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Brothers, Sisters

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Hal Miller

The church is never defined in the New Testament. Rather, it is pictured by dozens and dozens of metaphors. One author counts ninety-six different ones, but there are probably even more than that. . . .

Many renewal movements have focused on the metaphor of the body. . . . [They] have come to rely on the body metaphor for a number of reasons. One is that they are, more or less consciously, returning to the New Testament for nourishment. And in the New Testament, the body metaphor is obvious. Paul, for example, has spun out the body metaphor at greater length than any other. He is more specific than Jesus and certainly develops this idea more fully than the little snatches of other imagery we get here and there.

The body metaphor also pictures the church as having a variety of interdependent roles. As renewal movements have moved away from a one-dimensional concentration on the pastor or priest as the sole actor in the church, the body metaphor has been very helpful. . . .

Other images, however, can rise to fill the need. Though renewal movements have tended to concentrate on the body, the family is the New Testament’s single most common metaphor for the believers in Jesus. For the New Testament writers, family imagery falls effortlessly from their minds onto paper. They call each other “brother” and “sister”; we enter the kingdom of God by a “new birth” and are “children of God”; Paul claims to be “once again in childbirth” with the Galatian Christians; he tells the Corinthians “they have many teachers but not many fathers.” Again and again, New Testament writers assume they are a family with other Christians and act on the basis of that vision.

Consider some of the ways the family metaphor may help us where the body metaphor either lets us down or distorts our vision. Although there may be many more than these – and other applications are (as engineering books say) left as an exercise for the reader – four stand out.

First, the way a body is one and many is different from the way a family is one and many. The uniqueness of individuals, for instance, is much more strongly portrayed in a body than in a family. The eye is not an arm and so (obviously) cannot have the same function. But, though a brother is not a sister, in the family, the role distinctions blur: anyone can do the dishes or carry out the garbage. Old family acquaintances say to me, “Oh yes, you’re Ray Miller’s boy.” They might have said the same about either of my brothers, for, seen in the family, our roles were not all that distinct.

In an age of independence and struggle for identity, it is no wonder we have latched onto the body metaphor with its strong affirmation of the indispensability of each part. But I wonder whether we have not played that particular melody enough. Perhaps it’s time to hear the counterpoint: we are all children of the same God, and we share that relationship in common. Maybe that’s all the identity I need: to be the Creator’s boy instead of emphatically a particular, unique individual. Renewing the family metaphor can help us come to terms with the things we all share in common, which are just as important as the things which make us each unique.

Second, although differences in a body are cast in terms of role and function, in a family, differences are primarily in terms of maturity. Children listen to mothers and fathers not (in the first place) because parents have a different abstract role but because they are more mature, wiser, and better able to cope with the unpredictability of life; children trust their parents. The body metaphor has as its goal to get people involved in doing what is uniquely theirs to do; the family metaphor teaches them how to do it. In a family, the older members are often better able to do the things that the younger members also do, and the younger members look to the older for guidance and models of living. Understanding the church as family will mean that the younger members will learn to take their cues from those who are older and wiser.

Similarly, the body focuses more on accomplishing tasks, but the family more on day-to-day existence. Thinking about the church as family makes a person’s specific gifts less relevant. It doesn’t matter what your gifts are; the fact is we need someone to take out the garbage, and here you are. The same thing is true of relationships. In a family, it doesn’t matter what another person’s gifts are; we are loving them or putting up with them or nourishing them because we are part of the same family, not because they have a particular gift.

This brings out a third significant difference between the body image and the family image: the church as body is oriented toward tasks while the church as family expresses and nurtures our need for community. American culture has almost entirely fragmented the extended family. As a result, we experience a deep longing for the things the extended family used to provide: a network of close relationships outside the immediate, the stimulation of others who are different and yet closely related, a sense of security in having options beyond the immediate ones (just in case things don’t quite work out).

The church as family can be a way of incarnating an answer to these longings. Perhaps the reason Paul and others did not spin out the family metaphor is that it seemed so obvious to them. Because they experienced extended households as a fact of life, it was easy to see how church repeated that pattern. As children in a family learn most (for good and ill) by imitating, so new Christians learn not what their gifts are but how to exercise them, discovering what they are in the process. Children imitate the way you eat, the way you deal with others, and the things you deem important. What we mean by Christian growth is largely just this process, a process which in the church as family is a spontaneous, not a programmed, one.

Church as family also points to both the tragedy and the fallacy of one of the important decisions of Christian life for us: finding the right church. Seeing church as family doesn’t even acknowledge that there is such a decision. Being in a given family isn’t a matter of choice at all; you just end up there. The family to which you belong gives you both your possibilities and limitations. It gives you people with whom you must deal. People in a family are not necessarily friends, they may not go bowling with each other, and they may not even particularly like each other. But they are still family.

In fact, of course, we do have a choice about church, which seeing church as family can obscure. Nonetheless, the family metaphor can help us see that we should not constantly be looking for the “perfect church” any more than we should for the perfect family. . . .

The vision of the church as a body has been very important for Christians to catch hold of. We shouldn’t ignore the insights it gives, but enrich them with the insights that envisioning the church as family can give us. It can show us how we touch the world. It can teach us about Christian nurture. It can show us the dynamic way in which new groups of believers form and gain integrity. . . .

But the need is not met merely by saying, “Yes, family is a good metaphor for church,” and leaving it at that. Rather, we need to look into that metaphor and bring out its implications just as Paul did with the body metaphor. We might even be surprised at some of the things which come out. ◆

Joseph H. Hellerman

Jesus’ early followers were convinced that the group comes first – that I as an individual will become all God wants me to be only when I begin to view my goals, desires, and relational needs as secondary to what God is doing through his people, the local church. The group, not the individual, took priority in a believer’s life in the early church. And this perspective (social scientists refer to it as “strong group”) was hardly unique to Christianity. Strong-group values defined the broader social landscape of the ancient world and character­ized the lives of Jews, Christians, and pagans alike. . . .

Early Christian communities, moreover, represented a specific kind of strong-group entity. Historians have struggled for generations to situate early Christianity in its social world. Were churches like Jewish synagogues or Greco-Roman voluntary associations or what? As it turns out, the social model that best accounts for the relational expectations reflected in our New Testament epistles is the Mediterranean family. Most of us are familiar with the surrogate kinship language (brother, sister, Father, child, inheritance) that permeates the New Testament. Family remained the dominant metaphor for Christian social organization in the writings of the church fathers, as well. . . .

Stories of the ancient church living out its family values appear throughout early Christian literature. For example, sometime around AD 250, a marvelous thing happened in a small church in the rural town of Thena, just outside the Roman metropolis of Carthage in North Africa: An actor converted to Christ. We do not know his name, but let’s refer to him as Marcus. Marcus’s conversion created a stir in the church in Thena.

Theater performances in antiquity were typically dedicated to a pagan god or goddess, and the plays often ran as part of larger public religious festivals. Scenes portraying blatant immorality were commonplace. All this proved rather troubling to the early church. Christian leaders, such as Tertullian, spoke out in opposition to the idea of believers going to the theater:

Why is it right to look on what it is disgraceful to do? How is it that the things which defile a man in going out of his mouth, are not regarded as doing so when they go in at his eyes and ears – when eyes and ears are the immediate attendants of the spirit? You have the theater forbidden, then, in the forbidding of immodesty.

Thus, when an actor converted to Christ in third-century Carthage, the church demanded that he quit his profession.

Marcus did just that. Our new convert now faced an economic dilemma, however, since he was no longer gainfully employed. So, instead of acting, Marcus opened an acting school. This apparently created quite a stir among Marcus’s fellow Christians, and the surviving letters exchanged by his pastor and the church’s bishop paint a portrait of the church truly living out its strong-group family values.

Marcus’s pastor, Eucratius, naturally wondered how it could be acceptable for Marcus to teach others what he himself was forbidden to do. Yet Marcus had already made a tremendous sacrifice to follow Jesus. So Eucratius wrote to his spiritual mentor, Cyprian of Carthage, to ask “whether such a man ought to remain in communion with us.”

Cyprian’s reaction to Marcus was unequivocal: “It is not in keeping with the reverence due to the majesty of God and with the observance of the gospel teachings for the honor and respect of the church to be polluted by contamination at once so degraded and so scandalous.”

No compromise. No drama teaching. Marcus must either leave the church or quit his job – again.

Marcus’s story has the “strong-group” aspect of the strong-group, surrogate family written all over it. It is Cyprian’s conviction that “the honor and respect of the church” must take priority over Marcus and his acting academy. Marcus, on his part, finds himself answering to the church for his whole vocational and financial future.

Cyprian’s handling of Marcus’s dilemma grates harshly against modern social sensibilities, since we tend to prioritize the needs and goals of the individual over the viability of any group to which he or she belongs. But for all his hard-nosed strong-group convictions, Cyprian is not unaware of the suffering Marcus will face. As Cyprian’s comments clearly demonstrate, the intense emphasis on personal holiness that characterized the North African church had a beautiful complement: a genuine concern for those whose livelihoods might be adversely affected by assenting to the church’s demanding moral standards. In short, Cyprian tells Pastor Eucratius that the church should provide for Marcus’s ­material needs:

His needs can be alleviated along with those of others who are supported by the provisions of the church. . . . Accordingly, you should do your utmost to call him away from this depraved and shameful profession to the way of innocence and to the hope of his true life; let him be satisfied with the nourishment provided by the church, more sparing to be sure but salutary.

And if this is not enough, Cyprian concludes by telling Eucratius that Cyprian’s church will foot the bill if the rural church in Thena lacks the resources to meet Marcus’s basic needs:

But if your church is unable to meet the cost of maintaining those in need, he can transfer himself to us and receive here what is necessary for him in the way of food and clothing.

Cyprian made sure that the church would serve as the economic safety net for any brother or sister whose finances were adversely affected by their willingness to follow Jesus. Why? Because the church was family, and this is what families in the ancient world did.

The conviction that church members should meet one another’s material needs is, of course, central to the New Testament understanding of church family life: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” (1 John 3:17).

Can we recapture in our churches the biblical vision for authentic Christian community as reflected in the strong-group, surrogate family model that characterized the early church? ◆