Yesterday, I read this post calling on us to stop calling the church a ‘family’. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the post is altogether wrong. I think it certainly presses into an issue about how the church describes itself and what the reality of church life is for the average person. The critique is worth thinking about. And yet, I find the language of family to be rather harder to avoid that Tim seems to do.

For example, I think it harder to escape an image Tim doesn’t mention: the church as the bride of Christ. Not only is that specifically familial language, the picture is of a specifically familial relationship. He rushes over God as our Father, but isn’t that the specifically familial reality of having Christ as our husband? Being united to Christ adopts us into his sonship and makes us all sons of God. And as sons of God, united to Christ, the Bible then refers to us as brothers and sisters, children of the living God. These are quite specific, personal familial terms.

Of course, the familial terms are not supposed to be identical. They are analogical. After all, how can we be simultaneously brothers and sisters with one another and yet all the same bride? How can we be both sons of God adopted into Jesus’ sonship – and thus brothers with Christ – and yet simultaneously his bride? Clearly the images are supposed to convey slightly different things and oughtn’t to be pressed too far too literally. But nevertheless, we can’t avoid their clear and evident familial nature.

Then, there is the use of the term ‘household’. Bearing in mind an elder in the church is called to ‘manage his household well’ and is called to ‘be the husband of one wife’ and have his ‘children in all submission’, it is hard to escape that household is familial terminology. I accept, in the world into which Paul was writing households often encompassed servants and even small business ventures. There was a properly managerial element to some. But it similarly bears saying, they didn’t all include such things and I struggle to believe Paul was suggesting that only those who had sufficient size houses, with servants and business ventures, were qualified to be elders. Clearly, ‘household management’ – particularly given the other character criteria – includes the actual management of an ordinary, nuclear family. Which suggests ‘household’ is at least some of the time specifically familial.

Tim only references ‘household’ in relation to Ephesians 2 and (rightly) notes that its use there is to do with being built into the temple of God. Clearly, the household Paul is talking about here is the place where God will dwell (though it bears saying, it is the place where God will dwell with his people which has a much more relational element to it than just the word ‘house’). ‘Household’ is, to some degree, a necessarily relational term. Peter does refer to us very much as stones in the structure in 1 Pet 2 and lands on us being the ‘house’ but then simultaneously calls us priests in the building too, suggesting that we ought not to major too much on specifics of the images and end up playing them off against one another. Paul similarly mixes his metaphors by referring to two men who become one man, members (of a body; NB: not stones) being built into a house and foreigners becoming citizens who belong to a household, which is a structure that somehow grows like a body but into a building that is both built on but also grows up into the Lord. All of which is to say, the metaphors get mixed a bit and carry lots of different effects as a result.

Household is the term he uses again in 1 Timothy 3:15 where is is quite clear the household (familial) is the church of God. He refers specifically to the household of a potential elder – referencing wives and children in the process – making the issue specifically familial and then, in the next verse, uses that to suggest such a man might be able to manage the household of God. The strong inference is how he manages his own nuclear family is how he will manage God’s family. There seems to be a clear analogical link here. At the end of that section in which household is clearly used in a familial sense, Paul insists the church is the familial household of God. So, I’m not so sure we should rush to say there is no familial link drawn between nuclear families and the church. Such language seems to be there in scripture to me.

Even if we are not convinced by the specific language that relates to family, it is hard to ignore how Paul describes what the church is to do in familial terms. 1 Timothy 5:1-2: ‘Do not rebuke an older man, but exhort him as a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, with all purity.’ Paul literally tells Timothy to treat the people in the church like family! Indeed, it is impossible to ignore the family nature of the rest of that chapter. Looking after widows – a family responsibility – Paul insists is part of the church’s role (v3). We get another sneaky use of ‘household’ in v8, where Paul is very definitely referring to family. Indeed, there are plenty of other uses of household that are expressly familial. But as we read the scriptures we see such is commanded of the church towards one another, mirroring familial activities again. Having told the members of the church to care properly for their families, he tells them to do the same to their elders, with something of a familial ring to it. All of that is in line with what Jesus himself says: ‘whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother.’

On top of all that, there is the repeated use of the word ‘love’ and the call to treat each other as brothers and sisters (cf. 1 John 3:10-11). The many and varied ‘one anothers’ of scripture are largely couched as the kind of things you would expect to see within a family. The way we are called to treat each other is supposed to mirror family life in some way. It may not be an exact replica, anymore than we are an exact replica of a building, of the Levitical priesthood, or a literal body, of a nation of people, or any of the other images that convey something about our relationship to Christ and to each other. But it seems to me, just as you don’t find the phrase ‘God is triune’ anywhere in scripture – but you can’t escape the reality that he is – so you don’t get the phrase ‘the church is God’s family’ anywhere either, but it is hard to escape the reality of the matter.

Where Tim makes a valid point is that this necessarily creates some expectations in the modern Western mind. I think he is right. But I think there are a few things worth saying.

First, the term Father will necessarily create some expectation in people’s minds too. How often have you heard anything said about ‘our heavenly Father’ that is quickly caveated with ‘some of us haven’t had very good Fathers’. We don’t just jettison the term or the reality because people may have some unfortunate and unhelpful baggage that they load onto the term. We simply explain that how the Bible uses the term Father is quite particular and we explain what it is supposed to convey, not the faulty pictures that we might have in our own minds. Just as Fathers might be wonky, so our family lives might be wonky too. We may have brilliant families or we may have less than excellent ones. But neither the brilliant nor awful modern Western family is the norm by which we judge the picture. We aren’t supposed to be imposing our experience onto the picture that was neither written in our context, referencing modern Western families, nor to convey the reality of our personal experience. Most biblical pictures need a bit of contextual explanation and we shouldn’t run away from them because of modern baggage.

Second, we have to accept that a lot of the images are clearly mixed together anyway (as described above). Just like pressing the details of the Psalms is a fools errand, and landing hard on the specifics of the pictorial language of Revelation might lead us down wonky tracks, so we have to be a little careful about how we understand the images concerning the church. We are the bride of Christ, for example, but I’m yet to see a church in a wedding dress mirroring a modern, Western-style wedding. So the language of family – as much as it is familial – is analogical. The church is like a family, the love it expresses is like a family, the way it treats each other is like a family – we may even as metaphor say it is a family – but that doesn’t mean it is identical to a modern Western family. Frankly, we are just being thick if this is what we think. And a lot of the concerns and baggage people have around the term do push in this direction as they expect the church to be identical to family life when the picture is clearly analogical and thus in many ways like, and similar to, but not totally identical to a real family.

Third, one of the things about families is they are all different. One of the ways in which churches are like families is they are all different too. They all have different strengths and weaknesses. It is foolish to take our personal family experience, impose it entirely onto the term ‘family’ and then expect every church to operate like it. One of the issues many find with the familial language – whether they have good or bad connotations and expectations – is that they totalise their experience and impose it on the text. The issue is not with the familial language of scripture – which is fairly apparent – but with the person-centric hermeneutics being employed by the one totalising their experience and demanding, or fearing, that the church family will be just the same. We need to help people interpret the Bible better than that.

Finally, and perhaps more of a challenge for many of us, is simply that most of our churches are not good at the familial stuff of scripture. The issue is not with what the scriptures demand. Nor is it with the language of family applied to the church. The real problem is with churches that simply aren’t doing the stuff of scripture. We talk about family – even if we understand it analogically – and then don’t practice it. If we aren’t comfortable with the concept of church as family, think in terms of just obeying the scriptural ‘one anothers’. How many churches in the West, for example, look anything like the Jerusalem Church of Acts 2 and 4 in practice? How many of us are selling our homes and using the money to care for the poor among our number? How many of us are meeting regularly, even daily, with each other to eat, share fellowship and bear one another’s burdens? Even if we consider that a high water mark, how many of us are even doing a modicum of it? The reason the familial language can be so hard to swallow for many of us isn’t that the Bible doesn’t really call us a family, it’s that we’re not very good at being one. It isn’t necessarily the expectation that some may have about family that is the fundamental problem (though, as I said above, it can be a problem). It is that despite the familial language of scripture, we often just aren’t really very familial.

Of course, if we are certain that we are not meant to be a family, those who struggle with the term probably need to get over themselves, don’t they? If we’re not really family, and the Bible doesn’t call us to be familial, nobody can complain that they haven’t really experienced familial love and care in the church, can they? But I struggle to get around the fairly familial language of scripture. And in seeing it everywhere, and the actions described as those of loving familial care, we need to look at ourselves and ask why we aren’t more like the family that scripture seems to call us to be.