The Christian Family and the Church

Christians come from many different homes and backgrounds, but we’ve all been adopted into the family of God. Today, Sinclair Ferguson addresses the importance of integrating our families into the nurturing life of the church.

This week on Things Unseen, I thought it would be good for us to reflect a little on family life. I think we all agree that’s important, although we certainly don’t all have the same experience of family. Some of us have had good experiences, some bad, many mixed, and some of us, perhaps, have little or no real experience of family life. So, I think it’s important that we all begin in the same place, with the family to which every believer belongs, what one of my former colleagues used to call “the worldwide, eternity-long family of God,” because that’s the family that every believer has been brought into, and that’s the family that lasts.

We sometimes say about family relationships that blood’s thicker than water, and that’s also wonderfully true theologically, isn’t it? We’ve been brought into the family that Christ has created by the shedding of His blood, and that blood is thicker than water. That’s why sometimes Christians feel they’re even closer to members of the family of God than they are to some of the members of their natural family.

But there’s another wonderful thing to remember here. In the family of God, none of us is a natural member. We’ve all been adopted. None of us is in a position of demeaning any of our brothers and sisters by saying, “Well, I really belong to this family, but you’re just an adopted member.” I remember hearing about an adopted boy who was mistreated by his friends at school, and other children would say to him, “You are only adopted,” and he developed a great reply. He said, “My parents chose me; your parents just had to get whatever came.”

So, the first thing to say about families and family life is that we need to get our priorities right. There’s a lifelong family, and there’s an eternity-long family. Most of us belong to a lifelong family with its privileges and obligations, and that family life is a sphere all of its own. It’s got its own structure, and it’s a structure different from society in general or the state. And it’s also different from the church.

And all of these structures have their place in our Christian lives. The state has a responsibility for the families in it to serve them, but it doesn’t have the right to usurp the role of the family to interfere with it in a way that’s contrary to Scripture. And unfortunately, many states nowadays do that and overreach their authority. And by the same token, the church family doesn’t have the right to usurp the structure of our nuclear family life and to lay down laws for us that are additional to or contrary to Scripture’s teaching on family life. But that said, we do want our family to take its part in the life of the world around us as salt and light, and we also want to—and indeed need to—fold our family life into the family of the church.

That last statement about folding our nuclear family into the church family is, I think, a fundamental principle for growing as a Christian family. Sometimes I think I’ve seen families whose attitude has been something like this: “We are sovereign in our family, and we will allow the church only the space that suits us.” But that tends to put our family over the church, not really in the church. No, the more biblical picture is of families being folded into the family of the church.

Maybe I can put that another way, thinking about parents. Those of us who are parents need to realize that God never intended two parents to have all the gifts and graces necessary to raise one child for Jesus Christ. It takes a church to do that. Our children could get a very limited view of the gifts and graces of the Lord Jesus just from us. So, surely, we don’t think we have all of those gifts and graces, all of the wisdom that our children are going to need. No, it’s a long haul growing a family, adapting to each stage, taking account of each family member. It’s many, many days, weeks, months, years, and we need all the help we can get. And the best help we can get is when our family is folded into the larger church family, our congregation, and then all the gifts and graces the Lord has given to the church will be used for the blessing and strengthening not only of ourselves, but also of our children too—just as, in turn, we want our gifts and graces to serve the larger family of the church.

It’s surely one of the greatest privileges we have as Christians in the present time that we not only have our nuclear family, but we can fold that nuclear family into a family that loves us, cares for us, encourages us, strengthens us, and protects us. And we’ll try to think more about that tomorrow. I hope you’ll join me on Things Unseen.