The church is supposed to be a family, right?
What does it mean for the church to be a family in a world where fewer people experience healthy expressions of family life?
Can we expect the church to become a family for those who know nothing more than family breakdown and heartache?
I’ve pondered these questions for a while now. I wrote two columns last year (here and here) and devoted an episode of Reconstructing Faith to the topic, featuring Joseph Hellerman as a guest, whose book When the Church Was a Family makes a good contribution to understanding the church’s familial identity.
No Place like Home
I remember the discussion I had with PhD colleagues about When the Church Was a Family. Some thought the book was a welcome correction to churches satisfied with superficial relationships, while others worried that leaning too heavily into family metaphors can lead to something more akin to a cult, where the distinction between an individual’s walk with Jesus and their life in the church disappears. The individual can get so absorbed into “the family” that the ability to differentiate between Jesus and his Bride gets lost.
We could call this the flip side of seeing the church as a family. It’s the realization that the sentimental line in the popular Christmas song “There’s no place like home for the holidays” can take on a double meaning in some situations, a darker connotation. There really is no place like my home for the holidays . . .
The Church Is like a Real Family. It’s Messy.
Samuel James examines this angle in a recent article, “The Local Church Is Not Olive Garden.” One way we can prevent “church hurt,” he says, is by managing expectations. When Christians apply Olive Garden’s old marketing tag—“When you’re here, you’re family”—to the church, we often overlook the less-than-positive connotations of seeing the church as family.
Of course, we’re right to insist on the Christian being part of a local congregation. We’re right to fight “lone ranger” Christianity. We’re right to see the church in familial terms, because the New Testament is our source for such a vision.
But there’s a flip side to the high regard we have for the church as family. An idealistic portrait of family can saddle us with overly ambitious, “enormous expectations” for church life. The appeal to family life can lead us to fall for a fantasy. James writes,
There are enough dysfunctional families out there in the world to make you wonder why anybody would advertise their institution as a family. Well, the reason they do is that nobody hears that and thinks, “This place is going to be just like my awkward and tense conversations at thanksgiving.” They hear it and think, “This is going to be like the family I want, not the one I have.” The word “family” invites fantasy. It invites longing. It invites ordinary people to feel like they can experience something even better than what they have. “When you’re here, you’re family,” where “family” means not heartaches and troubles, but endless salad and breadsticks.
The Church Isn’t a Fantasy Family
When we preach and teach about the church as family, following the Scriptures’ familial language, we often dwell on the upsides of family life. We think of brothers and sisters in terms of closeness, and honor, and loyalty. We don’t think of how common it is for real brothers and sisters to, well, fight. Even in healthy families, there’s conflict. In unhealthy families, the conflict can become debilitating. The whole reason the apostles spend so much time appealing to unity is because they assume there will be frequent occasions for infighting and sin.
When we screen out the odd, the cumbersome, the dysfunctional, and the challenging aspects of family life and when we expect churches to always function like a healthy, thriving, idealistic family, we set the stage for church hurt. We begin to see the church as “something less than human, less than flawed, less than something that’s capable of breaking your heart or even perhaps not making a spectacular difference in your day to day life at all.” James continues,
I am wondering aloud if “the church is a family” has translated in some cases as, “The church is like your family, but way better,” and consequently, people are shocked and perhaps unable to recover when they discover that, actually, the church is a lot like your actual flawed, fighting, unremarkable biological family.
Flawed Family of God
Wise resources on the church manage expectations of church life. Marva Dawn’s book on the communal life of God’s people points out the flaw in looking to the church for satisfaction that only God himself can give:
If we try to get rid of our longings by belonging to the community, the longings will continue to grow. If we want the Church to erase our loneliness, it will become a deeper ache. On the other hand, when we realize that God is the Source of all satisfaction, then our attitudes can change to rejoicing in the moments and the persons that he gives to bring us comfort and care.
It’s paradoxical but true. You can only truly benefit from the community of faith in its healthiest expressions when you don’t expect something from the church that God alone can give.
The church doesn’t solve loneliness. Only God does that. Yes, often he does that through his people. But the way he accomplishes this work is by putting you through the difficult, sanctifying process of loving people who don’t seem to love you back and remaining fiercely committed to people who may be a source of heartbreak in your life.
This is the hard part of seeing the church as family: bearing with your siblings through thick and thin, recognizing Jesus in them but also realizing they’re not Jesus. That’s the only way we can live and love as the family of God, without idealistic expectations crushing our spirits.
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