This redefinition of family ties provides the backdrop for McGowin’s reflections on how apprenticeship to love finds expression in the warp and woof of everyday household life, where opportunities for mundane (and occasionally seismic) acts of faithfulness, care, and mutuality are plentiful, regardless of whether the household looks anything like the prototypical nuclear family. These reflections oscillate in scale and scope, particularly when she discusses how brokenness shapes households. McGowin doesn’t shy away from the importance of truth-telling about the forces within which families operate— from patterns of generational trauma to unjust economic and social systems. She helpfully notes that family constructs have often been appropriated as a mechanism of upholding and spreading empires—including those claiming to act in the name of Christ—to violent and dehumanizing ends. In tracing out these dynamics, McGowin adds some of her most unique contributions to the conversation, even if they prove a bit unwieldy as she quickly hops between analysis of malformed dynamics internal to families and those imposed on families by broad social influences. Nevertheless, these brief moments of structural inelegance do not derail the overall clarity of her multifaceted vision. She deftly communicates the profound power of familial spaces and relationships to harm and heal, returning often to grounded observations (her analysis of suburban impulses toward isolation and busyness stands out) that underscore the gravity of family as a zone of formation.

In McGowin’s later chapters, the practical reflection increases, and she sounds several points that I love. Children should be meaningfully influenced and raised by communities, not just parents! They’re also real people with agency – but that doesn’t erase how vulnerable they are! Single people should have pathways to give and receive deep intimacy and love too! (She makes these points with whole chapters’ worth of nuance, and fewer exclamation points.) Yet as I applauded, I found myself wishing for further development on one thread: intentional geographic stability. It struck me that her overall advocacy for interdependence and mutuality, not just within a given household but also between households, neighborhoods, and within the family structure of the church, would pose unique challenges to a community marked by transience versus one characterized by rootedness. I wonder if the latter, practiced through long-term creative engagement with the contours of specific places and particular communities, is necessary to truly achieve the cultural shifts that would loosen the hold of the family blueprint on the contemporary evangelical imagination. McGowin does gesture in this direction repeatedly, but I longed for deeper exploration.

McGowin’s prodigious theological imagination is most on display in her final chapters, where she enumerates specific spiritual disciplines that can shape household-based apprenticeship to love. The physicality of baptism infuses significance into caring for our bodies and places. The rhythms of the Eucharist manifest in sharing meals and practicing hospitality and reconciliation. Such habits of remembrance and honor flow from an attention to the spiritual weight of the physical world—a world shared by all people and shared with a unique degree of proximity in household spaces.

Indeed, this last section wonderfully illustrates the core strength of McGowin’s work in Households of Faith: a robust interest in the necessity of practicing love in the spaces where human beings dwell most intimately, without pedestalizing or valorizing specific structures of practice to the exclusion of others. In this, she has offered a meditation that is both a helpful corrective and compelling fuel for the imagination, inviting a more creative response to love in the life of our households. I hope her words encourage many to embrace the path of discernment and improvisation.