
  • Making space for conversations in ordinary every-day language, listening to and learning from families about love and relationships, affirming that God is very close. 
  • Building confidence and hope, offering a map or reference guide to the different ‘seasons’ of family life from conception to death, responding to the family’s spoken and unspoken search for God in their love and struggles.
  • Encouraging parishes to review their accompaniment of families, helping them to identify some take-off and landing points for ministry where family life intersects with the life of the Church
  • Signposting to recommended resources
  • Being ‘Family’ is a life-long vocation to grow in love

Celebrating Family: Blessed, Broken, Living Love