The Upside and the Downside of the Church "Family"

When asked to describe themselves, the most common image congregations turn to is “family.”

It’s easy to see why. Family suggests security, intimacy, belonging. Family is where our identity and sense of self is formed. Family calls to mind commitment and unconditional love – all the things we hope our churches would exemplify.

But there is a shadow side to family. The adjective “dysfunctional” is most often used in conjunction with the noun “family.” Families can be our greatest joy but also the source of our greatest pain and anguish.

We expect that people will be drawn to a community that regards itself as one happy family. The truth is, though, that many people are repelled by it. “I have more than enough issues with my own family,” they say, “why in the world would I want to join another one?”

Families can also suggest “closed circle.” Families have their inherited stories, their inside jokes, their private lore, their unspoken signals, their closely guarded secrets. If you’ve ever attended someone else’s family reunion, you know how much of an outsider it can make you feel.

My wife and I have long-time, dear friends we would describe as “part of the family.” But only to a point. We love to spend time with them. We’ve even taken vacations together.  But we do not include each other in our family decisions, and while it’s nice to go for a visit, the time comes when we need to go home.

If you’ve ever had someone move into your house for an extended time, you know how stressful it can for someone to “invade” your family space. Many people are familiar with that experience first-hand, and so to be told that they are coming into a church “family” will not necessarily be good news.
   

Imagine you decide to attend church for the first time, or to return to church after a long absence, and the unmistakable message, conveyed  both verbally and non-verbally that, “here at First Church-on-the-Corner, we are one happy family.” What you may well conclude is, “I don’t really belong here.” 

Some churches unwittingly communicate the message that, not only are they a church family, they are a church of families. Most people are related to each other, or are part of families, making someone who is single, or someone who is from the outside feel like there

is not a place for them.

The New Testament does not really compare the church to a family in our modern sense of the nuclear family. It’s instructive to note that Jesus and the early Christians were perceived to be anti-family. “Whoever does the will of God is my mother and my sister and my brother,” Jesus said.

The Romans revered the family as one of the cornerstones of society, and vilified Christians because they placed faithfulness to Christ ahead of loyalty to gods of hearth and home.

The New Testament uses the term oikos, or household, what we would think of as an “extended family.” This family, though, is based on the bonds of shared faith rather than a sense of simply belonging to a tightly knit clan.

The New Testament also calls the church an ekklesia, a term that originally described a gathering of citizens, called together to do the work of the city.

These words communicate dimensions of what the church is intended to be that are not captured with the single term "family."  

I’m not suggesting for a minute that we stop talking about our churches as families. The image of family powerfully evokes the ties that we hope will bind our churches together.

But family is an emotionally complex experience. If we are interested in connecting with new people, we should not automatically assume that they will share our enthusiasm for a church that is like a family.  In dealing with people outside our current congregations, we need to be sensitive to its ambiguity. It is only one a rich repository of images that we could use to convey to people what we are all about.