history that was made present in every assembly – not only in the rooms themselves, but in the people as well. . . .
We would love to have much more detailed information about the lives of those early communities, but our sources for the most part offer us little. Nevertheless, we know enough that we are in no danger of glorifying the community life of those times. Above all, Paul’s two letters to the Corinthians show us a community in which there was uncertainty, arrogance, slanted theology, and serious social conflicts. It would have been no different in other places.
What distinguishes those communities is not their moral integrity or the power of their faith, still less their unanimity. Nevertheless, Paul calls them “the saints” in the introductions to his letters, “the called,” “God’s beloved,” “sanctified in Christ Jesus,” the “ekklēsia of God.” He thus expresses the conviction that what is crucial is not the mistakes that are made; there will always be those. Theological foolishness is also not decisive; there will never be a lack of that. Not even sin and guilt are the most important things, however dreadful they often are; they can be forgiven.
What is decisive, after all, what everything depends on, is that the community knows that God has called it to make the divine plan visible and to be a place of reconciliation in the world as the body of Christ. It is already that body, anterior to any of its own efforts. The spirit of God promised for the end time, the spirit of Jesus Christ, has already been given to it and has made it one body. Nevertheless it must know that its task is still to become that body. ◆
5
Brothers, Sisters
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Hal Miller
The church is never defined in the New Testament. Rather, it is pictured by dozens and dozens of metaphors. One author counts ninety-six different ones, but there are probably even more than that. . . .
Many renewal movements have focused on the metaphor of the body. . . . [They] have come to rely on the body metaphor for a number of reasons. One is that they are, more or less consciously, returning to the New Testament for nourishment. And in the New Testament, the body metaphor is obvious. Paul, for example, has spun out the body metaphor at greater length than any other. He is more specific than Jesus and certainly develops this idea more fully than the little snatches of other imagery we get here and there.
The body metaphor also pictures the church as having a variety of interdependent roles. As renewal movements have moved away from a one-dimensional concentration on the pastor or priest as the sole actor in the church, the body metaphor has been very helpful. . . .
Other images, however, can rise to fill the need. Though renewal movements have tended to concentrate on the body, the family is the New Testament’s single most common metaphor for the believers in Jesus. For the New Testament writers, family imagery falls effortlessly from their minds onto paper. They call each other “brother” and “sister”; we enter the kingdom of God by a “new birth” and are “children of God”; Paul claims to be “once again in childbirth” with the Galatian Christians; he tells the Corinthians “they have many teachers but not many fathers.” Again and again, New Testament writers assume they are a family with other Christians and act on the basis of that vision.
Consider some of the ways the family metaphor may help us where the body metaphor either lets us down or distorts our vision. Although there may be many more than these – and other applications are (as engineering books say) left as an exercise for the reader – four stand out.
First, the way a body is one and many is different from the way a family is one and many. The uniqueness of individuals, for instance, is much more strongly portrayed in a body than in a family. The eye is not an arm and so (obviously) cannot have the same function. But, though a brother is not a sister, in the family, the role distinctions blur: anyone can do the dishes or carry out the garbage. Old family acquaintances say to me, “Oh yes, you’re Ray Miller’s boy.” They might have said the same about either of my brothers, for, seen in the family, our roles were not all that distinct.
In an age of independence and struggle for identity, it is no wonder we have latched onto the body metaphor with its strong affirmation of the indispensability of each part. But I wonder whether we have not played that particular melody enough. Perhaps it’s time to hear the counterpoint: we are all children of the same God, and we share that relationship in common. Maybe that’s all the identity I need: to be the Creator’s boy instead of emphatically a particular, unique individual. Renewing the family metaphor can help us come to terms with the things we all share in common, which are just as important as the things which make us each unique.
Second, although differences in a body are cast in terms of role and function, in a family, differences are primarily in terms of maturity. Children listen to mothers and fathers not (in the first place) because parents have a different abstract role but because they are more mature, wiser, and better able to cope with the unpredictability of life; children trust their parents. The body metaphor has as its goal to get people involved in doing what is uniquely theirs to do; the family metaphor teaches them how to do it. In a family, the older members are often better able to do the things that the younger members also do, and the younger members look to the older for guidance and models of living. Understanding the church as family will mean that the younger members will learn to take their cues from those who are older and wiser.
Similarly, the body focuses more on accomplishing tasks, but the family more on day-to-day existence. Thinking about the church as family makes a person’s specific gifts less relevant. It doesn’t matter what your gifts are; the fact is we need someone to take out the garbage, and here you are. The same thing is true of relationships. In a family, it doesn’t matter what another person’s gifts are; we are loving them or putting up with them or nourishing them because we are part of the same family, not because they have a particular gift.
This brings out a third significant difference between the body image and the family image: the church as body is oriented toward tasks while the church as family expresses and nurtures our need for community. American culture has almost entirely fragmented the extended family. As a result, we experience a deep longing for the things the extended family used to provide: a network of close relationships outside the immediate, the stimulation of others who are different and yet closely related, a sense of security in having options beyond the immediate ones (just in case things don’t quite work out).
The church as family can be a way of incarnating an answer to these longings. Perhaps the reason Paul and others did not spin out the family metaphor is that it seemed so obvious to them. Because they experienced extended households as a fact of life, it was easy to see how church repeated that pattern. As children in a family learn most (for good and ill) by imitating, so new Christians learn not what their gifts are but how to exercise them, discovering what they are in the process. Children imitate the way you eat, the way you deal with others, and the things you deem important. What we mean by Christian growth is largely just this process, a process which in the church as family is a spontaneous, not a programmed, one.
Church as family also points to both the tragedy and the fallacy of one of the important decisions of Christian life for us: finding the right church. Seeing church as family doesn’t even acknowledge that there is such a decision. Being in a given family isn’t a matter of choice at all; you just end up there. The family to which you belong gives you both your possibilities and limitations. It gives you people with whom you must deal. People in a family are not necessarily friends, they may not go bowling with each other, and they may not even particularly like each other. But they are still family.
In fact, of course, we do have a choice about church, which seeing church as family can obscure. Nonetheless, the family metaphor can help us see that we should not constantly be looking for the “perfect church” any more than we should for the perfect family. . . .
The vision of the church as a body has been very important for Christians to catch hold of. We shouldn’t ignore the insights it gives, but enrich them with the insights that envisioning the church as family can give us. It can show us how we touch the world. It can teach us about Christian nurture. It can show