The other night I came across a journal that I kept my senior year in high school (which is now half my life ago!), a required assignment for English class that traced the ups and downs of life in my year before college. Some of the entries are funny and immature, some are surprisingly deep, and others are just surprising. One such entry recalls that and friend and I spent a particular Wednesday night Bible study picking on another girl in the group, "then went back to my house and played Atari and ate cheesecake."
The flippant tone of that entry now staggers me. I apparently saw no contradiction between the setting - a Bible study - and the company - other believers - with what we were doing to amuse ourselves, which was mean and divisive. My friends and I were "good" kids. We prided ourselves for staying on the straight and narrow, but when it came to our own obligations toward Christian community, we remained worldly. What we needed was for the light to be shined uncomfortably inward - not inside our own selves, but in towards our own group, to be challenged to consider how we treated one another. After all, other entries from that journal recount that I had jealousy and rivalry toward that same friend who was my comrade-in-arms at youth group. Wow, what hypocrisy.
Is the Church really the "family" of God? Or is that just a hope or a lofty word picture or a recognition our common ancestry? If churches are (individually and collectively) a family, why does it not feel that way much of the time? More importantly, what are we doing to socialize new believers, and kids especially, into that reality?
There are benefits to a church calling itself a family. It evokes warmth. It reinforces traditions. It lends an air of familiarity to the relationships there. It reassures people that they belong. It allows us to carve an identity grounded in practices: "In this family, we do things this way." But if there are benefits to calling yourself a family, there are also risks, the biggest being that when you say it, no one will believe you. Some churches don't resemble the type of family anyone would want to be a part of. Another risk is that a church or ministry unintentionally erects a barrier to entry: "We are a family…and you're not in it." And that same impulse to define the family by "the way we do things" can become an unreasonable obstacle to change.
The phrase "family of God", a common modern expression, appears only once in the Bible; but, other references to God's family (believers in Christ "are Abraham's seed" (Gal. 3:29), numerous references to the early Christians as "brothers" throughout Acts, we are all "sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ" (Gal. 3:26), etc.) substantiate the idea. We enter this family initially through the adopter, and subsequently we become related to the adopted. We don't "join" a church or group, we are joined to God, and as a result, we inherit a family, the fellow members of God's far-flung adopted brood. The job for us is to figure out that second relationship, how to become what we already are: the family of God. It's easy for a church or ministry to say it is a family, but quite another to transform itself into one.
The church is, after all, a family, but it is an adoptive one, not a natural one, and all of us bring to it the vestiges of our family of origin (our carnal, pre-salvation existence). So, long after appropriating the label, we continue to deal with one another's hurts, hang-ups, dysfunctions, and shortcomings - in a word, one another's sin. Sinful people who've been forgiven are still sinful. This is a rude shock to anyone who's been wounded in a church or by another believer - they aren't supposed to be like that! But the key to family living lies not in others' perfection but in our own God-given ability to offer superabundant grace to one another.
I thought about all of this as I heard about other pre-teen ministries at the conference I attended and how commitment-phobic we all are and how hard it is to forge deep, lasting relationships in a mobile and overscheduled and transient and individualistic culture. I don't think nostalgia is the answer, because the world has changed too much and none of us wants to wear a suit that fit ten years ago. But there is some value, I think, in intentionally cultivating the idea of family in every church and every ministry, large and small. For one thing, families are committed to one another and require commitment…looooong term commitment. Secondly, we learn to forgive one another in families because like it or not, we're stuck with each other. The easy, too-common alternative is to simply bail. Third, because we're committed to the long term and because we learn to forgive, we also learn how to overlook what really doesn't matter - in other words, we give grace. And by teaching kids commitment, forgiveness, and grace, what are we equipping them for? If you said "a successful marriage," pass GO and collect $200. On the other hand, when we fail to socialize kids into the family of God, or we propagate the myth that church family life is happy and ever conflict-free, we miss a teachable opportunity.
The world is big enough and choices abundant enough that we're really not bound to a church we're unhappy in. And that's ok. I'm not suggesting that one style of worship or church leadership structure or curriculum should be imposed across the board. But I am suggesting that the Christian world is a lot smaller than we think, that when we focus on the minutiae of what separates one church from another we're treading in territory that is hopelessly foreign to those who don't know Christ. Like it or not, those outside the Church see us as one body. We would do well to embrace that identity and be about the hard work of family life than to remain hyper-focused on what separates us from them within the Christian world.
Info, articles, and thoughts for parents of kids at North Coast Calvary Chapel.
