“This church is family.”
I think I heard it one too many times. Or maybe I was feeling particularly jaded. But suddenly, it sounded wrong. Sticky sweet and overly simple and just not entirely true. I hate half truths and things meant to sound nice (probably to a fault) but saying the church is like a family just didn’t sit right with me.
So let’s stop calling church a family.
I get that it’s supposed to feel like one. I understand we can gain a bit of what we have lost or are missing or was wounded within the church. And I know we’re supposed to be loved and fed and cared for and included in the church, the way a family is supposed to. I think it’s a modern American thing. It feels like apple pie and potlucks. And it feels too easy, too familiar. Too shallow. Too much on the surface of things. It feels like the sentiment of love and things that are good without the fierce power and intensity and purpose that I know my relationship with God is.
Jesus didn’t say the church was a family. He said we are the body. His body.
We are the temple of the Living God, living stones, being built and knit together to serve and contain and live Him. By Him and for Him and not of anything worldly.
In reality, families are big and messy. They’re too big to be intimate with everyone. They’re awkward. People marry in but are never fully accepted. There’s people you don’t like, disagreements, things done just for tradition. Things get complicated. Hard. You can distance yourself from family, not return calls, skip a couple get-togthers, grow apart, give up working things out.
I’m not saying all families, or all churches, are like this. It can feel like coming home, it can be safe and comforting and loving, all of which God intended. We are supposed to be committed to each other, love one another with a deep and brotherly love, we are meant to be unified. But He is the father. He is the head. He’s adopted us into His family, but makes us all brothers and sisters. There’s no cousins no one’s heard from in years, fathers who have dropped off the face of the earth, abusive uncles, drunk aunts and condescending grandmothers. The brother and sister reference is to God. We are in God’s family, but that’s not all. He didn’t just leave us with a nice picture of fellow Christians sitting around a campfire or having supper together or big bear hugs. He has more for us to do. Adoption into the heavenly family – miracle that it is – isn’t the end of the story and the final destination. It’s just the beginning. It simply explains our relationship with God, and how we should view fellow believers, and not how we should view the church. Being a part of a family gives us a sense of belonging, but that’s not really what God wants from the church.
When Jesus, and especially Paul, talk about the church, he calls us the body. (1 Corinthians 12:12-31)
Unlike a family, a body is undeniably one.
There are parts like a family has parts, but blood pumps to all of it. Nerve endings weave to each bit of it. You can’t cut part off. You can’t ignore a wounded part forever. You can’t remove part of it without death. Each part of the body is intricately, imperceptibly, and intimately bound to the whole. Paul speaks of the insanity of cutting out an eye saying, “I don’t need you”, but can we imagine separating out white blood cells, brain neurons, hormones, veins or the cells of the small intestine? What part could we live without? How well could we function without even one tiny part?
We – followers of Christ – are knit together in an impossibly complex system. We can’t get mad at part and not speak to them. We can’t have a shallow, annual Christmas card relationship to the body of Christ. We can’t rely on the warm fuzzy feeling of coming home for Thanksgiving without also doing the hard work, having the hard conversations, working out our salvation with them. We can’t have that without understanding the body has a job to do. A commission to work on, and a purpose to fulfill. The benefits of a family are just for us, just selfish. The purpose of a body is to get kingdom work done.
“Family” sounds nice.
But “body” sounds functional.
One of the names for the Holy Spirit is literally breath. And breath needs a body, not a family.
Threads of a Remnant 