Last month we saw how the New Testament makes family the basis of all relationships in the kingdom of God. In the early church people related to each other primarily as brothers and sisters, equal before God as “brethren” of Jesus Christ. Other relationships were secondary within the Christian social structure -- elder/younger, male/female, master/slave, etc. The normal substructure of authority, leadership, and organization, made up of husbands/wives, parents/children, elders/ younger, grew up within that primary context. Even the male/female polarization was drawn together in common familyhood in Christ, a remarkable achievement for that age.
A basic purpose of “family” in any society is to raise children, to bring the immature into a place of maturity. For environmental reasons in the primitive world the extended family system was the one that worked well; children were raised not to go away, but to become peers and co-elders with their parents, taking their place in the leadership in the clan as they grew mature. Authority was shared among elders in a healthy extended family; the system was not a pyramid with one person at the top. The oldest one became respected and valued for advice; he was sometimes seen as a symbol of the tradition, but there had to be a shared leadership if peace was to prevail.
The extended family unit with such a shared leadership structure was the model that the early church took in shaping its life as community. It was not a religious model but a social one. It was an altered social model, however, and not the natural one. Jesus had transformed the terms of the family relationships, and the first church accepted this as a fact of their life.
In the early church, the young -- those immature in the faith as well as those born into the fellowship -- were raised to maturity by those who were their older brothers and sisters.
They did not go away to seminary or theological college for training, nor were they sent to public school, but were prepared for leadership in the context of the family community itself. Elders taught, directed, and judged the younger ones, and then shared leadership and eldership with them when they were mature enough. Just as Jesus had laid down his life for his disciples so that they could share in his life and calling, so the elders laid down their lives for the younger brothers and sisters, who in turn grew graceful and mature. The community contained its own seedbed for its members. Ministering gifts were given for the use and benefit of the community, not for individuals; the community itself was the minister empowered to raise within its own context experienced and effective servants.
We live in an industrial society in which family/spiritual life has disintegrated. Most people have commitments in three or four different places, none of which informs the others: work, church, relatives, friends, and leisure. Each modern maintains these commitments within himself with the expense of a great deal of energy, in order to maintain a sense of his own integrity.
The structure of the local church as we know it today served well in an earlier, peaceful, agrarian society. Now the same structure is almost meaningless because it no longer serves our purpose. We have lost the full force of the New Testament meaning of “God’s people,” for as a church we no longer function as a family. The church today approaches pastoral care from the viewpoint of an institution which operates in a secular sense -- as a fraternity with “religious intent” -- and not from the viewpoint of family.
Therefore, many scriptural injunctions are senseless and irrelevant to us. Why? Because the whole context of the New Testament ethic presumes an intimate, deeply tender family community. It presumes God’s people caring for one another, nurturing one another, warning and correcting one another, and perfecting one another in service to its members and to the world round about. Nothing is considered One’s own; all is considered the possession of all -- because the people are a family.
Our local churches are structured either as business consortiums or as dictatorships--even as monarchies. The church leaders are hired, and largely controlled, by vote and public opinion. Leadership expertise is limited almost entirely to an archaic ideological coterie while the forces that shape the lives of church people (including leaders) are secular ones that have little, if anything, to do with the Christian gospel. The leaders are economically and politically motivated.
It is these professionals who are meant to be responsible to create family. If it is a big church, there may be two or three such hired persons. But in fact, the hired persons cannot do it all alone, nor can two or three of them. Making up a team of experts does not do it, because one person could not pastor (in a family sense) more than ten or a dozen nuclear family units at any given time. This means that no matter how large the neighborhood or how great the potential for evangelism, today’s churches spawn professional institutionalism. They cannot grow healthily because the church cannot exist as a family with a disproportionate number of members to leaders. Is it any wonder that, in our huge society, the institutional church is ineffective?
We see the impulse to localize in the popular house church movement. House churches know they are not going to influence any more people than the number that will fit into their homes. Homes are where families live, and family is what church is all about -- or meant to be.
Yet attempting to alter the structure of the local church (say, by setting up a board of renewal) will not result in church family. Structural change happens only as the life-forms of an institution are changed.
This is the third in a series of columns by Graham Pulkingham on "The Shape of the Church to Come." Former rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Houston, Graham Pulkingham was one of the leaders of the Community of Celebration in Scotland, an international center for promoting church renewal when this article appeared.
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