We are His family... literally

Sorting out the New Testament metaphors for the church

Family - Building - Body. These are the predominant ways that the church is referred to in the New Testament.

The BUILDING or temple metaphor helps us understand that Jesus has a master plan for His kingdom, and that is the church - and He makes it clear that He will accomplish building His global family in spite of any opposition from without or distraction from within. The question is, will we build on the foundation He prepared and the apostles laid down, or are we too starry-eyed about our own little projects?

The BODY metaphor helps us understand the function of Jesus’ family. While Jesus’ physical body isn’t present on earth during this age, His Spirit has empowered Jesus’ family to go and carry out His plan (which we have via the apostles’ teaching). With everyone functioning according to their gifts and abilities, but most importantly of all, building one another up, an activity that is born of genuine love for one another and must be practiced in order to be done well.

The FAMILY metaphor… wait, here’s where I think the metaphor concept tends to break down. Paul repeatedly refers to the church as the household of God, he calls those in the churches brothers and sisters, he shapes his writings to address their roles as older men & women and younger men & women (and as spouses, parents and in their work situations - the individual households). He engages in life-long mentoring of young apostolic-type leaders, like a father. He appoints leaders in the churches that are supposed to shepherd them being like both an exhorting father and nurturing mother. The picture of the church in Acts looks very much as if, suddenly, all those followers of Jesus have become a real family and they shared their lives accordingly. They got together constantly. Ate meals together daily. They did life together. Seriously engaged in non-stop conversation about their new life together in the gospel. They didn’t let anyone’s needs go unmet.

It seems to me that FAMILY is not a metaphor. That HOUSEHOLD is the intentional social structure for Jesus’ church, and if that is true, then we all have a lot of questions we need to ask ourselves about how we “do church” today, because it doesn’t appear that it looks anything like it did in Acts… either before Paul was on the scene or after he began implementing a strategy that intentionally shaped churches this way and unleashed God’s Spirit to multiply them throughout the entire world of that time.

When we choose to follow Jesus, we don’t become a building or a body. We become part of a family.

We are Jesus’ family… literally, not figuratively or metaphorically.

Photo by Janosch Lino on Unsplash