Life2gether

4 New Testament (Church) Family Values:

1. We share our stuff with one another.
2. We share our hearts with one another.
3. We stay, embrace the pain, and grow up with one another.
4. Family is about more than me, the wife, and the kids.

~ Joseph Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family, (pg. 145).

Al Mohler recently spoke at the Connecting Church and Home Conference in Louisville, Kentucky.  In his message, “Christian Parenting is Combat,” he gives 4 things Christian leaders must do to connect the church and home.

#1 The church must present faithful vision of the family, marriage, and parenting – and equip believers to transfer that vision to the next generation.

#2 The church must overcome the zone of privacy and autonomy that keeps individuals from being accountable to the church community. We need to get into each others face. Our parenting and marriage are not properly ours – but belong to Christ and are the affairs of the whole church. Someone needs to get involved when people struggle in these areas.

#3 The church has got to be a place where brokenness is overcome by the Gospel. We slander the good news when we act like the only people who can glorify God are those who have never experienced brokenness.

#4 The church has to got to be the place where families are rescued and armed for the combat to which we are called. Discipleship is a battle. We come to church because we can’t afford not to come. We need to get together because we need to be equipped by the preaching of the Word of God and the fellowship of the Saints.

(HT: Tony Kummer)

I wasn’t able to attend this year’s Connecting Church and Home Conference here in Louisville, Kentucky.  But Tony Kummer took some great notes on the conference if you’re interested.  The audio messages should be available at the conference website soon.  You also might be interested in downloading this free conference program given to the attendees.

Jonathan Dodson was recently interviewed by Joe Thorn on the topic of discipleship.  Here’s one excerpt from the interview:

What is the biggest mistake the church is making when working to make disciples?

I can’t answer that question definitively. However, the dearth of suffering, the absence of hope, the trivialization of the Spirit, and the lack of mission among disciples of Jesus is terribly concerning. We have tried to minimize suffering through convenience, eliminate hope through self-made retirement, reduce Jesus to redeemer of the past, and surrendered any sense of discipleship as a call to die to ourselves that others may live. Instead, discipleship has been reduced to having a good marriage, handling finances well, raising good children, securing a future, and knowing your Bible. Our mission is very different than Jesus’ mission, our lives very different than Jesus’ life. This should scare us.

Yesterday my car started over-heating on the highway.  I was with a good friend of mine and we quickly pulled over at the nearest exit and prayed for a place to stop.  God led us to a Valvoline where I found out that my car had to be towed.  Little did I know God was ready to teach me about community from a most unlikely source.  

He was a scruffy, cigarette-smoking, 48 year-old country boy with a deep Kentucky drawal.  As we got into his tow truck, we started asking him questions.  It wasn’t long before he told us about how he was a member of the “Vannin Club.”  Yep, you heard it right.  The Vannin Club.  We told him we had never heard of such a thing.  And he was more than excited to tell us all about it.  In fact, he gave me the offical Vannin’ website and here’s what it says:

For those of you new to vanning, or who have somehow stumbled across us, vanning is a culture unlike anything else you may have ever dealt with.  Vanners are like a big family, they will travel for hours, even days to see each other on a regular basis. They watch out for each other, they celebrate together, and sometimes… they mourn together. Vanners are a diverse bunch brought together by their common love for the sport of vanning. Some people like to just camp out of their vans, while other prefer to make their van into something more them. Sometimes that is just curtains and a bed, for others its something they put their all into, chopping, gull wings, tubbing,..It’s amazing what you can do with a van. Whatever level of vanning you may enjoy, you do it because you want to. Vanning is also a very social event, we do some wild and crazy things, and consume more than our fair share of alcohol.   

There you have it.  Vanners are “like a big family … they watch out for each other, celebrate together, and sometimes even mourn together… a diverse group brought together by their common love for the sport of vanning.”  Wow.  Makes you want to be a vanner!  So as we thumped along in the front of his tow truck, this guy kept jabbering about his Vannin’ Club and the community he experienced there.  He rambled on and on about how much he loved it.  We just sat and listened.

Finally it was time to get out.  We shook his greasy hand, told him thanks, and said good-bye.  But he wasn’t done.   He actually turned to us, looked at us in the eye, and asked us to come to his next “Vanning Club” get-together.  We laughed out loud … but he was totally serious.  And as he rode off, I turned to my friend and said, “Weird.  He just invited us to his church, didn’t he?!”

You see, for this 48 year-old, buck-toothed, cigarette-smoking Kentucky hick, vannin club is where he’s found community.  He couldn’t help but talk about it, and in the end, invite us to be a part of it.

Everyone is looking for community.  Some find it in the strangest of places.  But I learned something from this simple tow truck driver.  He found community and was eager to talk about it and invite others into it.   Am I?  After all, I’m part of a community too.  A community centered on something that will last forever.  A community centered on a Savior who bled and died on my behalf.  All other kinds of community are only faint pictures of the real thing our hearts were made for.

And to think God used a tow truck driver to teach me all of that.

This made me think of Bonhoeffer’s quote below (Hat Tip to Zach Nielsen):

‘Nothing can be more cruel than that leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than that severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.’ (105)

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community.

Not too long ago, I preached on Nathan’s confrontation with David in 2 Sam. 12 here.  It was a hard sermon to preach.

Brent Thomas:

[Our] Community Groups are made up of three spheres, “Communion,” “Community” and “Mission.” We first saw this diagram in Hugh Halter and Matt Smay’s book The Tangible Kingdom, and it made a lot of sense to us. Halter and Smay define “communion” as our connection with God; worship, both personal and corporate. Community is life together and mission is being focused outward, on others. Our Community Groups aim to be the intersection of all three, the “sweet spot.” It is when all three of these spheres intersect, that Halter and Smay say the kingdom becomes “tangible” for people. 

Community Groups are meant to be a context in which we can aim for the intersection of each sphere, where communion, community and mission so inform our lives that the kingdom becomes tangible. This means that they are not just small-group bible studies. They are that, but they are more. They are not just social gatherings. They are that, but they are more. They are not just service projects. They are that, but they are more. Community Groups at Church of the Cross are small families of learning, serving missionaries where we learn to live everyday life with Gospel intentionality.

A couple days ago I posted a question about which family has a greater claim on our lives, the church family or our biological family.  As I continue to grapple with this question and its implications, I appreciated Jonathan Dodson’s words in the comments section of this initial post:

The radical emphasis on the nuclear family is a recent development in history. In the Mediterranean World of the NT, extended family and group think was dominant, not individualistic, nuclear family. In fact, blood brothers/sisters were considered a stronger bond than even that of marriage. This was true in the Ancient Near East also. Hence the many brother narratives and mythologies.

I believe that Jesus and the writers of the NT preserve this communal, extended family perspective on relationships but place it in the context of redemption, creating the church family. Thus, Jesus can say harsh things about biological families because there is a new family with which we are “blood-related.” This is why Paul repeatedly greets the churches as brothers and sisters, not as non-blood relatives, i.e. bride.

I agree that the church family has a greater claim on our lives, which is sometimes at odds with biological family but also takes a redemptive posture towards bio family. If possible, we should try to get the two families to overlap in social interaction. At the end of the day, however, Christ reigns over both very differently–one with judgment and one with salvation.

When we are born again we are born into a new family. Conversion is a community creating event, not a individualistic conversion. The Gospel converts us three times 1)Christ 2) Church 3) Mission. We join the church family and labor with her to include bio family through mission, but our conversion is not to bio family, it is to a new church family gathered around a new Head Jesus, loving one another as part of the new mission which we desperately long our bio families to join.

Jonathan Dodson with a much needed word for men who love ministry and neglect their own family:

My first year of church planting I started a new, full-time job, a new city, a new daughter, and a new church. Guess which one got the least attention? Family. As all these new things filled our lives, they began to crowd conversation with my wife. What was once natural—inquiring about my wife’s hopes, fears, and joys—became unnatural, even absent from our conversation. She patiently continued to ask how I was doing, but I was “working for the church while my family died.”

As my wife began to wither without the invigorating love of her husband, she revealed the affair. I’ll never forget her crushing comment: “I feel like there’s a mistress in the house.” I was alarmed and frustrated. How dare she make such a comparison! After all, I made a point of being home by 5:30 and on weekends. I made sure we had good family rhythms—breakfast and devotions, dinner and downtime. How could she say there was a “mistress” in our home? Then it dawned on me—you can be home without being home. I was present but absent. My thoughts, emotions, and concerns were with another Bride while I was home, not with my bride.

Read the whole thing …

Which family has a greater claim on our lives?  The church family or our biological family?  Take a look at the following Scriptures and tell me what you think:

Mark 3:31-35 says, “And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brother are outside, seeking you.” And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”

1 Tim. 3:5 says, “For if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?”

Matt. 10:34-37 says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

1 Tim. 5:8 says, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

So which is it?  Which family has priority?  Some might say: “Obviously, you need to put your biological family first.  If you don’t, then how can you really care for your church family?”  While others might say: “My church family has greater claim on my life since it’s the family I joined when I was born again, and it will be my family for all eternity.”  Both of these answers are truthful and I believe biblical.  So which family do we put first?  Which one has a greater claim on our lives?

Tim Chester says, “the gospels make it clear that the church family has a greater claim on us than our biological families … While the church should support the family as a God-ordained institution, we do not give it our ultimate allegiance.  Is it too much to suggest that for some Christains their biological family has become an idol?” (Gospel Centred Church, 70-71). 

Though I agree with Chester and understand the danger of the family becoming an idol, I don’t think it’s helpful to separate the “two families” and put one above the other in importance.  After all, many a pastor has fallen into the trap of “marrying the church” and forgetting his family.  Clearly, God wants the church family and the biological family to work together in its mission to make disciples.  It’s really not one or the other.  Biblically it’s both.  My family is connected to a larger church family and my allegiance is to Christ who reigns over both. 

So practically I’m trying to find ways to bring Deut. 6 and Mt. 28 together.  To put both families first!  Thoughts?