I wonder if you’ve ever stopped to think about the kinds of metaphors that underly the different ways that people think and talk about the church.
For example, if you speak to a bishop or a denominational bureaucrat, they might talk about a church as if it was a franchise business, or a chain of stores. You know how it works - there’s a head office somewhere in town and branches in all the suburbs, with the logo of the chain on the sign out the front, and you get your instructions from head office and you compete with the other chains to get the most customers.
Or there’s the metaphor of the church as a museum, where cherished traditions and artefacts from the past are kept inside a beautiful, heritage-listed buildings, and there are paid curators who have studied these things, and keen volunteers who help out in their spare time, and members of the general public who come along, sometimes to drop in, and sometimes because they’re real buffs and afficionados, and they come every week.
We could go on, and talk about the church as vending machine, dispensing sacraments to the faithful, or the church as boutique pub, where the fans of a particular style of spirituality come to enjoy the ambience and meet their friends; and so on...
But surprisingly, none of those metaphors is actually used in the Bible. Which is partly because they didn’t have vending machines or boutique pubs or museums back in the first century, but also partly because the understanding that the Bible writers had of church was very different from ours.
The Bible writers use a very different set of metaphors to talk about the church. They speak about the church as a body, with Christ as the head; the church as a bride, with Christ as the husband; the church as the branches of a vine that is Christ; there are a number of different metaphors.
But the dominant image you get in the New Testament, again and again and again, is the image of the church as a family. It begins with Jesus in the gospels when he looks around him at the community of his disciples and says to them, “Here are my mother and my brothers!”, and it continues with Paul and the other apostles through the rest of the New Testament.
So church gets described as the ‘household of God’; they meet together for a meal that is a fulfilment of the passover meal that Jewish families ate together to remember the Exodus story; they refer to one another as a ‘brothers and sisters’ – in fact, there’s a special word philadelphia, or ‘brotherly love’ that they use to describe the sort of relationships they have with each other. Overwhelmingly, the favourite New Testament language for church is family language.
In fact, you really have to go further than saying that family is the New Testament’s favourite metaphor for church. It’s not just a favourite metaphor – it’s the reality that underlies all the other metaphors. If we are people who belong to Jesus then God really is our father. We really are brothers and sisters. We really are a family in him, with a common home and a common name and a common father.
So Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 2 about the way we once were far away from God, separated from him and strangers to him, without God and without hope; he describes what we were apart from Christ, and then he talks about what God has done in Christ to draw us near; he says that God has made us fellow citizens with the saints, and then he goes one step further in verse 19 and says that we have become members of God’s own household. In the language of chapter 1, we have been adopted into his family. That is what takes place when we become Christians. And the vertical relationship that our adoption creates between us and God generates a horizontal relationship that we have with each other; when God becomes our father, we become brothers and sisters to each other. Our new identity in Christ is not just a private, individual religious experience; it’s a corporate identity, as part of a family. So in those words from Knowing God that I’ve quoted from time to time over the years, Jim Packer encourages us to remind ourselves over and over again: “I am a child of God; God is my Father; heaven is my home, every day is one day nearer. My Saviour is my brother; every Christian is my brother or my sister too.” Our new identity in Christ is a family identity.
This has big implications for how we think about and practise church together, and I want to spend the rest of our time thinking about a few of those implications together. The way I want to do it is by spending some time looking at another letter that Paul wrote to Ephesus – not Ephesians but 1 Timothy, written to Paul’s ‘son’ Timothy, who was one of the key leaders of the church in Ephesus.
1 Timothy is a letter about life in the family of God. In fact, Paul says that quite explicitly in the passage that we read from a moment ago. Right in the centre of the letter, he talks to Timothy about the reason that he’s writing, the rationale behine all the instructions, and he says: “Although I hope to come to you soon, I am writing you these instructions so that, 15 if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.” “I am writing you these instructions so that… you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household.”
1 Timothy is a letter about life in the family of God. And I want us to look together at five aspects of that which Paul addresses in the rest of the letter.
A family for those without family (1 Tim 5:3, 5, 9-10)
In the first place – and chapter 5 is where this comes out most clearly – the fact that church is the family of God means that it is a family for those who are without family of their own. In the Old Testament, this was a responsibility that was carried by your extended family. Your nearest male relative was called in Hebrew your goel, your kinsman-redeemer, and if you ended up in debt or widowed or orphaned, he would be the one who had the responsibility of taking care of you. So in the book of Ruth, for example, Boaz acts as the kinsman-redeemer for the widow Naomi and the widow Ruth.
Here in 1 Timothy, Paul says that the church is to carry that sort of extended family responsibility for those within it who are without family. Specifically, he talks at some length about widows, and the role that we the church play for those who would otherwise be alone and without family. Chapter 5 verse 3: “Give proper recognition to those widows who are really in need.” Verse 5: “The widow who is really in need and left all alone puts her hope in God and continues night and day to pray and to ask God for help.” So Paul takes it for granted that there will be a list of widows for whom the church takes on collective responsibility. Verse 9: “No widow may be put on the list of widows unless she is over sixty, has been faithful to her husband, 10 and is well known for her good deeds, such as bringing up children, showing hospitality, washing the feet of the saints, helping those in trouble and devoting herself to all kinds of good deeds.”
We don’t have a lot of widows in our church family here at Petersham. We do have a number of older people who are without an immediate family – Peter Young, Jacki Napier – and in the light of verses like these ones here in 1 Timothy, we need to remember that we have a very definite responsibility to be like family for them. Their welfare – not just their spiritual welfare but their total welfare – is our concern and our responsibility. We are to think of them as we would think of a mum or a dad or a grandma or a grandpa or and uncle or an aunty. And there will be concrete things that we will need to do to put that concern into practice – the meals roster, the transport roster, visits, phone calls, making sure that they have a good place to live and enough to live on, and so on. We are to be a family for them. And more broadly, we are to be a family for all of those within our church who are without family or away from family, like the residents at Flo.
A family that strengthens families (1 Tim 4:1-5, 5:4, 8, 11-14, 16)
Church is to be a family for those who are without family. And yet, at the same time, we are to do that in a way that doesn’t replace or do away with or diminish the importance of biological families. Quite the contrary – we are to be a family that strengthens and reinforces the importance of biological families.
So in 1 Timothy 4 Paul speaks in the strongest possible terms against those who think that marriage and biological family are made redundant for those who belong to the people of God. He says that those who forbid marriage are propagating a doctrine taught by demons.
And in chapter 5, when he talks about the church taking responsibility for the welfare of widows, he wraps those instructions around with a series of words about how important it is to do that in a way that doesn’t pull those people out of family networks, but instead encourages them to be part of families, and to make sure that those families are doing their job in caring for them. So he says - chapter 5 verse 4: “if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.” In fact, verse 8: “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
Verse 11: “As for younger widows, do not put them on such a list. For when their sensual desires overcome their dedication to Christ, they want to marry. 12 Thus they bring judgment on themselves, because they have broken their first pledge. 13 Besides, they get into the habit of being idle and going about from house to house. And not only do they become idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying things they ought not to. 14 So I counsel younger widows to marry, to have children, to manage their homes and to give the enemy no opportunity for slander.”
Paul recognises that being in working, functional, biological families is a great blessing and provision of God our creator, part of our creation design, so when he writes about church as family he goes out of the way to stress that we don’t try to replace biological family but to strengthen it and reinforce it.
Again there are big implications for how we do things here at Petersham, aren’t there. It matters that we don’t try to fill up the entire Uni holidays of our Flo residents with ‘ministry’ and conferences, so that they never get home to spend time with parents and brothers and sisters back in the country. It matters that we put energy into training people and supporting people to be husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters to aging parents. It matters that as far as we are able we create conditions in which people are able to marry wisely, and that we support and help them along the path when they do. And there are many, many more implications too. Church is to be a family that strengthens families.
Family relationships (1 Tim 5:1-2)
Thirdly, chapter 5 verses 1-2, church is to be a family in which we relate to one another with family-like relationships. Our age and our gender do not disappear when we walk through the doors of the church – they are no bar to our fellowship, but they have profound implications for the shape of how we love each other.
So Paul writes – chapter 5 verse 1: “Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, 2 older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.”
We are to relate to each other within the family of the church as we would to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and the shape of how we love each other and relate to each other is to be informed by those realities. In particular, Paul writes to Timothy as a young leader within the church, this will have implications for him – for the purity and carefulness with which he loves the younger women of the church, as if they were his sisters. For the honour and the respect that he shows to the older men and women of the church, even when they’re doing wrong or when he disagrees with them. The whole shape and tone of how he is to relate to people within the church is to be affected by the fact that these are family relationships with people who are his mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters.
Family leadership (1 Tim 2:12, 3:1-13)
All this is connected with the fifth point, which is to do with the way that spiritual leadership works out within the family of the church; because it’s the family nature of church that is part of the rationale for what Paul has to say about who should lead the church and how they should go about leading it.
So when Paul writes in chapter 2 and he says, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man,” he’s not just making up a random rule. He grounds the instruction in the creation stories of Genesis 2-3 about the first family and the relationships of Adam and Eve within that family.
The connection between family leadership and church leadership becomes even clearer in chapter 3, when he writes about the qualifications for pastors/elders/overseers. So he writes, chapter 3 verse 1: “Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. 5 (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?).” Because church is God’s family, you show whether you have the self discipline and the gentleness and the faithfulness and the authority to lead God’s family by the way you demonstrate those things as a husband and a father in your own family.
So you can be praying for our pastoral search committee at the moment, and you can ask God that we would have a clear grasp of passages like this one in 1 Timothy, and that we would prioritise the things that God prioritises, and that we’d have the discernment to see whether they are there.
Family business (1 Tim 3:15-16)
One more point to make, and it takes us right back to the verses that we started with, and it’s about the business that the family shares in. Because the family of God is not just a cosy, domestic, self-serving family. The family of God is the family of a missionary God, a God who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
So in chapter 3 verse 15, Paul talks about the household of God, the church, and he goes on to describe it as ‘the pillar and bulwark of the truth’ – he sees the church as holding up and holding out the truth of God. And then he says: ‘Beyond all question, the mystery of godliness is great: He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory’.
When he talks about the ‘mystery of godliness’ what he means is the thing that God has revealed (that’s how Paul uses the word mystery) – the thing that God has revealed that is at the heart of all our worship of him – at the heart of all godliness. What is the story that God has revealed as the great thing that shapes our life together? What is the thing this family is united by, the thing that draws us together and occupies our energies? It’s Jesus Christ, risen from the dead and preached to the nations. May God make and keep this church here at Petersham a family united in that gospel.