I’ve been around churches for a while now, and one of the things they have all said is that they are “like family.” They’ve all meant this to be a positive thing, and it has been, at best, just that—the church as a family that works hard to provide a safe, nurturing environment through which they might reach out to their neighbors. But at worst, “like family” has often been a nicer way of saying, “a clique to which you don’t belong,” which leads me to an observation: to say a church is “like family” is to say nothing meaningful.
In reality, there are all sorts of families and all sorts of things meant by the word. Don Corleone was the head of a family. The Simpsons and the Bundys and the Griffins and the Lannisters are all families. When we say the church is “like family” do we mean we are like these families? Around the time Jesus was born, Herod had a family. Of course, he stole his brother’s wife and assassinated several of his children in order to protect his reign. Is this what we mean when we say the church is “like family”? I suspect not, though we may, on occasion, look more like them than we want to admit. (Lord, have mercy!)
More, being family is not a particularly Christian thing to be, as if we make some deep biblical or theological claim when we say our churches are “like family.” As the above examples attest, one doesn’t need Jesus to be “like family.” Even healthier, more appealing examples of being “like family” don’t require Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection to happen. Think about those Olive Garden commercials with everyone sitting around a table, laughing and eating pasta: “When you’re here, you’re family.” Rather, Jesus often has harsh words for families: talk of hating mother and father; talk of letting the dead bury the dead; talk of the kingdom ripping families apart; talk of a rift between Jesus and his own family.
To be clear, the point isn’t that family is bad (though it can be), but that until we talk about what kind of family our church is like, we haven’t said anything meaningful by saying we are “like a family.” In our broken world, we discover that one of the things “family” is most often used for is for deciding who is in and who is out. Along with similar distinctions between “us” and “them,” family talk is a way of differentiating between those who do get mercy, love, or compassion and those who don’t. Again, this is very much a family dynamic, but it is self-evidently not Christian. This is what Jesus is getting at through the middle part of his Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6. If you only love those who love you, you’re not really doing anything special. If you only give to those from whom you can expect something in return, how are you different from anyone else? If you are only going to show compassion to those who are a part of “us,” how is that different from anyone else?
Additionally, those practices that Jesus discusses just before are the sorts of things we are more likely to do for those we know, like, and love than we are for a stranger or an enemy. I can have a little patience when a loved one strikes me on the cheek. I have gone the extra mile for family members in a time of need. It’s no big deal to give something to a sister or brother in my group who needs it. We hardly think of these things under many circumstances, but any family will behave this way within itself. The question isn’t, “Is your church a family?” but, “Whose family is your church?” Jesus tells us to love our enemies—to treat them as we would our family or loved ones—by blessing them, showing compassion, doing good to them, turning the cheek, and all the rest because that is indicative of who God is. God loves our enemies just as much as he loves us, and, as his children, he has placed us in our communities to be a manifestation of that love – even for those who belong to “them” rather than “us".