You don't know what "Church family" means

Or: Pauline Brotherhood Ideals within the Early Church

If you have an evangelical background like myself, you've probably heard the phrase "church family" thrown around to the point of meaninglessness. "Welcome, church family!" says the nice lady at the front of the church as five hundred strangers file in for a worship service that involves more smoke machines than scripture. It's hard to believe that the phrase has much weight when we all know that everyone will bolt out the door when the service is over. Interaction with others? I scoff. 

Photo by Shaun Frankland on Unsplash

I paint a myopic picture, of course, and there are many churches (including my childhood church) where I have experienced the term being used with some import. But we all understand the stereotype. 

I haven't done a historical analysis of the origins of the phrase, but it seems easy enough to put together. The New Testament speaks of all believers being part of one family, right? Not a hard jump to put two and two together to get "church family." There's just one issue here.

For us, in America/the West, "family" means "father, mother, children." The primary relationships in our culture are, of course, those between father and mother, and parents and children. But as we saw previously, Ancient Near Eastern culture is a strange, old world to the Western Christian, full of arcane honor/shame dynamics and confusing beliefs about siblinghood. This means that we should be ever-vigilant when thinking about phrases like "church family"—we are in grave danger of projecting Western ideas onto old, Eastern ones. 

"Church family" is an unfortunate phrase for that reason. Not because it is wrong, per se. But because of our culture, the phrase short-circuits the Biblical text, and replaces it with a Western idea of what family means. What exactly am I referring to? In the New Testament, the primary image of the church as family mirrors the culture it existed in, namely, the New Testament focuses on the church as siblings. 

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Family in the Gospels

Jesus's views on "church family", and what that should look like, are most striking in Mark 10:

Mark 10:28–30: Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.” [29] Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, [30] who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. (ESV)

It's easy to forget how radical this is—both in our culture and his. Jesus is asking all those who would follow him to completely destabilize their lives and their understanding of "family". Leaving one's brothers was the highest form of treachery in the ANE world. This is no light thing. 

But Jesus doesn't stop at "leave your family." No, he goes much further, and says that anyone who does leave her family, who does commit treachery against her father and siblings will "receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters...". Hellerman writes: 

"According to the most straightforward reading of the passage, Jesus here assumes his followers will relate to one another according to the standards of solidarity shared by families in Mediterranean antiquity..."¹

These standards are foreign to us. They included: 

• the assumption that your siblings would be the people you were most emotionally intimate with;

• the expectation that you would share all material things with your family, especially your siblings;

• complete loyalty to the family unit, even at the cost of personal happiness.²

Similarly, Hellerman calls Jesus's words in Mark 3 "scandalous" and "radical": 

Mark 3:31–35: And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. [32] And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.” [33] And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” [34] And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! [35] For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.” (ESV)

Jesus openly rejects the idea that his blood-brothers have any special claim over him because of their consanguinity. Rather, he says that his brothers are those who follow God, who is the Father of the family.³ Notice that in Mark 10, Jesus speaks of leaving one's father, but not receiving fathers a hundredfold. 

In doing so, he casts off the hierarchy so strongly embedded in his culture. Fatherhood and patrilineal bloodline were the defining features of your family life. The place you held within the family—patriarch, eldest son, youngest son, granddaughter—was all given its significance precisely by whether you were, or would one day become, the father of the family. By saying that we will not receive fathers "now in this time", he removes the central, defining hierarchical character of family relations. Christian relationships, first and foremost, are those between equals.

Jesus demonstrated that his disciples are family in non-obvious ways, too. Josephus writes that the passover meal was assumed to be eaten with family: the Last Supper, then, is a declaration that Jesus's family is the twelve.⁴ Similarly, Jesus's burial was undertaken by the disciple Joseph of Arimathea, an activity reserved for close family.

Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

Burial was an integral part of their culture. It was high treason to let one's father go unburied, yet Jesus says to do exactly that in Matthew 8:21-22. This is so antithetical to the PKG⁵ ideal that Hellerman says it "...stands alone in the literature. There are no true parallels to this scandalous saying in the Greco-Roman world."⁶

From all this, we see that Jesus was not saying empty words when he claimed his disciples were "family". He was flipping cultural tables and challenging the very notion of family that his followers took for granted. This understanding of the family of God is radical both then and now.

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Pauline views on brotherhood

With this in mind, we should expect the epistles in the New Testament to be rife with siblinghood terminology. If Jesus's followers understood themselves as siblings organized according to the PKG model—and Jesus certainly understood things that way—we should expect Paul to use "brothers" as a reminder of their calling rather than a formality.⁷ Indeed, this is what we find. Paul uses kinship language primarily when the groups he writes to have broken the PKG ideal of conduct. 

"Paul deliberately employs "brother" and other kinship terms in order to encourage his readers to live out the family metaphor in their day-to-day relationships, for he has intentionally crafted his letters precisely to that end."⁸

We'll see this primarily by analyzing Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians.

1 Corinthians: A Greco-Roman Concord Speech?

It seems that the Corinthian church was split along class lines. Wealthier, high status Christians are called "strong" by Paul; poor, low status Christians are called "weak".⁹ It appears that Paul was writing in the style of a Greco-Roman Concord speech. These were speeches given by leaders of cities in times of crisis and factional unrest with the goal of restoring unity in the city. This aligns with what we see in a couple of places:

1 Corinthians 1:10: I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.

1 Corinthians 12:24b–25: ...But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, [25] that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. (ESV)

Generally, these concord speeches attempted to dispel conflict by reaffirming the social order. This makes sense, right? Oftentimes, social unrest comes from one class of people bringing grievance against another. Convincingly reaffirming the status quo as good is an easy way to stop the bleeding. Because of this, brotherhood language—a relationship inherently between equals—is usually absent from concord speeches.

Yet this is the opposite of what we find in Paul. Paul opens by invoking kinship language ("brothers" at 1:10), flips everything upside down by placing a crucified criminal at the center of the community (1:18-23), and furthers this by honoring weakness over strength (1:26-31). 

Indeed, the word group for brother/sister occurs in 1 Corinthians no less than forty-one times,¹⁰ only one of which (1 Cor. 9:5) is not referring to the surrogate family of God. Many of these are paradigmatic of PKG values: 1 Corinthians 6:1-8, where Paul impugns the habit of the rich suing the poor, the "strong" suing the "weak", is a clear example.

The expectation between brothers was the mutual sharing of all goods—to seek retribution of any sort for wrong done by the hands of a brother deeply violated PKG norms. If Paul expected the Corinthian community to behave like PKG brothers, we should expect kinship language to abound when addressing this issue. Indeed, he uses the word four separate times:

1 Corinthians 6:5–8: I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, [6] but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? [7] To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? [8] But you yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers! (ESV)

Paul is irate that the brothers, rather than fulfilling the norm of mutual, generalized reciprocity, are suing one another. Note also the use of the word shame—the Ancient Near East, much as the Mediterranean is today, was an honor/shame society.

Loyalty, another value-norm between kin, is also discussed in 1 Corinthians. Many of the Corinthian Christians were married to unbelievers, which posed the question: should their loyalty remain with their spouse, or with the brethren of Christ? Paul says the following:

1 Corinthians 7:12–16: To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. [13] If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. [14] For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. [15] But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. [16] For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife? (ESV)

Paul says that a married believer should remain with her unbelieving spouse if he consents to it. If not, then she is not bound. In other words, non-Christian marriage was, for Paul, ultimately a tentative relationship at best. The relationship between siblings in Christ is stronger than that of non-Christian marriage, for that is where the loyalty of the Christian should lie.¹¹

The Rest of the Letters

1 Corinthians is, of course, far from the only place Paul invokes brotherhood language. The letter with the highest density is, unsurprisingly, Philemon, where Paul asks a wealthy Christian (Philemon) to receive a runaway slave (Onesimus), not as a slave, but as a brother and therefore as an equal. 

Philemon 1:15–16: For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, [16] no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother—especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. (ESV)

Beginning a retrieval

What should we do with this information? How should we then live, in light of this?

Answering this question is something that will take far more than a few hundred words at the end of an article; nonetheless, I want to briefly sketch some thoughts.

One essential characteristic of PKG sibling norms that we discussed is sharing material wealth. Once you know this, then this passage in Acts makes a lot more sense:

Acts 4:32–35: Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. [33] And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. [34] There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold [35] and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. (ESV)

I think we are far too insular, at least in the American church, with the things we are willing to give people. Americans tend to take a very "stay out of your business" approach with things. An obvious way this shows itself is in our unwillingness to invite people over without cleaning the house, the room, or the apartment first. The truth of our lives is in the mess. Being a human is messy. It would behoove us all, I think, to stop caring so much about the mess and invite people to step into the mess with us. (I am speaking both literally and, in a deeper sense, metaphorically here.)

A particularly radical version of this that I've seen on Substack is

Andrew Berg

’s guest article over at The Deleted Scenes:

Yes In My Spare Room: Increasing Housing Density Can Start With Us

It's a great read, and everyone should go check it out. I think he captures well the general American milieu:

If you had asked me to consider inviting in long-term houseguests before COVID, I would have said no. A few days?—yeah sure! But a month or more? No way. Like many middle-class home-owning Americans, I value my privacy and my personal space, and the idea of inviting people who aren’t in my nuclear family to live with me for more than a few nights seemed strange and risky.

And yet this form of hospitality should be, to me, part and parcel of being a Christian. 

I have a few ideas for what I'll write about next, so I thought I would ask you, dear reader, which one you prefer. They are:

• Exploring the ways in which the rise of the episcopacy within the church was tied to the increase in "fatherhood" language by those in authority (this is basically continuing along with Hellerman);

• Tracing the outlines of how Byzantine society—one explicitly shaped by Christian theology—understood itself;

• Expounding my thoughts on how we can better practice this radical vision of family that the New Testament envisions.

If you have a preference, please drop a comment below! If there's an overwhelming favorite, that'll be what I write next in this series.

1. Joseph Hellerman, The Ancient Church as Family, p. 66.

2. For more on these three qualities, see my article here. If you have any questions on these, feel free to drop a comment below.

3. Matthew 5-7.

4. Josephus, Antiquities, 11.109. In general, mealtimes in the ancient world were a very important, often public, event, where your loyalties were displayed to others. This is why the Pharisees are able to walk up to Jesus in the middle of eating with “tax collectors and sinners” and insult him—see Luke 5:27-32.

5. PKG here is “Patrilineal Kinship Group”. In their world, families were determined exclusively by the bloodline, which passed through male children. For more, see my article here.

6. Hellerman, Ancient Church, p. 73.

7. Much like today, there were many cases in the ANE world where people would use "brother" as a way to claim equality with someone—real or imagined—especially when asking a favor of them. It behooves us to make sure that Paul is not using it in this way.

8. Hellerman, Ancient Church, p. 94.

9. Hellerman, Ancient Church, p. 94-99.

10. Hellerman, Ancient Church, p. 99-104.

11. One important thing that I must put a pin in is Paul’s innovation of father language in the letters. This would be discussed in the first of the three options I give at the end of the article for what I could write about next.