The Local Church Is Your Family—and This Changes Everything

May 21

When each of my three sons were born, we lived 1,200 miles from family. Although my mom and my mother-in-law each came to stay for a few days, they eventually had to go home. More than ten years later, I still remember the mounting feeling of panic as I watched them pack their bags. Before leaving, they did all the laundry, stocked the pantry, and made sure I got one last shower. But then they handed me the baby and walked out the door. I cried every time.

In my empty house with a tiny crying stranger, I have never felt more alone.

But then, something happened. The doorbell rang: a church member dropping off a meal. The phone rang: an older mother from church asking me how I was doing. My heart lifted: the prayers of God’s people being answered. In the days following each child’s arrival, the people of my local church reminded me: the church is my family.

Just as life in a nuclear family impacts everything from our schedule to our bank account, life in the spiritual family changes the way we live. Again and again, I’ve received love from my brothers and sisters in the church, and, in turn, I have daily opportunities to show love to them, too.

In order to know what this family life is like, we can turn to the place where the Bible most frequently calls Christians “brothers and sisters:” the New Testament Epistles. These letters to the churches are the family mission statement posted on the refrigerator. They are the family meeting agenda. They are the family rules. They are the family portrait. They tell us what it means to be brothers and sisters and teach us “how one ought to behave in the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15).

In these letters, we see that belonging to Christ’s family reorients our allegiance and our actions—not just on Sunday morning, but every hour of every day.

Meet the Family

By their repeated use of the term “brothers” (or “brothers and sisters”), the writers of the Epistles underscore that the people in the pews around us are, in fact, our family. Like the members of a biological family, we haven’t chosen them for ourselves, but they have been chosen for us, and we are therefore inseparably bound to them. Because we are allied with Christ, we are allied with his family.

The family terms in the New Testament are not incidental; they compel their hearers to live as the family they truly are. When Paul wanted the Roman church to welcome and help Phoebe, he called her “our sister” (Rom. 16:1); when Peter wanted to commend Silvanus, he called him “a faithful brother” (1 Pet. 5:12). We, too, ought to think of—and speak of—our fellow church members as family.

Familial Duty

Acknowledging the truth of our family relationship encourages us to willingly take up our family responsibilities. Throughout the New Testament, God commands us to mutual care in the local church. These “one another” commands are practical instructions for our family life: build up one another (1 Thess. 5:11), speak truth to one another (Eph. 4:15), pray for one another (James 5:16), serve one another (Gal. 5:13), forgive one another (Col. 3:13), and bear one another's burdens (Gal. 6:2). The Epistles remind us that life in Christ’s family has specific, concrete implications.

Of course, caring for family is sometimes frustrating and often tiring—ask any mother of toddlers or teenagers!—and loving the local church is no different. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are not always agreeable or thankful, and meeting their needs requires great sacrifice, but it is precisely because they are our brothers and sisters that we do.

Because God’s people are our family, we will open our hearts and our doors; we will pull up another chair to the dinner table and add another name to our prayer list. We will give them our groceries and furniture and smiles. We will share their grief and trials and disappointments. We will look for ways to show love.

Christ, Our Brother

Ultimately, our joy in our spiritual family comes from something greater than our daily experience of life with the ordinary people who belong to the local church. Our joy comes from Christ, our brother, who is making everyone in the family like himself.

Romans 8 tells us that “those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (v. 29). The whole work of redemption has this in view: a vast family where all the members look increasingly like their older brother.

Knowing this, we can delight in the particular people God has given us as brothers and sisters, no matter how unexceptional they may seem, because, in them, we apprehend something of Christ. We want to be with them and to care for them because we want to see Christ displayed in them. And the more they—and we—become like Christ, the more we will love them.

In one of Scripture’s most striking statements, we read that Christ sees the people of his church and “is not ashamed to call them brothers” (Heb. 2:11). How can this be? How can Christ look at the ordinary, weak, and sometimes difficult people of his family and not be ashamed? He is not ashamed because he is increasingly being formed in them, and he is confident that one day—because of his work on their behalf—their transformation will be complete (Heb. 2:10-18; cf. Gal. 4:19). He willingly identifies with us because our identity is found in him.

As we affirm our relationship to the people of our local church and overflow with affection for them, we testify loudly to the world that we are not ashamed to call them brothers either—not because they are perfect but because they are being made like our only sibling who is.

In our Christian brothers and sisters, we can see something the world cannot. We can see Christ himself.

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from A Place to Belong: Learning to Love the Local Church and is used here by permission.