A very warm welcome to the website for Family Life Ministry (FLM) in the Diocese of Leeds. This site has resources which are available to you for home, school and parish use. Why? Because "no plan for organised pastoral work at any level must ever fail to take into consideration the pastoral area of the family." Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio (FC).

What is Family Life Ministry? Family Life Ministry helps equip us, ordinary family people, to live our vocation to love.

“Having children and grandchildren is so important in this age of self contentment, because we lose ourselves in the lives of our children. There is no greater gift and no greater vocation” Bishop Arthur Roche ‘Wharfetales’ Summer 2006 

Whatever helps us to know God’s love and to share that love with each other: couples to love each other; parents to love their children; family people to love each other, to love our neighbours, to love the wider world, is Family Life Ministry.

What is love? Love is God, love is life – love is life giving, life affirming, wonderful and demanding in countless ways. Love can be unglamorous: Jesus demonstrated 'love one another as I have loved you' by washing his disciples’ dirty feet; and also incredibly difficult: Jesus loved us enough to die a cruel, violent, public, criminal's death for us.

When do you love? Do you wash tired and dirty feet? nappies? school uniforms? jeans? Do you work to feed your family? Do you comfort a sick or distressed child, wife, brother, mother? Do you cook? clean? grow or buy food? Do you guide in love an errant child? Do you talk with your children, family and friends about the wonder of God and how God's love, shown by Jesus, inspires and informs everything you do? Do you forgive? or struggle to forgive?

If you are doing any of this, however imperfectly, then you are living your vocation to 'guard, reveal and communicate love’!

(FC) Family Life Ministry proclaims that vocation, celebrates it and affirms your importance as ministers of the home (or 'domestic church’) and as the first evangelisers of your children.

How? By resourcing you to live the 'greater vocation' of love in family life. This website shows some of the resources available. All you have to do is look, ask and take action to help yourself and others in your family and community!

“Love has the power to reveal again the depth and truth of our humanity. This is achieved in the enduring love of parent for a wayward child, in the love of friend or spouse faithful through every crisis, and in the unconditional love given by the saint, often to the poorest and most forgotten. This is the love given supremely in Christ, and in him crucified.” TheMost Rev Vincent Nichols, installation  homily, 11th Archbishop of Westminster, 21st May 2009