“Focus on the Family”
“Family Christian Stores”
“Family Worship Center”
“Faith in the Family”
“Rock Family Church”
“Family Church”
I have a pet peeve: the American church is way too focused on the family and the result is a stunted witness to the world. Here’s why I think this is true.
The church is based on an eternal covenant relationship between believers and God while marriage is based on a temporal covenant relationship between a husband and wife and God.
“This cup is the New Covenant in my blood.” With that statement at the Last Supper Jesus instituted the church and gave it a new command: “Love one another as I have loved you.” The moment we enter into a relationship with God through faith in His Son, we become participants in that covenant and have eternal life.
Marriage is also a covenant. But it is a temporal covenant: “Until death us do part.” This is why…
Marriage ends at death, but the church doesn’t.
We are not Mormons, people. Scripture states clearly that marriage ends when a spouse dies (Luke 20:27-40; Romans 7:2; 1 Corinthians 7:39). But the church, and the relationships we have now with other believers, will go on forever long after we die. Fellow believers are themselves family members. “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:50), Jesus taught.
The relational commands in the New Testament are addressed to believers as a whole, not just to believers in their family relationships.
The radical nature of the church is that believers are to love each other as Christ has loved us, not just love their spouse as Christ has loved us or their children as Christ has loved us, as important as these relationships are.
This eternal covenant relationship between believers and God forms the basis for the temporal covenant relationship between a husband and wife and God, not vice versa.
It is Christ’s love for the church that informs Christian marriage and gives it transcendent value. “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). Human marriage apart from God cannot generate its own moral absolutes. So when the church focuses solely on the family and ignores those who have no family, it loses its moral voice and opens itself up to a sea of relativism.
The church living out in this world its eternal covenant relationships as they apply to the entire body of believers has the greatest impact on culture, not simply the church living out its individual family relationships in the world.
This is what Jesus meant when He prayed, “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). Jesus didn’t go around the countryside holding seminars on how to be better husbands and better fathers. But he did die on the cross that we might be saved from this wicked world and do something radically different from the world: love each other.
Does this “radical difference” apply to marriage and family? Yes. But it also applies–perhaps primarily applies–to the rest of the body of Christ too; to those believers who have fractured families, or no family at all: to fatherless children, to single parents, to widows and widowers, to the weakest in our churches. It is seeing us loving those kind of fellow believers with that kind of love that gives non believers pause.
And that, my friends, is why the church, when it loves the way it is supposed to, is more important to social stability than the family.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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