This is a book born of personal necessity. In 1990,

I married a woman with two young daughters. As my wife

and I began to encounter the situations and events that

are the reality of life in the stephome, we made our way

to the bookstores and libraries in search of perspectives

and answers. There we found sociological treatises, sta-

tistical studies, self-help psychology tracts, and legal anal-

yses.

But our home is a Christian home, and we were

looking for an approach to life s questions that came

from a specifically Christian perspective. What we dis-

covered, however, was a surprising absence of material.

The few authors who addressed stepfamily relationships

did so in one of two ways. Some wrote ofstepfamily issues

as a subsection of a larger discussion of the Christian

home. Others focused primarily on the dynamics of the

blended family, which is but one type of stepfamily. In

our case, I had no children with whom to "blend" my

stepfamily. We simply did not find the material we

needed.

But why a book on the Christian stepfamily? Be-