13/4/94

How ‘Church’ Can Become ‘Family’

All who believed were together and had all things in common;
they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute
the proceeds to all, as any had need. (Acts 2:44-45)

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our
Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that
there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in
the same mind and the same purpose. (1 Corinthians 1:10) For
whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother
and sister and mother. (Matthew 12:50)

There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and
uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but
Christ is all and in all! As God’s chosen ones, holy and
beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness,
humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and,
if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each
other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must
forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds
everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of
Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called
in the one body. And be thankful. (Colossians 3:11-15)

But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to
forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them
slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them
known to your children and your children’s children.
(Deuteronomy 4:9) Like newborn infants, long for the pure,
spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation. (1
Peter 2:2)

Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in
showing honor. (Romans 12:10) So then, putting away
falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors,
for we are members of one another. (Ephesians 4:25) Keep on
doing the things that you have learned and received and heard
and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.
(Philippians 4:9)

When the ‘chorus boom’ invaded our churches a couple of
decades ago, one of the most popular was: ‘We are heirs of
the Father, We are joint heirs with the Son, We are children
of the kingdom, We are family, we are one.’

But our songs sometimes do not match reality. About that time
a popular Christian book had this complaint: ‘Our churches
are filled with people who outwardly look contented and at
peace but inwardly are crying out for someone to love them…
just as they are – confused, frustrated, often frightened,
guilty, and often unable to communicate even within their own
families. But the other people in the church look so happy
and contented that one seldom has the courage to admit his
own deep needs before such a self-sufficient group as the
average church meeting appears to be.’ [Keith Miller, The
Taste of New Wine, Waco: Texas, 1965, p.22] [97]

An unnamed ‘serious man’ once reminded John Wesley that ‘the
Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.’ He was right.
God’s antidote for loneliness is community, koinonia, rich
fellowship, experienced in the church.

The key purpose of the church is to continue to do in our
world what Jesus did in his. It’s as simple as that. But the
key difference between Jesus and the church is that Jesus did
not need to be redeemed! The church – every church – is a
mixture of good and evil. Jesus the head of the church is
there, present with his people, who comprise his body. God’s
Spirit is at work in the church; so is the Devil. The church
is not yet spiritually sanitized, just forgiven.

Last week an ex-church leader came to talk to me. He was
driving his wife and ten-year-old daughter to church these
days, and not attending himself. Why? He’d been hurt, and was
disillusioned by the church. But as we talked I think he came
to see that though his diagnosis was right his attitude was
flawed. He should be there, with his family, meeting God, who
still ministers to us in worship as we minister to him. We
are to have the same attitude to the church Jesus has: he
loves the church, not because it is perfect, but in spite of
its imperfections. Jesus always loves like that. So must we.

So the local church ought to be the best resource in our
culture to create ‘community’. It is God’s family, where we
are accepted with all our faults and sins.

When people attach themselves to your church group they ought
to quickly feel at home. Your church circles should be
semi-circles, opening to include new people. But here’s the
rub: deep down many church-folk are scared of their
‘networks’ becoming flexible, because their security is tied
up with the predictability of those relationships. In church
after church I ask the leaders: Is yours a friendly church?
To which they mostly answer, ‘Yes’. Then I ask: name the
adults who have joined your church through conversion in,
say, the last eight years. Many churches have great
difficulty naming them. And when I talk to people who tried
to ‘break into’ an established fellowship they say, ‘They
were nice to me the first few Sundays, but I didn’t seem to
get invited to any of their homes. They didn’t give me the
“cold shoulder”. I just knew I wasn’t welcome.’ Why is this?
Deep down we are fearful of new people upsetting the
chemistry of the group that satisfies our needs! So we
preserve the group intact at all costs – even if we don’t
realize we are excluding others.

Churches are actually clusters of groups: fellowship groups,
service groups, mission groups, social groups etc. When
someone enters, they need to be attached to one or more of
these groups within a few weeks, or they’ll drift between
them and out the back door.

Now the most common fallacy I encounter at this point is ‘we
must get so-and-so onto a committee so he or she will feel
involved.’ But many committees stifle creativity, and are not
the best place to initiate involvement. In any case, in a
church that’s alive, the first group ought to be a ‘faith
development’ group of some sort, where new people’s spiritual
gifts can be assessed before they are invited to be involved
in ministries.

We can’t talk about the church as ‘family’ apart from the
notion of ‘covenant’. This means that God has redeemed,
rescued his people, and invites them to live in obedience to
his will. His will is discovered especially in Scripture, and
is ‘incarnated’ in Jesus and in the redeemed community. So
one of the purposes of the church is to nurture godly
families. The image of God is to be transmitted not only
genetically, but also in the way that parents raise their
children. The laws of God are to be taught to children, who,
hopefully, respond by freely choosing to obey God, to walk in
his ways.

What is the best way for children to be motivated in this
direction? Kid’s clubs? Sunday School? Junior Church? I
remember the well-known American church consultant Lyle
Schaller being asked this question. His response: children’s
programs are good, but they are not the key ingredient in the
development of a living faith. Children watching the Big
People ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’ as they worshipped
is by far the best stimulus to a child’s godliness. Also, as
children see the church modeling life in Christ by rejecting
exploitative attitudes and practising love, forgiveness and
self-sacrifice they will find the church to be very
attractive.

This kind of church family/household is thus an open
community where all are welcome. It will resist buying into
cultural attitudes which are ungodly or discriminatory, like
legalism and moralism, racism, slavery, sexism, or the greedy
exploitation of God’s earth. In such a church the
marginalized (name them in your town) will find a home.

How does the church-as-family relate to the biological (or
extended) families within it? If we had to rank-order
priorities I believe the list would look like this:

1. God first
2. Spouse
3. Children
4. Vocation – ‘religious’ or ‘secular’
5. Everything else.

But when all these relationships are in balance they ought
not to be in conflict with each other. Nevertheless, every
church ought to be careful to arange their activities to
avoid dividing families too much or expecting various family
members to be at meetings too many nights of the week.

‘Family nights’ are a good idea – one night a week where all
church activities shut down. I would encourage families on
this night not to answer the phone, to refuse all other
invitations, and if anyone visits, to explain politely that
they might come back at another convenient time. Turn the TV
off (videotape ‘essential’ programs). Plan talking time over
the meal, and a fun time afterwards. Maybe older children can
go to their homework at, say, 8 o’clock.

More broadly, every local church should ask: we cannot do
everything for everyone, but what can we do well? Those
ministries will probably come under one or more of three
headings: primary (support networks for those in need of help
by the church generally), secondary (self-help and
issue-centred groups and the creation of support networks)
and tertiary (for example, a church-linked professional
counseling service). One church I know, for example, operates
half-way houses for homeless youths and women; they have
self-help groups for single adults, men in search of their
masculine soul etc., and have a ‘Barnabas House’ counseling
service on a pay-as-you-can basis.

Every church should run father/son, mother/daughter events,
Dobson’s Focus on the Family films, family picnics… the
list is endless. But, more importantly, various families
should do things together – and include fractured or
single-parent families. In other words, children should have
opportunities to relate meaningfully to mature Christian
adults other than their parents; adults should be able to
find meaningful friendships with other like-minded people
(eg. parent networks); and all should reach out to a limited
number of marginalized people. Who for example, helps older
single adults, especially widows in your church? Or seniors?
Or the unemployed, early retirees, and single mums?

Every church should have ‘family services’ where whole
families participate – perhaps a 9.30 am service every Sunday
in large churches, once a month in smaller ones. And every
church should run a ‘How to Help your Friend’ course at least
every two years, and seminars for parents etc. from time to
time.

The church is uniquely placed to do in its world what Jesus
did in his – teaching God’s truth to everyone, and relating
to the ‘little people’ like the mentally ill, the lonely,
children from dysfunctional families. Then we shall be truly
God’s family in a heartless world.

In a way, family relationships are the church. If the church
is the body of Christ, the human relationships within the
congregation and between congregants and others in the
community are the circulatory and nervous systems. The way to
know God’s love is through relationships with others, so
family ministry must be central to the mission of the church.
If we cannot get that right, we will not be able to perform
any of the other missions expected of us. The Good News
itself is that God offers to be our parent, and Jesus
promises to be our brother if we follow him. When we do, we
find ourselves entering a whole new family of brothers and
sisters and parents. Even evangelism cannot take place, then,
unless persons are embraced in relationships which mirror the
family-like love of God through which the spirit of God can
work.

Diana S. Richmond Garland, and Diane L. Pancoast, The
Church’s Ministry with Families, Dallas: Word Publishing,
1990, pp. 235-236. [148]

Early in the life of Family magazine we ran a survey among
the readers to try to find out about their marriages. We
asked about stress points, and found to our surprise and
dismay that a major cause of stress affecting both husbands
and wives was the pressure of church commitments. In a
paradoxical way, that made me feel slightly better. It was a
relief to discover that I was not the only one who had faced
up to divided loyalties between husband and ‘things that were
being done for God’.

Anne Townsend, Now and Forever: Christian Marriage Today,
London: Fount Paperbacks, 1986, p.14. [91]

Let [those] who cannot be alone beware of community. [They]
will only do harm to [themselves] and to the community. Alone
you stood before God when he called you; alone you had to
answer that call; alone you had to struggle and pray; and
alone you will die and give an account to God. You cannot
escape from yourself; for God has singled you out. If you
refuse to be alone you are rejecting Christ’s call to you,
and you can have no part in the community of those who are
called…

But the reverse is also true: Let [those] who are not in
community beward of being alone. Into the community you were
called, the call was not meant for you alone; in the
community of the called you bear your cross, you struggle,
you pray. You are not alone, even in death, and on the Last
Day you will be only one member of the great congregation of
Jesus Christ, and thus your solitude can be only hurtful to
you…

We recognize, then, that only as we are within the fellowship
can we be alone, and only [those who are] alone can live in
the fellowship.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, New York: Harper & Row,
1954, p.77. [198]

There was a woman in my parish who suffered more physically
than anyone I’ve known. As a young woman she had been a haute
couture model and a singer with an operatic-quality voice. A
degenerative arthritis slowly destroyed her joints, wracked
her with excruciating pain, and left her crippled…

Though her faith never wavered, more than once she said to me
that God had abandoned her. ‘Where,’ she asked, ‘am I to see
God’s love for me?’

In her last years, she became the centre of attention for a
group of women in the parish. Most of them were a generation
younger, and had gotten to know her through a women’s Bible
study and other parish activities. Singly or at times
together, without any planning or organization, they simply
began to visit her at home and in the hospital when she was
there. They would run errands, care for some household
duties, but mostly just be with her, pray with her, sit with
her, talk with her. Slowly in the depth of her sufffering,
she began to realize that she had not been abandoned by God.
True, there were no moments of mystical intimacy, or
interventions of dramatic healing. The love of God came to
her in a quiet way, through the calm, patient affection of
those women. We cannot live the Christian life in isolation.
He calls us into koinonia.

Kenneth Swanson, Uncommon Prayer, NY: Ballantine, 1987, pp.
113-114. [232]

When you became a Christian, you not only became a friend of
God but you became a member of God’s family, and like your
own family, you have no choice about your brothers and
sisters, and so it is in the family of God – the church. If
I had been put in charge of picking the members of the church
I attend, I would not have picked all of them, and I am sure
that they certainly wouldn’t have picked me! However, the
more I meet with them and see what God is doing in them and
with them, the more I have grown to appreciate them and to
marvel at how really great God is.

John Chapman, A Fresh Start, Sydney: Hodder & Stoughton,
1983, p. 189. [116]

Some two thousand years after the birth of that dynamic
community of God, a small group of believers was getting
ready to start a church in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.
They decided to go door-to-door throughout the community with
a survey. Their first question was, ‘Do you actively attend a
local church?’ If the answer was ‘Yes,’ they thanked the
respondent for his or her help and went to the next house.
If the person said, ‘No, we don’t go to church,’ they asked
him why. The results were astonishing. Some of the most
frequent responses:

Church is irrelevant to my daily life
Church is lifeless, boring, and predictable
The pastor preaches down at me, instead of to me
There’s too much talk about money

I was a part of that group of believers, and I was
heartbroken by the responses given to that survey. I vowed,
before God, never to allow our church to be boring or
irrelevant. If the vision of Jesus Christ is true (and it
is), then church should be the most dynamic, compassionate,
challenging, and relevant place on planet Earth.

Bill Hybels and Rob Wilkins, Tender Love, Chicago: Moody
Press, 1993, p.155. [188]

Frequently… real love fails to flow in a local church
because Christians do not enjoy [Christian] security. The
results of such uncertainty are many: for example, there are
those who cannot give themselves to others because it is too
painful; they feel that they will be diminished or that the
cost will be intolerable; they fear rejection or that they
will not be appreciated. Others find it as difficult to be on
the receiving end of love because they feel they do not
deserve it, or because they see the love as artificial or
manipulative (what is he after?). Such attitudes to giving
and receiving love from one another are often transferred
either to or from our relationship with God. In particular,
the feeling that we must earn love dies very hard.

If, by contrast, we know that we belong to God, that we have
been given access to the grace of God in Jesus, that God
chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we
have been appointed by him to live for his praise and glory
and sent to bear fruit for him by practical love and goodness
of all kinds – then we are free to give ourselves to others
without fear… Jesus told [his] disciples that the bottom
line of such effective Christian living is the realisation
that ‘apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5). It is
very clear that we cannot by ourselves love one another as
Jesus has loved us. Without him we can achieve nothing in
this – or in any other – direction.

David Prior, Bedrock: A Vision for the Local Church, London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1985, pp.56-57. [262]

People come to a church longing for, yearning for, hoping for
[a] sense of roots, place, belonging, sharing, and caring.
People come to a church in our time with a search for
community, not committee.

We make the mistake of assuming that, by putting people on a
committee, they will develop ownership for the objectives of
the church. People are not looking for ownership of
objectives or for functional, organizational, institutional
goals.

Their search is far more profound and desperate than that.
They are looking for home, for relationships. They are
looking for the profound depths of community. They are not
looking for transitory, temporary, annual goals, hurriedly
sketched on newsprint or butcher paper at a planning retreat.

Amid the alienation and loneliness of this time, they bring
to our churches a desperate search for community. They almost
put up with the silliness of our brochures, the
institutionalized new-member orientations, the self-serving
nature of our membership hustling. Their search is that
desperate.

Kennon Callahan, Effective Church Leadership, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1990, p.106. [164]

The preoccupation of local congregations with programs and
activities is deplorable. People win people to Christ;
programs do not. People discover people in significant
relational groups, not in a merry-go- round of programs and
activities.

Some churches become so involved in sponsoring a vast array
of programs and activities that they lose sight of the people
those programs and activities allegedly serve. Professional
staff become preoccupied with advancing their own territory –
the programs and activities related to their area of
responsibility – and lose sight of people they started out to
serve.

Increasingly, effective and successful congregations have
discovered that people are more important than programs –
that people reach other people – precisely because all of us
search for groups in which we can discover significant
relationships of sharing and caring. Effective congregations
offer these groups – and start new groups of similar
character in thoughtful, helpful ways.

Kennon Callahan, Twelve Keys to an Effective Church, San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983, p.39. [146]

It is an extraordinarily vital and impressive thing – the
Christian fellowship that meets you in the pages of the New
Testament. Here you have Saul of Tarsus, haughty Pharisee,
Hebrew of the Hebrews, who took care that everybody should
know it, sharing his deepest intimacies with poor illiterate
slaves from Greek slums, barbarians, he would have once
called them, Scythians, miserable outsiders – yet now
miraculously his brothers… It was an amazing thing, that
early fellowship; and it meant everything to those who shared
it… And that is meant to be normal Christianity. That is
the impact your life and mine might be making on the world
around us, if we were really men and women of the Spirit.

James Stewart, ‘The Fellowship of the Spirit’, The Gates of
New Life, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1956, pp.92,101. [118]

The church is not a club where people with common hobbies
meet. It is not a voluntary association, such as the American
Medical Association, in which members guard and tend to their
shared interests. Nor is it simply a helping organization, an
Alcoholics Anonymous that people seek out after they
determine they have an unmanageable problem. People choose to
join AA or a civic club but, in that sense, no one really
‘joins’ the church. The members of the church are called,
gathered together by the God who showed himself in Jesus
Christ.

The New Testament thinks of the church as Christ’s body (1
Corinthians 12:27); Christians are their Lord’s limbs and
organs (1 Corinthians 6:15). It comes to no less than this:
as Jesus’ body the church holds within it ‘the fullness of
him who himself receives the entire fullness of God’
(Ephesians 1:23)…

In community Christians encourage and hold one another
accountable before their Lord. They complement one another’s
gifts, providing a fuller and more compelling reflection of
Christ in the world… In the period of its inception… it
was a sense of community, of identity and vision granted by
the story of Christ, that once changed the world. Who is to
say it cannot do so again?

Robert E. Webber, Rodnay Clapp, People of the Truth: The
Power of the Worshipping Community in the Modern World, San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988, pp.53,67. [205]

Discipleship simply means one man asking another man how he
is doing, receiving an honest response, and responding to
that need from the depths of his heart and soul. It means
that when a man’s company is laying off people and he is
scared he will lose his job, another man will sit with him
and listen to his fears. Perhaps the man who listens will be
able to share what God showed him during a similar crisis in
his life, put his arm around him and ask what he can do to
help or pray with him. When men have this kind of committed,
supportive relationship with each other, spiritual growth
naturally happens. This is discipleship in real life.

Real discipleship provides a path that moves a boy into deep,
holy masculinity. In its most basic form, this kind of
discipleship begins at birth. It means that older men,
whatever their ages might be, care enough to invest
themselves in the spiritual, emotional and physical lives of
younger men. It means that older men will surround a boy as
he becomes a man so that they can help guide and strengthen
him through the stages of life and honor and celebrate his
deepening status as a man of God.

A man needs to be a disciple spiritually and emotionally in
order to discover his feeling life and to be healed from his
father-son wound. This discovery usually does not happen to
its own. Most men live without feeling much of anything until
they reach midlife and cannot keep their emotions inside any
longer. Left on their own, they will do almost anything to
keep their feelings at bay – go out and get a new car, a new
wife or a new job. They will try everything to avoid dealing
with what is in their hearts.

Earl R. Henslin, Man to Man, Nashville: Thomas Nelson
Publishers, 1993, pp.192-193. [307]

The call to the church in this era is a call to be present
with its people… [and] to assist in the search for
behaviour patterns that will enhance the lives of all people.
The time has come for the church, if it wishes to have any
credibility as a relevant institution, to look at the issues
of single people, divorcing people, post-married people, and
gay and lesbian people from a point of view removed from the
patriarchal patterns of the past, and to help these people
find a path that leads to a life-affirming holiness.

John Shelby Spong, Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human
Sexuality, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988, pp. 52-53.
[97]

If you are among the body of concerned citizens, I urge you
to not just sit there. Get out and work for what you believe.
Democracy only succeeds when people get involved. Campaign
for a position on the local school board. Write your
representatives in Washington. Better yet, help elect
congressmen and senators who hold to the Judeo-Christian
system of values.

Picket an abortion clinic. Serve on the hospital lay
committee. Take a teacher to dinner. Examine the policies of
your local library. Support your neighbourhood crisis
pregnancy center. Accept a pregnant teenager into your home.
Write the producers and sponsors of sex and violence on
television. Petition the city council to rid your town of
adult bookstores and dirty theatres. Pray for your country
every day. Support the work of your church in reaching to a
lost and dying world for Christ. And by all means, do these
things in a spirit of love that would be honoring to the One
who sent us…

Work to help the homeless in your community – especially
where children are involved.
Form a community action group to fight pornography – or participate in
an existing group.
Raise money at bake sales to donate pro-family books to your local
library.
Take advantage of the opportunities that may be available in your local
public school district to review text books that are being considered
for adoption. Let the school board know of any anti-religious or immoral
biases in the books…
Volunteer your time with an AIDS support group, thus providing a
Christian response to this dreaded disease.
Teach a Sunday school class on social-action issues affecting Christians.

Dr James Dobson and Gary L. Bauer, Children at Risk: Winning
the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Your Children, Dallas:
Word Publishing, 1990, pp.41,79-80. [275]

‘Molly and me, and baby makes three,’ in the words of an old
sentimental pop song. The point, in Rodney Clapp’s words, is
simply this: ‘For the Christian, church is First Family. The
biological family, though still valuable and esteemed, is
Second Family. Husbands, wives, sons, and daughters are
brothers and sisters in the church first and most importantly
– secondly they are spouses, parents, or siblings to one
another.’ And Clapp goes on to point out that ‘exactly as
family is how the New Testament church behaves.’ It extends
hospitality to a wide range of Christians and others. Its
central sacrament draws on the analogy of a family meal. At
their best, both ‘first’ and ‘second’ families are a magnet
for unbelievers who are drawn to the love that is shared
within and beyond their boundaries.

Rodney Clapp, ‘Is the Traditional Family Biblical?’,
Christianity Today, 32, no.13, September 16, 1988,
pp.24-28. [134]

Lord,

Thank you for the church –
the church around the world and in heaven
and the church around the corner.

Thank you that you are present there
even though the church is imperfect.

Thank you that you love the church
even though we must cause you so much pain.

Thank you that as you died and rose again to form a redeemed
community so you are dying and rising still, giving us
new life an new hope.

Lord, help us to do in our world what you did in yours:
to worship the Father in Spirit and in truth
to work hard for justice and to promote love
to heal the sicknesses and loneliness and hurts of ‘little
people’
to befriend women and men, religious people and reprobates
to preach the gospel truth even when to do so may invite
persecution
to bring down the haughty from their high seats
and to promote the humble and meek
to care for little children
and to advance a child-like ‘kingdom of God’ in our
church
to pray in solitude and train disciples.

So, Lord, may I love the church as you love the church and
see in it the incredible potential you obviously saw in it
when you entrusted to it alone the preaching of your Word
in the world. Amen.

A Benediction

And may the risen Christ who dwells in his body, the church,
and is redeeming his church from all corruption to that it
may be presented to his Father faultless and without blemish,
encourage you to align yourself with that redemptive process.
For his glory alone. Amen.