Establishing Zion

The family is the fundamental unit of Zion — not merely its nurturing heart, but its basic unit of economic life, civic action, historical memory, education in the doctrine of Christ, and community engagement. This is a more demanding vision of family than the one most Latter-day Saints carry around in their heads, and it has direct implications for how families should organize themselves and what they should be working toward.

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The six dimensions of family life in Zion are worth naming explicitly. The family is the basic social unit — the network of relationships within which people learn to love, serve, and be accountable to one another. It is the basic productive unit — holding property, combining labor, and consecrating surplus to the poor. It is the basic civic unit — engaged in the governance of the communities its members inhabit. It is the keeper of historical memory — connecting living members to ancestors and descendants across generations. It is the primary educational institution — teaching the doctrine of Christ not as a curriculum but as a way of life. And it is the basic unit of action and self-reliance — capable of meeting its own needs and therefore free to serve others without reservation.

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This vision of family encompasses all of God's children — single adults no less than married ones. The extended family, the ward family, and the covenant community through which single members live and serve are genuine expressions of the family principle, not substitutes for it or consolation prizes. Single adults are not waiting for family life to begin. They are living it now, in the networks of relationship and service and covenant that constitute genuine family in the Lord's sense.

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The foundation stones apply within the family just as they do in every other institution. Devotion to God and Christ means the family is oriented outward, toward the Lord, rather than inward toward its own comfort and preservation. Charity means family members see one another as the Lord sees them — with full awareness of eternal potential and genuine concern for flourishing. Agency means family members are invited into real decisions and trusted to act, not managed into compliance. Accountability means each member takes genuine responsibility for the health and direction of the family as a whole, not just for their own individual behavior. And unity — the foundation stone no one can keep alone — is the deliberate, sustained work of becoming one heart and one mind within the home before extending that unity outward into the community.

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Parents are accountable for teaching but children are agents who choose. Even the perfect Father lost one-third. This is not a counsel of despair but a clarification of what faithful parenting actually requires: creating the conditions in which children can encounter truth, make genuine choices, and develop their own covenant relationship with God — not managing outcomes or measuring success by behavioral compliance.

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Spencer W. Kimball's counsel that families can achieve unity by learning to make decisions together is the chapter's most practical pointer. Unity within the family is not achieved by the strongest personality dominating or by avoiding conflict. It is achieved by the patient, transparent, mutually respectful process of working through real decisions together — about finances, about priorities, about how the family will engage with its community and fulfill its covenant obligations. That process, practiced consistently over time, is what produces the unity Zion requires at every level.

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Building families capable of shouldering these responsibilities requires focusing on true doctrine rather than behavioral management. President Packer's observation that a testimony of true doctrine, when it takes root in the heart, changes behavior more reliably than any program of behavioral management — applies with full force to family life. The family that understands what it is and what it is for will organize itself accordingly. The family that has only been taught rules and programs will struggle to find the motivation Zion requires.