Over the past 12 months, our little regional church has started growing—one person, one family at a time. One Sunday last year, a woman about my age came along by herself—she and her family had recently arrived in Australia from the Middle East, and she was curious about Christianity. Eventually her husband and children started coming to church too; then her husband’s parents began tagging along, even though they don’t speak any English.
By the time Christmas came around, my new friend wanted to be baptised. By Easter, it was her husband’s turn. And I know that for both of them, the thing that drew them towards Christianity—and ultimately to Christ—was experiencing our Christian community.
Now I have to admit: our church is very ordinary. We’re a motley group of all ages and stages; we’re not particularly good-looking or outwardly successful; we’re not all in ‘happy families’; we’re just plodding through the ups and downs of life together, with our eyes fixed on Jesus. So I asked our new friends why our ordinary little church community had made such an impact on them.
The first word they used was ‘open’: our church welcomed them in, without putting any hurdles in their way. There was no dress code, no shushing of noisy children, no judgement for those who are still working out their faith. My friend’s husband called it ‘love without conditions’. The next thing that stood out was the personal interest and care. When the recent Middle East conflict began to touch their home country, our church drew around them to listen and to pray.
A number of families, including ours, have invited these newcomers over for a meal (and they have more than returned the favour!). As they left our place, the wife was beaming from ear to ear. ‘Thank you. Really, thank you. We had such a feeling of family tonight’, she said.
Another person who joined our church for a time was a young single man whose work had brought him to our area—on the other side of the country from his family. I got to hear this young man’s story of faith one night as we were doing the washing up after a church dinner. He had become a Christian a few years earlier through a Christian housemate. Sadly, the young man’s work contract recently came to an end, and we had to farewell him. On his final Sunday, he thanked us for welcoming him into our community and being ‘a home away from home’.
All of these new people claim to have experienced God’s love through our church community and have used the language of ‘family’ to describe it. Indeed, we speak about the church being a family, because that’s how the New Testament describes it—as ‘the household of God’ (1 Timothy 3:15).
But what does that mean exactly? And how do our natural families fit into this picture? Is our church family a replacement for our natural family? Or is a church simply a gathering of natural families? Or is the church something different altogether?
Someone that I have learnt a lot from on these questions is British theologian Alastair Roberts. Coming up on Wednesday, June 17, Alastair will be in Sydney speaking about how the cross reshapes all of our relationships. This event run is being run by Cross Related (formerly Single Minded).
