CHURCH IS FAMILY

Church is Family
The New Testament uses certain pictures to describe the church, and each one brings out aspects of our corporate lives together as believers that we need to know about. For instance, we are likened to both a field and a building (1 Corinthians 3v9), to a spiritual house (1 Peter 2v5) and a flock of sheep (Hebrews 13v20). There are other pictures too, and we can profit from the wealth of insight that each gives: but they are clearly not intended to be taken literally. (If any of you feel yourselves to be literally sheaves of corn in a field then perhaps you would sway gently in the wind for a moment or two. Likewise any sheep amongst you might declare yourselves with a corporate'Baahh'.)
 There is, however, one particular picture to which I want to draw special attention, but only to demonstrate that it isn't actually a picture at all, but is meant to be taken and understood quite literally. It is the description in God's Word of Christians being the Lord's family! Throughout the New Testament believers are referred to as brothers and sisters; God is said to be our Father in Heaven, and Jesus is depicted as our brother. And now get this:
'Yet to all who received Him (Jesus), to those who believed on His name, he gave the right to become children of God - children not born of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.'(John 1v12-13)
Not only are we said to be brothers and sisters because we are following the Lord and therefore part of His Church, we have actually become part of that Church by literally being born again into it. What we have here is family, family, family - and it is all quite literal! People who have the same Father and big Brother are all part of the same family; it's as simple and straightforward as that!
And of course this is the defining truth of the Christian Church regardless of which particular mode of its existence one is speaking of; and in this regard we must take a quick look at what the theologians like to refer to as firstly, the Church Universal, and secondly, the Church Militant. Now by Church Universal they mean every believer who has existed, or who does exist, or who will exist. Therefore, in its most comprehensive form, the Christian Church includes believers who are long dead and with the Lord in Heaven, believers who are currently alive, and all those who aren't even born yet but who will follow the Lord in the future. Church Militant, however, is a smaller part of that comprehensive whole and refers to all those Christians currently alive on the earth; and of course this can be broken down even more into believers in whole countries, in geographical areas, in cities and towns and villages, right down to the smallest unit of individual local churches meeting in people's homes. Perhaps we could usefully abandon the traditional jargon though and rather think of it like this:
The Church Throughout Time - Here we have every believer past, present and future!
The Church Throughout Space - This includes every believer alive now in the present moment, wherever they may be.
The Local Church - Individual churches in people's homes,
So, the Word of God tells us that church is family, whether it be the Christian Church Universal (throughout space and time), or part of the Church Militant (throughout space) locally in any one individual and particular corporate gathering in someone's home. God is indeed our Father, and Jesus is our elder brother. And of course if you tie this in as well with the biblical teaching that the Church is those people in whom the Lord lives, then we arrive at the simple, yet unbelievably wonderful truth of the Lord simply living with His family: and living with one's family is the most natural thing in the world! It is revealing too that when Jesus said,'...I will build my church... '(Matthew 16v18) the word used by the apostle for build is oikodomeo, which specifically means to build a house. And of course your house is where you live with your family, and one could legitimately translate this,'...I will build my house, my home, the church...'Everywhere we turn in the New Testament we find the same thing; churches are seen to be extended families of God's children.
This is, after all, all good solid evangelical Bible believing stuff. But what I want to highlight now is the way in which the apostles, unlike the vast majority of believers who have come after them, established churches to not just be extended families of God in theory, but to actually function and live as such in practice. When you turn to the New Testament to enquire as to how churches were set up, and the way in which they functioned, then what you find is that they met on the first day of the week in someone's home in order to talk and fellowship together, to encourage and enjoy one another, and to do so over a meal. They most emphatically did not have a 'church service', or involve themselves in ritualistic religious rigmarole of any kind. They simply came together in order to spend time with each other with the Lord. They talked and they prayed together. They sang songs of praise and worship to the Lord together as well; and they built each other up spiritually by teaching and encouraging one another from the Word of God. And all this they did in the context of eating a meal together in joyful acknowledgement of their guest of honor who, though not present physically, was with them nevertheless by His Spirit empowering them for their service to Him through the week to come. That, and nothing less, is the family of God as described in the pages of the New Testament, and that is why Jesus had the apostles establish churches in the way they did. A family is neither an organization nor a corporation, and if you treat it and have it function as such then you simply destroy everything that it is intended to be.
Can you imagine a family get-together organized on the lines of a religious meeting? Picture it: A senior member of the family stands up the front (of course it's in a public building and not the home of one of the family members) and all else present seat themselves in rows so that the personal contact of being face to face and looking at each other is precluded. From that point onwards all is directed from the front, the 'audience' being allowed varying degrees of involvement and interaction depending on each particular family. At some point the senior family member who is leading from the front gives a speech of varying duration, after which a morsel of bread for each adult present, and little sips of wine or grape juice, are distributed before everyone goes home. (More progressive families might, however, provide a time for coffee and chit-chat afterwards.) Then, happy that duty has been done, and that family responsibilities have been satisfactorily carried out, all return to their individual homes to get on with the rest of the day.
I tell you, that is not my idea of a family gathering; and neither is it the Lord's idea of His extended family meeting together either. What I think of as the shape of churches in the New Testament was both very deliberate, and carefully implemented, and the design was intended precisely to produce personal relationships and mutual interaction, the very thing family is all about. We know from the human biological family unit that if you change its shape from what it was designed by God to be; that is, a married man and a woman in a lifelong mutually loving and serving relationship, then what results is other than what the Lord intended. Families with parents who serve neither each other, nor their children, as they should, or parents who divorce, or families with two daddies or two mummies, all these become what we call dysfunctional families. They are families, to be sure, but they are the wrong shape; and therefore function differently from the way they should. The children suffer most of course, and rather than the security and safety of loving relationships, insecurity, with its corresponding indiscipline, takes over, and anarchy and divisiveness and broken relationships soon follow.
And in precisely the same way, churches which aren't based on the teachings, traditions and practices of Jesus and His apostles are, quite simply, the wrong shape. They are churches, to be sure (assuming, of course, that they are gatherings of genuine believers), but they are dysfunctional churches which don't act like extended families; and for the precise reason that they are not set up to be families, and therefore don't behave or function like families when they meet.
Form follows function, and design must correlate directly with the practical purpose of a thing. Birds are meant to fly and so have wings, whilst fish, being designed for an underwater existence, are provided with both gills and fins. So when the Lord passed on His design for churches to His apostles, it was a design which correlated exactly with what He intended those churches to be: His extended families! Had he intended churches to be organizations, or religious corporations, then we might have expected the blueprint to be somewhat different, but as it stands the New Testament pattern remains that of an extended family, nothing less. Change the pattern, tamper with the design, alter the shape; and you get something completely other than what Jesus either envisioned or intended.
Dysfunctional families are so much less than what they should be! Likewise dysfunctional churches! The Lord intended we grow from spiritual babes into mature believers in a family of a church. He intended we experience security, love, character formation and necessary discipline in a group of brothers and sisters sharing their lives together. My wife and I are so blessed to be the parents of 3 wonderful children. We love them more than we can possibly say, and we love them quite unconditionally. Our relationship with them is primarily that of fun and laughter, and of teaching them all the wonderful things they need to know: but part of it too is the need for the discipline of child-training and character building, and even at times, though it gives us no pleasure, punishment when they have been naughty. But the point is that they receive any such measures from the very people who love them quite unconditionally, their parents. We don't love them any less when they are being bad, and neither do we love them any more when they are being good. We just love them absolutely, and quite unconditionally, to bits. And so it is too with being part of a church that is based on the New Testament and which lives just like an extended family. The task of discipling and correcting each other, of spurring one another on to live holy lives, is meant to be in the context of brothers and sisters; of close friends who are all ultimately struggling with the same problems and weaknesses, and who can therefore support, sympathize and identify with each other in all things.
Here is safety! Here is security! Here is reality! The reality of actually living as if we are the Lord's family! And for the simple reason that we quite literally are. It's safe, so very, very safe! And it's so safe because it's all based on the love the Lord has for us, a love as unconditional and as lacking in condemnation as you can get. Our unspeakably deep need, as human beings, for belonging is met here; met in being part of a little local extended family of God - known otherwise in scripture as a church!
So there you have it - the church as family! Indeed, the church is a family! The very extended family of God! And that, and that alone, is the reason why churches in the New Testament were established in the particular way that they were. Let's remind ourselves of what we have seen thus far concerning what I am calling the shape of biblical churches:
• Believers met as churches on any day of the week
• When churches came together on any day of the week they met in houses.
• When believers came together in each others houses as churches their corporate worship and sharing together was completely open and spontaneous with no one leading from the front. Indeed, in a lounge in a house there isn't a 'front' for anyone to lead from. Remember, the early believers didn't have anything that came anywhere near even looking like a 'church service'.
• As part of their proceedings they ate the Lord's Supper as a full meal; indeed, as their main meal of the day, commonly referring to it as the love-feast.
• They understood each church to be an extended family unit (the idea of churches being institutions or organizations would have been totally alien to them), and practiced non-hierarchical plural male leadership that arose from within the church it would subsequently lead. This indigenous eldership (elder, pastor/ shepherd, bishop/overseer being synonymous terms in the New Testament) sought to lead consensually wherever possible, and was understood to be purely functional and not in any way positional.
Think about it for one moment! It's perfect, isn't it! Churches are meant to be extended families, and so the Word of God gives us the pattern of how they are to function and operate. And when we look at that blueprint and pattern then what do we find? We find a family gathering in every sense of the term. God is our Father, Jesus is our big brother, and those others in the church are our brothers and sisters. Wow! I like that! And so, it seems, does Jesus! It was, after all, His idea in the first place!