The Kingdom Family

I want to write about something I've been thinking a lot about recently. It's really changed the way I think about Church and Kingdom. It's the idea that both are really all about family. I don't mean biological family, but biological family is a shadow, a pattern of the reality found in the Kingdom.

The North American Problem with Family

I grew up in North America. So I live with a North American world-view. I am even more aware of this mindset after living for a year in Costa Rica (as a language student), and in the Dominican Republic as a missionary mostly to Haitians living there. That experience made me aware of some of my cultural assumptions more than anything else.

One of the things that became evident to me is that in other cultures family means something other than what it means in the culture I grew up in. Without trying to articulate what family means in those cultures, let me just make this observation about family in ours: family is the launching pad to your real life.

In North America the important thing is one's work, one's job, one's life calling. It doesn't matter if it's painting houses, running a Fortune 500 business, or preaching the Gospel: the important thing is that we do our job, and do it well. We admire the person who sacrifices all to work hard and build up a successful business, or to advance in the workplace, or to simply do his/her best to make his/her employer look good, make money, etc.

What is clear is that one's family is not the most important thing in the lives of most North Americans, one's work is. From work we get purpose and meaning, we matter to society and to ourselves. At least that's how we see it. In fact, it's what we assume to be true, without even thinking. And despite the slogans of what people wish they had done on their deathbeds, North Americans are more likely to skip a family vacation than to skip a day of work to attend an important family event. And we expect them to, and admire them for it.

This is not the way it is in most of the world.

Given all of this, we tend to understand Church and Kingdom in terms of individual sacrifice and achievement. We tend to understand the relationships in the Church and the Kingdom of God more in terms of policies, procedures, and expectations of a "contribution" (by which we mean doing something around here). We tend to run our organizations more like machines, with the people in them like cogs in a wheel, here to help the machine function. We even talk about Spiritual Gifts that way.

Basically we value people for what they can do for us, not because we see them with intrinsic value (though we would deny that with our words, while affirming it with our actions).

Kingdom Culture is not North American Culture

If we read the Bible as an individualist, we will see terms like "God the Father" and "children of God" as metaphors, instead of basic realities. Since we tend to assume that the purpose of family is to get the kids out of the nest and independent, we will understand such references as metaphors for launching us into our 'real' work in the Kingdom (from where we get our identity and purpose). And while we might not say it that way, the way we live demonstrates our actual beliefs and assumptions.

In the Kingdom of God, independence is a problem, not a goal. The entire goal of most families in North America is at odds with the basic assumptions of the Kingdom of God: it is only in dependence on God and in community with other believers that we can find our identity and purpose. Notice I said "community with other believers;" I should have said as "a family of brothers and sisters," but if I say that to we North Americans, we get the wrong picture in our heads. We don't know what family in the Kingdom looks like, because we have never seen anything like it in our daily lives.

Joseph: a Story of a Family's Restoration

In reading and preaching through the Joseph narrative in Genesis (chapters 37-50), I was struck as never before by how family dynamics drive the story. If we begin with the assumption that God could have rescued the family from the coming famine by simply stopping it from happening (we agree that's within God's power, right?), then there must be another purpose for the story. What might that other purpose be?

As I read the story, what becomes clearer and clearer is that Jacob's family is extremely dysfunctional. There is jealousy and envy. The oldest, Reuben, slept with his step-mother's maidservant. Jacob obviously has a favorite: Joseph, who comes on the scene looking a like a tattle-tale and a bit of an entitled brat. The brothers all want to kill him (except for Reuben and Judah), and instead sell him into slavery (where he'll likely die in forced labor). Jacob, in self-centered despondence, abdicates his role as father and the rest are on their own. Judah even leaves the family, takes a Canaanite wife and his family goes downhill. He ends up sleeping with his daughter-in-law, believing she was a prostitute. This is not good.

Without re-preaching the series here, let me say that one way of understanding the Joseph narrative is to see it as God's way of restoring Jacob's family, so that it would be the 12 tribes of Israel. The family was on the brink of disintegration, but God, through Joseph and the crisis of famine, pulls them back together. It is out of this family that God builds His people.

Fast Forward: the New Testament Church

The New Testament is full of the language of family: brothers and sisters, God as Father, the household of God (Eph. 2:19; 1Tim. 3:15), etc. It is the language of belonging, more than the language of function and purpose (as we North Americans understand purpose).

Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. (John 1:12-13)  

When we read John 1:12-13, do we understand that when we come to Christ we enter a family, or do we see this merely as a metaphor for something else? And what sort of family do we come into: a place of belonging, or a place of launching? Do we read that God is our Father in the sense that He equips us and sends us out of the house, or in the sense that He never leaves us, but empowers us as we go together? Do we understand that God is our Father because we are "born of God" (as opposed to by a biological father)? Is He our Father really, or metaphorically? What kind of a Father is He: the kind we grew up with, or something more?

How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! (1John 3:1a)  

When we read 1John 3:1, how do we understand what John is saying? Do we see here that we are given a new identity?

Consider all these references to treating and loving each other as brothers and sisters: Romans 12:10; 1Thessalonians 4:9-10 (e.g.), and the dozens of places where fellow believers are called brothers or sisters throughout the New Testament. These are more than nice ways of speaking. This is not mere poetry or sentimentalism. The Biblical writers are telling us of the new reality we are living in and the new identity that we have in Christ.

If we really are children of God (1John 3:1), then that is the most important thing about us, and it's the most important thing about our brothers and sisters. In fact, our brothers and sisters become for us more than "fellow believers" they become family; we belong together and to each other.

The Family Business

In some families, all activity and relationships revolve around the family business. Family members gain or lose value in the family as they contribute, or fail to contribute to the family business. This is not healthy. When the members of the family have value only insofar as they contribute to the success of something outside of the family (the business), the highest value in the family ceases to be family; it becomes making the business successful. Lamentably, this makes perfect sense to everyone in such a family.

For some of us, Church and Kingdom are the family business for the family of God. So, we treat people in the family the way the above, dysfunctional family does: people are only valuable insofar as they contribute to whatever it is the family is doing: running this program, that outreach, holding this small-group, etc. The exceptions we make are for those who are old or infirm, but we will say things like "But you can still do the work of prayer," meaning they might still be valuable to us, if they could at least do that. It's the wrong message! Sure they can pray, and should! But their value is not in what they can do, it's in who they are as sons and daughters of God Most High!

The Business of Being Family

The more I read Scripture, the more I pray and worship, and the more I try to live this life we are called to, the more convinced I become that God's major project is not so much saving souls as it is (re)building His family (which is the purpose of saving those souls!).

One of the major works of the Holy Spirit that is often overlooked is found in Romans 8:15-16

For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.   

and Galatians 4:4-7

But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.

The Holy Spirit reunites us with our true Father. In so doing, He incorporates us into God's family. Nobody is adopted into isolation, or into independence. When someone is adopted, they are adopted into a family.

In God's family, everyone has a place. This does not mean that everyone has a 'job.' It means that everyone belongs. Whatever 'job' we have in the family of God, is an expression of belonging, not a requirement for it. We don't do what we do in God's family in order to belong, but because we belong. The only qualification for being in God's family is met in Christ and applied by the Spirit of adoption.

If we only have value because of what we can do for God or for each other, we are not sons or daughters, but slaves. A slave has value only in what the slave can do for the family. This is not who or what we are.

Sometimes we need to be reminded, and sometimes we need to remind others: I belong; you belong; we belong together. If the Spirit lives in you and in me, we are family, because we have the same Father. Nothing else qualifies you to deserve my honor or attention as much as that truth does.

What the Church is supposed to be about, and what the Kingdom of God actually is, is this: God's family being God's family. The business of being family, is the family business in the Kingdom of God. This includes, by the way, finding those brothers and sisters who don't yet know they are our family. It includes extending the love we have received from our Father to others who need it (and who doesn't?). It includes just about everything most churches and most ministries already do. We just do those things out of love, and not for love; out of belonging, not in order to belong; to be more like our Father, not to gain his approval (which we already have).

When we begin to see all of this in terms of family, as the governing perspective on all ministry and what the Church is supposed to be, a qualitative change happens: the family business becomes the business of being a genuine and healthy family.

[There's more to say on this, but this is a good stopping point for today.]