The Church as a Family

We need a better model for understanding how we experience the life of the Church

Apr 03, 2025

Welcome to the Fourth Week of Lent!

Today we’re continuing our series on the Church as our context for transformation. In this issue, we’re looking at how we should aim to experience the life of the Church.

You can find our intro article to this series here!

The Church - Our Context for Transformation

I - What Comes to Mind When You Think of “The Church?”

“Church” is a complicated word.

For all of us, it brings different images to mind.

For instance, you might view the Church as a building. It might be beautiful and ornate, ugly and uninteresting, or just old and dusty, the age of its congregation matched only by the age of the building itself. If you’re on a vacation in Europe looking for a tourist attraction, a Church is a cool place to visit but otherwise it doesn’t contain much of value.

You might view the Church as an institution. At it’s best, it has some helpful things to say about life and wisdom for spirituality but at its worst, it’s a club for bureaucrats, charlatans, and downright abusers. You might be on board with “Jesus,” but this whole Church thing seems to be nothing more than an unhelpful and harmful distraction.

Or, maybe you view the Church the way I did for a large part of my life - as an organization filled with happy and idealistic people who want nothing more than to see numbers added to their ranks. Exactly what’s so compelling about being a member of this organization has yet to be determined but that doesn’t really matter as long as we’re growing.

All of us have images of what the Church is that are informed by a mixture of truths and falsehoods, but one thing is clear - if we want to experience any kind of meaningful change as Christians, it’s critical that we sort through exactly what is meant by this “Church” business.

II - A Helpful Model of the Church

So where do we begin? I’m convicted that one of the most helpful places we can turn to for answers is Sacred Scripture. The Bible lists several “models of the Church”

Jesus’ Body (1 Corinthians 12:12-27)
Jesus’ Bride (Revelation 19:7)
A living Temple, the place where God dwells (Ephesians 2:21-22)

And many more.

It’s good and important for us to have many images to understand the Church because ultimately it’s a mystery that encompasses all of these analogies, but none of them expressing it fully. That said, I do think there is one image that can be particularly helpful to us today: the image of the Church as the family of God.

Viewed from this lens, the Church is not some abstract entity outside of myself, it’s something I belong to and play a vital role in. Rather than a dispenser of spiritual goods or a broker of spiritual transactions, the Church is a family, composed of sons and daughters who can hurt and heal one another to the extent that they remain in relationship with God, the head of the family.

It’s not uncommon for us to use language like “the Church teaches,” but when we learn to experience the Church as a family, it becomes more practical for us to use language like “we believe.”

III - A Shift in Practice

So how does this way of looking at the Church change the way we experience it?

To help us examine this more closely, I want to look at one of the most compelling images of the life of the Church found in Scripture: one that sounds very similar to the life of a family.

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. - Acts 2:42

This story comes right at the beginning of the Church’s history and we see almost immediately that the believers begin to live according to a story and a rhythm. The teachings of the apostles form their story - the way they look at the world. In the same way, the stories we tell ourselves in our families shape and form the ways we look at the world. Understanding who we are, where we came from, who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are, what the “good life” is like - all of these are found in the stories we learn about the world from our families.

The community is also shaped by a rhythm. They have some semblance of a pattern to their life together - fellowship, breaking bread, prayer, and later in the chapter, being open to the new people the Lord was bringing into their community. In the same way, our families have rhythms - patterns of life we hold in common like traditions, shared mealtimes, and particular ways of organizing household upkeep.

These two elements - story and rhythm - are essential to how we experience the Church in the modern world. To experience the life of the Church as a family, it’s crucial we learn to accept the stories of the Church not just as true but as our own. These stories require internalization. It’s not enough to just accept what the Church says about morality or the abundant life - we need to come to the conclusion ourselves that these stories are good for us.

We also need to enter into the rhythm of the Church - not as an obligation but as an invitation to community. More than just a thing we must do to maintain our membership in an organization, these rhythms form the fabric of a life together.

IV - A Rule of Life

Just after I got married, my wife and I took a little bit of time on our honeymoon to pray into a “family mission statement.” Was this a little bit unnecessary and over the top? Yes.

But I will not deny how powerful the words we came to that day have been for us since.

Our family mission statement (to “make friends family,” for those who are curious) has shaped and guided the way we order our family life, handle hospitality, and even the physical space of our home.

Lots of families get on just fine without a “family mission statement” and I think that’s totally fine. That said I do believe that when things get difficult or murky, it’s helpful to have something concrete to unite yourselves on.

In the same way, the Church doesn’t always clearly articulate what her life together should look like in practical terms and that’s okay. For many centuries, it’s been okay to operate that way, with implicit values and traditions to guide us.

We live in a different world today. Culture has changed much in the last century and the Church with it and if we’re not careful, we run the risk of letting the life of our family get carried away by the most immediate demands (empty pews, increasing poverty, public scandal etc). I’m not saying at all that any of these other pieces are unimportant, just that it’s very hard to handle them if we’re not doing so out of a place of rooted identity - in other words, a clear sense of the stories we believe, and the rhythms we live into.

Perhaps now is the time for the Church to develop a little bit of a “family mission statement.”

In various communities throughout the history of the Church, the term for this was a “Rule of Life.” I believe now is the time to ask the Spirit to reveal to us exactly what our Rule of Life is and to commit to it for the long haul - without compromise.

Benediction

Pause to pray with us these words from Catherine Henry:

Jesus, let Your love begin to satisfy my soul’s deep thirst for communion within Your family, the Church.

Lord, come into my heart and engrave upon it, the truth that I belong to the family of God.

When self-sufficiency takes root or the desire to withdraw tempts me, gently draw me back into the healing embrace of communion within the Body of Christ, where I am made new and whole again.

Amen.

Thank you for joining us! Next week, we’ll start exploring some of the practicals of community life in the Church, starting with a foundational practice for our life together.