Last Sunday, January 1, my friends Mike and Karen, who pastor a church in Mobile, invited their married daughter and her family home with them after worship for a traditional New Year’s meal.
The meal finished and the dishes cleared away, Mike and Karen were settled in the living room and Mike had found the football game du jour on television. Oldest grandchild Jayda, nearly 10, I think, sat nearby doing something. The daughter, her husband, and their young son were in the kitchen gathering the dishes they had brought to take back home. The three of them were laughing it up and having a good time.
Suddenly, as Jayda jumped up and started toward the kitchen, she called out, “Are y’all being a family in there without me?!”
Grandmother Karen told me that story and said, “I love what it says about her concept of family.” Indeed.
God wants us to be a family.
He wants our family to be a “real” family–that’s the reason for the numerous proscriptions in Scripture regarding this smallest and tightest of all communities. We are to honor parents and obey them, to love one another, to provide food and shelter for them, not to engage in sexual relations outside marriage, and so forth.
God wants His people to be family, also.
Within the church membership, we refer to one another as brothers and sisters. We draw a distinction between those related to us through Christ as our spiritual siblings and outsiders not so related. Scripture commands, “As much as we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, particularly to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).
And yes, it is true we have a Father within this family. Not the preacher, I’m happy to say, although in some ways pastors function as surrogate fathers. Undershepherds, we call them. In my own family, the parallel would be our oldest brother Ron, who always functioned as the assistant father. Many times the other five of us didn’t care for that, but Dad backed him up and that was the end of it.
This is an image needing no further explanation or illustration for readers who grew up in tight, healthy, loving families. But, for those whose parents and siblings were dysfunctional or even absent, almost no explanations can overcome the faulty image brought into adulthood.
Only a loving church that functions as it should can erase disturbing memories and images from their minds.
God wants His family to be a fellowship.
The Greek koinonia refers to the way people share with one another. As we bind ourselves into a family, we share identities (we “belong” to each other), breathe the same air, engage in the same activities, and share heartaches and joys with one another. Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15). It’s what families do.
On the day a congregation of only 120 members saw 3,000 people convert to Christ and join them, that tiny band had to decide in a hurry how to disciple them in the faith. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayers (Acts 2:42).
We’ve written extensively on this subject on this blog, so need not belabor it here except to point out the two types of fellowship in any body: formal and informal. Formal fellowship occurs when leaders make specific plans for activities involving members of the body. They sit in a Sunday School class and discuss the Christian life, go on mission trips, hold backyard Bible clubs in a neighborhood, or a small team spends the day repairing the home of an elderly neighbor. The things they share–the planning, the labor, the discussion, the laughter, the pain–all fall under the heading of fellowship.
Informal fellowship takes place all those other times, the unscheduled times. It’s basically “hanging out.” The Lord’s people sit around before a class visiting with each other, they go out for lunch with friends following the services, they have groups into their home to get acquainted.
All humans–but particularly Christians–need fellowship with one another as much as we require oxygen. Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). We need one another.
God wants His fellowshiping family to be faithful.
All those new believers–three thousand of them!–threatened to overwhelm the small band of disciples who formed the original Jerusalem church. The apostles knew they would have to do something quick to get these converts grounded in the faith. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayers.
New believers would need to spend time with other believers, to be sure. But just as importantly, they would need to learn the Word. And, having no New Testament to put in their hands, the apostles did the next best thing: they taught them themselves. After all, who better? These men (and women too) had followed the Lord all those months, had heard His teachings and seen His miracles, and knew personally of the atonement and resurrection. In organizing and sharing these things with the new believers, without realizing it, they were preparing the material which would later be written as our gospels.
Believers would be expected to maintain a close relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and the Heavenly Father through the Holy Spirit. For this, they would need the Word, worship times (“breaking of bread”), and prayer.
It is noteworthy that while scripture teaches church members are to put themselves under the authority of their spiritual leaders, it does not create a system where the message of Christ is constantly being tweaked and adapted to circumstances and environments. All believers are given the message of Christ, that message is written down, and the Holy Spirit indwells each one as their Guide.
Each believer is expected to be faithful to the Lord. Each new class of believers becomes Second Generation Christians as a result. We each hold in our hands copies of the apostles’ own account of Jesus’ life and ministry, we have the same Holy Spirit indwelling us, and we are under the same mandates. We are not constantly tweaking this message to suit changing tastes and whims. This word is the eternally unchanging word of God, sufficient for now and forever.
I used to say each new group of converts becomes “first generation” believers because of the Holy Scriptures, our full access to the Lord, and so forth. But that’s stretching it a little. Only the first disciples walked those Galilean hills with Jesus, sat on that hillside to hear the Sermon on the Mount, stood at Bethany while the Lord called dead Lazarus back from wherever he’d been, and experienced the wonder of the risen Savior materializing inside the locked Upper Room. Oh, to have been among that group. But, we share much in common with those who came immediately afterwards. We have the stories of the disciples, we share the promises, we know the reality of the risen and ascended Lord in our midst. We know Matthew 18:20 and treasure its assurance.
I’ll even go so far as to say the Lord wants His fellowshiping, faithful family to be fun.
I need to laugh and love. I want to gather for worship and work with people I respect and like and enjoy being around. I want to rejoice and be joyful. Having fun.
Not “fun for fun’s sake,” of course. We will not be needing to import the latest Christian comedian to hear his routine in order to laugh and relax. There should be enough joy in any congregation so that when the people get together, laughter erupts, smiles spread, and spirits are lifted.
Pastor Bob Anderson told our seminary family, “We know Jesus was a happy person because children loved to be around Him, and children do not like to be around unhappy people.” That is as true as anything I know.
For a church to have to attempt to manufacture joy is a clear admission of failure of assignment. If it is true that “in Thy presence there is fullness of joy”–Psalm 16:11–then, all we should have to do to laugh and rejoice is draw near to the Savior.
As a college student, I went with some from our church to visit a small congregation in the neighborhood that was pulling in the teenagers. We wanted to see what all the excitement was about. What I saw that night disgusted me then as well as now.
The pastor, no more than college age himself, was seated in a chair in the middle of the room with a towel draped around his shoulders. Various young people were smearing his face and head with their choice of materials: raw eggs, whipped cream, liquid soap, soups, that sort of thing.
The pastor had issued a challenge that if a certain attendance goal was reached, he would allow himself to undergo this humiliating treatment.
I suppose some thought it was fun. Most, I think, were as disgusted as I was at the spectacle.
Let the members love the Lord and devote themselves to one another and the laughter will flow as naturally and freely as the waters of the Mississippi move down the huge channel a half-mile south from where I sit.
The Lord wants His faithful, fellowshiping family of joyful believers to be far-reaching in their service for Him.
He has placed eternity in our hearts and the world on our plate.
From the first, God had in mind reaching the entire world. To Abraham, He said, “And in you shall all the peoples of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).
As Jesus was departing from the disciples He said, “You shall receive power after the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
The church which sees no further than the city limits–or worse, it’s own property line–is failing the Savior in His most basic command to carry the message of Christ into the world.
One of the finest innovations I’ve been privileged to observe in my lifetime–I’m a child of 1940–is how churches rural and urban send teams for missions and ministry across the world. I’ll be the visiting preacher in some out-of-the-way church which a generation or two ago would have been completely isolated, and they will announce a fundraiser for their next Ukrainian mission or a reporting service for the team just returned from serving in Belize.
The command to reach the world for Christ was not given to the preachers, this generation has learned and fully accepted.
Far from pulling the members’ attention and focus away from their own Jerusalem, world missions involvement seems to deepen their commitment and hone their ministries for reaching their neighbors for Christ.
A family fellowship of faithful, happy, mission-minded believers–now, that’s a real church!
“A family fellowship of faithful, happy, mission-minded believers–now, that’s a real church!”
AMEN!
Thanks Bro. Joe!
If I were a Teneage Mutant Ninja Turtle, now I’d say “Kowabunga, dude!”