Rachel Jordan-Wolf: ‘we need to help parents smash the idol of individualism’

Executive Director of HOPE Together, Rachel Jordan-Wolf, invites parents to consider the impact of secular individualism on family life and casts a vision for a bigger sense of family

Rachel, tell us a bit about your family background and how that’s influenced what you’ve gone on to do? 

Family for me has always been extended rather than nuclear. When I was young my aunt and uncle had the house at the bottom of our garden and so that merged into one big, shared space where we played with our four cousins. They were close to our age; we got on great and very much grew up with them in the early years. 

When it came to holidays, again, we never had what other people would have called a normal nuclear family vacation, my dad started this bank holiday back to nature camping holiday. He found a friendly landowner who allowed him to bring a load of young people us up to his field and dig latrines and fire pits and we had to learn how to cook over a fire for ourselves. It was a bit like a Brethren version of the Famous Five! So, I grew up with a sense that family was much more of this wider motley crew of people rather than just mum, dad and children. We were more of a clan than a family. And yes, it was, it was wonderful.

In the same way that we learnt to clean our teeth we learnt to pray, sing and read the Bible

In that context we learnt to pray, sing and read the Bible just as we learnt to read and speak. I think there is a tape somewhere of 3-year-old me singing a worship song I’d made up, I think the theology is probably ……