Involvement in Outreach

I'm posting this during Christmas week when "family" and "home" are much on our minds. Unfortunately, we can fall victim to idealizing those concepts to a degree that that gives them a weight they can't hold.  When we do, the holidays become a source of disappointment.  As Dennis Bickers points out in Chapter 13 of The Healthy Small Church, congregations often like to see themselves as a "family." I think that's especially true in small congregations.  But I wonder if we fall victim to idealizing that image to a place where it works against our ministry instead of for it?

I like the old saying, "Family is like fudge - mostly sweet with a few nuts."  I'll start with the nuts -- the downside of "family" as the governing image for congregational life.  I re-read the section of Paul Borden's book Hit the Bullseye in which he criticizes the way the Western church has thought about "family" as an ideal for congregational life.  I'm afraid we're prone to having a limited, overly sentimental, Hallmark Channel understanding of family - warm, comforting, cozy, supportive.  If that's all we mean by that image, we're on the path to an inwardly focused church.  Taken to it's logical conclusion, it means people have to marry into, be born in, or earn their way to adoption into the church family.  A missional church is about hospitality; about taking in the stranger.  Unless we are careful, instead of drawing people in, a "family" repels them.  Borden says that the primary purpose of the church is not to be a family but an army (p. 20).  Personally, I'd rather make the images complementary instead of competing.  Both the family and militant images of the church are biblical.  My problem - and I suspect I'll find lots of company in our small churches - is that I like the family image better than the army image.  Warm and comfortable ranks higher than sacrifice and hardship.  The point is, the church is both a family and an army.  As much as it makes me uncomfortable, one image has to be tempered by the other.  We are a family called not to a reunion but to a mission.

Now let's taste the sweet part of the fudge. The chief organizing principle of small church life is relationships.  Our world is increasingly fragmented and many of our communities are populated with displaced people hungering for authentic relationships.  The small church is wonderfully positioned to minister in that setting.  Anthony Pappas, in Entering the World of the Small Church (pp. 17-18) writes, "At its best, the small church is like a large, warm intergenerational extended family." The "family" he has in mind is not a closed, nuclear family, but a "family of many cousins, likely to experience growth over time."  Putting the image of family and army together with the concept of the missional church, I suggest the image of a family business.  The family is together for a purpose that goes beyond itself.  The reunion is nice, and helps lubricate the relational mechanism, but it's not the goal.  The family of God is on a mission, because the head of the family is a missionary God.  No matter what the size of our church, we are part of our Father's family business.

If you have some time to breathe and think over the Christmas and New Year season, I'm interested in hearing your feedback.  What do you make of the upside and downside of thinking of church as a "family"?  I'd also like to hear what you think of Bickers' statement, "One helpful thing that small churches should do is to stop seeing temselves as churches and to begin to see themselves as mission stations" (p. 114).