The Character of the Local Church

By James A. Stahr [1] [2]

Introduction

The title and subject of this article is, “The Character of the Local Church.” While I will refer to many Bible passages, there are two which I will examine in some detail. Neither passage mentions the church, whether local or universal. Neither is likely to be discussed, or even quoted, in typical sermons or articles on the subject of the church. For these reasons both passages will require careful exposition, in context, to establish the legitimacy of their credentials and their relevance to this topic.

The first passage, Psalm 68:5–6, a text from the Old Testament, lays a foundation for the character of the local church. The second, John 13:34–36, a New Testament text, is a well-known command of the Lord Jesus. I would like to describe this command as the charter of the local church.

My subject is the character, not the characteristics, of the church. Character can be defined as the aggregate of the characteristics of a thing or a person. Using that definition as a starting point, I might have chosen to enumerate a series of characteristics of the local assembly of God’s people, and then to sum them up as a statement of its character. Instead, I intend to work in the reverse direction. I will concentrate first on the basic nature of the local church. Following that, I will list some of the characteristics that arise from this essential nature. The presentation will conclude with some vignettes of the local church, all drawn from New Testament epistles and all displaying the essential character of the assembly.

My thesis is this: first, the local church is designed by God and intended by the Lord Jesus to be a family. Second, as a family the church takes on or reflects the character of the head of the family, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Other images or illustrations of the church are better known than the family image. One quickly thinks of the three “B’s,” body, bride, and building. The church is well described as the body of Christ, as the bride of Christ, and as a building that “fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:19–22). These three images all come from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. They are also found in the Corinthian epistles. They are especially appropriate to the universal church. They may be applicable in some measure to the local church as well, but in a limited way. For example, the local assembly is not the body of Christ; it is rather a part of the body. It is not the bride of Christ, but part of the bride.

On the other hand, the local congregation is a family. It is a family in its own right. The church universal may also be called a family, providing one concedes that, as a family, its members have no chance of knowing each other. As a family, the universal church cannot hold a family reunion. Spread over six continents and twenty centuries, the universal church is far too large to function as a family. The local church, by contrast, is in the here and now. It is small enough that its members can know and interact with one another.

The Mind of God

The first passage we want to look at is Psalm 68, verses 5 and 6:

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God setteth the solitary in families; He bringeth out those who are bound with chains, but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.

A passage from the Psalms might seem an unexpected starting point for a New Testament topic. King David’s Psalms were composed a full millennium before Jesus Christ announced His intention to build a church (Matthew 16:18). Nevertheless, when a statement from the Old Testament expresses the mind of God, that statement may well be revealing an eternal truth that can guide our understanding of the ways of God throughout the ages of mankind. Such is the case with the sixth verse of the sixty-eighth Psalm. In David’s words, “God setteth the solitary in families.”

The Family in the Plan of God

It is and has always been the mind of God to gather people into families! That purpose was implied in Genesis 1:27, where we read that God created us “male and female.” [3]

God’s intention to put people into families was more fully revealed in Genesis 2. In Eden, God created a life-partner for our first ancestor, thus establishing the first human family. Genesis 2:24 then proclaimed that future generations of males would leave the families they were born into in order to form new families with female partners of their own. And so it went through the entire book of Genesis, a book that spanned at least two thousand years, fully one-third of recorded human history. Genesis contains long genealogies of fathers and sons and grandsons. It records the trials and triumphs of many fathers and mothers and of their sons and daughters. It tells occasional stories of fathers reaching out to other families to find wives for their sons in order to start new families.

Genesis is the preeminent family book of the Bible. It demonstrates the mind of God that people should be born into and grow up in families, and then start families of their own.

God’s Care for Broken Families

Inevitably families are disrupted by that ancient enemy, death. Death leaves orphans, and death leaves widows. The plight of the widow and the plight of the orphan moved King David to give us our text, as we see in verse five. He wanted to tell us that God desires to step into the broken family. God wants to fill the void with His own presence. In David’s words, God wants to be “a father of the fatherless, and a judge (that is, a protector) of the widows” (Psalm 68:5). Why so? Because it is His very nature to put people into family relationships. When those relationships are broken, He Himself wants to fill the gap. It is the will of God that lonely and solitary people be set in families (v. 6).

Psalm 68:6 is a wonderful text from which to preach the Gospel, especially when its final phrase is contrasted to its opening words. The first phrase is, “God gathers the solitary in families.” Picture the Lord Jesus extending welcoming arms and calling lost sinners to Himself. “Come unto Me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.… Learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest unto your souls” (Matt. 11:28–29). Many will respond to that invitation. Many others will turn away from Him. And so David warns in the final phrase of Psalm 68:6, “The rebellious dwell in a dry land.”

God wants to put us into a family, His own family. The rejecter will find himself living in a desert, a place of loneliness and emptiness. The desert here is allegorical. Whether the rebel lives in the midst of a crowded city or far out on lonely ranch land, there is ultimately no lasting satisfaction, no family companionship for him. “There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked” (Isaiah 57:21).

God’s Spiritual Family

A modern translation makes the words of David in verses five and six even more vivid. “A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land” (NIV).

By adding that last phrase, the one about dwelling in a sun-scorched land, King David took these verses beyond the human family. He had begun by talking about widows and orphans. He had been thinking about families composed of people related to one another by blood or by marriage. When David speaks of releasing prisoners and then of rebels living in the wilderness, he is enlarging the concept of family. He is saying there is not only a biological family, but there is also a spiritual family. There is a family of people bound together by spiritual ties, by a common relationship to the living God. There is, to put it simply, a family of God, and God wants to put people into that family.

God’s Spiritual Family in the Old Testament

This idea of a spiritual family was not very pronounced in Old Testament history. Israel was a nation of people united by their descent from Abraham, but often very disunited in other ways. They were divided both religiously and politically. Some of them served God, while others served pagan deities. In time there were two nations of Jews, a northern and a southern kingdom, often at war with each other. This was hardly a family! Or, even two families.

God’s Spiritual Family in the New Testament

The slowness of the disciples to have a family relationship. As we come into the New Testament, we find the Lord Jesus gathering a little band around Himself. They were not a family either. Not yet! His leadership bound them together, but not much else did. They expected that very soon He would take the throne of David. His closest Apostles began to maneuver politically for high-ranking cabinet positions. Two of them, blood brothers, brought in their mother, who urged the Lord to seat her sons next to Himself, one on each side of Him at the Cabinet table (Matt. 20:20–21). For those two, the bonds of blood relationship still took precedence over any sense of a spiritual kinship with the other Apostles.

When the other ten heard about this political maneuver, “they were moved with indignation against the two brethren” (Matt. 20:24). None of them seemed aware that their Lord was about to introduce them to a new concept of family. Little did they realize that they themselves, with one hundred ten others, would soon form the first local church. That local church was to have the characteristics of a family.

The family character of the local church. Whether they understood it or not, that was the intention of the Lord, as we shall soon see. We might well expect it to be so, for we have already learned that it is the mind of God to put people into family relationships, especially lonely people. The Old Testament emphasized the biological family, united by ties of blood and marriage. In New Testament times we see more clearly that God provides a second type of family, that is, the local assembly of believers.

I am not suggesting that the biological family ceases to be important. We find references to it in the upbringing of Timothy. He was taught the ways of the Lord by a godly mother and grandmother (2 Tim. 1:5). We read also that to be qualified for eldership, a man must know how to rule his own home and have his own children under control (1 Tim. 3:4–5). Older women are instructed to “teach the young women” to love their husbands and children, to be “keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed” (Titus 2:4–5). These passages are guidelines for the biological Christian family.

The precedence of the spiritual family over the biological family. The Lord warned us, however, that the Gospel sometimes disrupts the biological family. Jesus said:

I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me (Matt. 10:35–37).

One of the defining characteristics of modern cults is the turning of the convert against his family, and the cutting off of that convert from his parents. The true gospel does not do that. We teach young converts to honor their fathers and mothers, even when those parents oppose the Gospel. Unlike the modern cults, the alienation comes only when unbelieving parents disown, expel, or disenfranchise believing children. In such cases, the family of the local assembly is all the more important. The original family has cast out the new believer.

The New Commandment

Now we must get back to the story of Jesus and His little band of competing apostles. Back in Galilee they had been disputing among themselves as to who would be the greatest in the Lord’s government (Mark 9:30–34; Luke 9:46). Now again in the Upper Room, on the night before the Crucifixion, as the Lord served them the Last Supper, “there was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest” (Luke 22:24). This strife was probably a major factor in moving the Lord in that Upper Room to define the local church as family. He did so by uttering one of the most famous statements in the New Testament. It is recorded as John 13:34–35.

A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another; As I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another.

These words of Jesus are generally given a stand-alone status. They are divorced from their context and treated as something the Lord might have proclaimed anywhere and at anytime. He might have spoken them from a mountain top, à la Moses and the Ten Commandments. Indeed, these words are sometimes called the Eleventh Commandment.

Linking this new commandment to the Old Testament law is not without problems. There is enough in the original ten to burden us down, show us our guilt, and bring us in “guilty before God” (Romans 3:19). Why should our Lord add to that already heavy load on the night before He died? Why should He add another commandment that outranks the original ten in its impossibility of human fulfillment?

A cursory reading of the Ten Commandments as recorded in Exodus 20 might suggest that fulfillment is possible. We can abstain from idolatry, adultery, profanity, murder, theft, and false testimony. We can be staunch monotheists and refuse to admit the existence of any other gods. Saul of Tarsus certainly saw himself as keeping the first nine commandments. Ultimately it was the tenth, “Thou shalt not covet,” that brought him to his knees before God as a guilty sinner (Rom. 7:7).

It is the grand summation of the Commandments as quoted by our Lord that defines them as impossible for sinful humans to fulfill. When asked to choose from among the ten the one that He considered the greatest commandment, Jesus replied:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment (Matt. 22:37–38).

ALL thy heart? ALL thy soul? ALL thy mind? Impossible of human fulfillment! But the Lord did not stop with that insurmountable mountain. He added another: “And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (v. 39).

No wonder the Apostle to the Gentiles would later write, “There is no difference [between Jew and Gentile]. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:22–23).

What, then, was to be gained by adding another commandment? It did expand the command to love by adding a third category. First, love God. Second, love your neighbor. And now third, love your fellow-believer. If the Lord had left it at that, we might have understood, and tried to obey. He was simply enlarging the scope of our responsibility. However, there in the Upper Room He went further. He added a qualifying phrase that made fulfillment impossible. “As I have loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13:34). Impossible? Not one of us would dare to suggest that we can love each other with a love as great as His love to us.

On the other hand, we cannot contradict our Lord’s own words. This is “a new commandment.” He called it that. Rather than linking it with the original ten, however, we might understand it better if we join it to the context of chapter 13, to the scene in the Upper Room, and particularly to the burden that was on the heart of Christ when He spoke those famous words. We will discover, if we do this, not an eleventh commandment, but rather a commandment that is new because it is designed to fit a new situation. We will find it to be a provision for the new conditions His little band of followers were soon to experience. We will see that the words, “as I have loved you,” are not the imposition of an impossible standard, but rather a comparison of His past relationship to them with their future relationship to each other.

In short, these words were intended to define the character of the local church. The church is to be a family. It is to be a family knit together by a love for each other, just as it had been previously held together by the Lord’s love for each of them. It is to be a family in which the behavior of its members reflects the character of Christ.

In order to understand the new commandment in this light, we must first understand what went on in the Upper Room that night.

Jesus in the Upper Room

The Example of Love and Service

Looking back to the beginning of John 13, we can trace the concern that motivated our Lord to issue this new commandment. Heavy on His heart was the awareness of His soon departure. It was not so much His impending death, although that was certainly on His mind. His burden, more precisely, was the awareness of His imminent departure from this earth.

Verse one of John 13 reads, “Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world.” Why should He dread that? Was He not going back to the Father who had sent Him? Of course He was. The problem was that His little band of followers would then be left alone, lonely, vulnerable, and leaderless in a hostile world. Verse one continues, “Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.” This shows us that their well-being, not His suffering, was the burden of His heart that night. Their crisis would be the immediate consequence of His departure.

The third and fourth verses of the chapter restate His concern, and portray Him as doing something about it. “Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that He was come from God, and went to God; He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself.” He proceeded to wash the feet of His disciples. He talked with them as He did so. He taught them lessons about fellowship (“If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me” — v. 8), and about daily cleansing (“He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet” — v. 10), and about service one to another (“If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” — v. 14).

He said nothing during this foot washing about a local church. Yet in only fifty days, they would be the local church, the very first local church. These words were intended to instruct them about their behavior in that local church. Their behavior was to be modeled after His behavior. He said, “I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you” (v. 15). When these things happen in any local church, the character of that church reflects the character of the Lord Jesus.

“As I have done to you,” were His words. The local church is to be a place of serving one another. Not only serving in physical ways like foot washing, but also in the spiritual ministries illustrated by the foot washing. In other words we are to perform for one another ministries of cleansing, removing defilement, and maintaining fellowship. That is, we are to steer fellow-believers away from temptations that will drag them down into sin. We are to guide them to confession and forgiveness when they do sin. We are to exercise a ministry of cleansing because our Lord Jesus exercises a ministry of cleansing.

“If you know these things,” the Lord concluded, “happy are you if you do them” (v. 17). Those words are just as true today for every local church as they were two thousand years ago for that original local church.

The Lord of Every Circumstance

With the basin and towel laid aside, and with His outer garment put back on, the Lord resumed His place at the table. He reminded His disciples that He had chosen them and then told them that one of them would soon betray Him (vv. 18, 21). Peter motioned to John, who was right next to the Lord, asking John to find out who the Lord was talking about. Jesus identified Judas as the betrayer by passing food to him, but only John was aware of that signal. Then the Lord spoke out loud to Judas. “What thou doest, do quickly” (v. 27). The men at the table thought that Jesus was sending Judas out for groceries. John would likely have understood the real message.

Certainly Judas understood it, and what a shock that must have been to him. Until that moment, he thought he had the fate of Jesus in his own hands. It was entirely up to him to choose the appropriate moment and then to summon the soldiers to make the arrest. Then came the voice of the one he had served for nearly three years. “What thou doest, do quickly.” Suddenly the initiative had been taken away from him. The Lord had taken charge. “What thou doest, do quickly. I am giving the orders now.”

I wrote an article about this incident in 1971 and published it in the second issue of my fifteen years as editor of Interest Magazine. I titled it, “The Lord of Every Circumstance.” Even at a time of disastrous betrayal into the hands of Satan, our Lord made it known that He Himself was still in charge, and that betrayal would only take place when He so instructed.

When trials and tragedy come into your life, even if they come from Satan himself, do not ever imagine that Jesus Christ has lost control. He is still “the Lord of every circumstance.”

By sending Judas out, the Lord set in motion the final chain of events that would bring Him to the cross in just thirteen or fourteen hours. It was like being in a countdown that had passed its last possible hold point. So, in verse 31, He spoke of His crucifixion and resurrection as if they were already accomplished. “Now is the Son of Man glorified,” He said, “and God is glorified in Him.” From that perspective, with the cross already behind Him, the ascension was the next event. “If God be glorified in Him, God shall also glorify Him in Himself, and shall straightway glorify Him” (v. 32).

Teaching in Light of His Departure

That being the case, it was time to tell His disciples what was coming next. Had they really comprehended the fact that He was about to die, they might still have supposed that He would immediately take the throne after coming back to life. Not so, they learned in the Upper Room, for the resurrection was to be followed by His departure to heaven. Furthermore, they would not be allowed to go with Him or even to find Him if they searched for Him! We see this in John 13:33. “Ye shall seek Me; and as I said unto the Jews, ‘Where I go, you cannot come;’ so now I say to you.”

Apparently this was the first time that Jesus told this to His disciples. It is true that He had implied it in a number of parables [Matt. 9:15; 25:14; Mark 13:34; Luke 10:35; 19:12], but prophecy in parable form is very different from a straightforward announcement. “I am going away! You can’t come with Me!” That must have been quite a shock.

In verse thirty-six, the Lord softened the shock somewhat by promising that they could follow later on. In chapter fourteen, He amplified that promise. The “later-on” following would take the form of a rapture. In His absence He would be preparing a place for them. Then He said, “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself, that where I am, there you may be also” (v. 3).

The rapture allows the church to follow Him to where He is going and to the place He is preparing. The rapture is not a turn-around in the clouds with an immediate return to earth. He has gone away to prepare a place for us, and will come back to take us to that place. [4] That, however, is getting ahead of our story. Let me pick it up again at John 13:33, where the Lord told them He was going away, and that they could not go with Him.

We must notice one more thing in verse 33 before we reach the new commandment in verse 34. Here, for the first and only time in His ministry, the Lord addressed His Apostles as “little children” [Greek: τεκνία, teknia]. On one other occasion, after the resurrection, He called some of them “children,” using a different Greek word. Elsewhere, He spoke of believers as children of light, children of the kingdom, and children of God.5 He taught them that God was their Father, as in the Lord’s prayer.6 But in this scene, and in this scene only, Jesus depicts Himself as their father, and they as His little children.

Little children, yet a little while I am with you. you shall seek me; and as I said unto the Jews, ‘Where I go, you cannot come;’ so now I say [the same thing] to you (John 13:33).

The situation here has striking parallels to what might someday occur in our own experience. Picture a man in the last hours of life. Knowing he is about to die, his children gather at his bedside. Summoning strength and rising up on his pillows, he gives them counsel for the future, and then bids them farewell, one son or daughter at a time.

The scene is reminiscent of the last words of Jacob in the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis.

And Jacob called unto his sons, and said, Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the last days. Gather yourselves together, and hear, you sons of Jacob; and hearken unto Israel, your father (Genesis 49:1–2).

The long chapter continues with a prophetic message for each of his sons, and ends with these words: “When Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people” (v. 33).

The Lord Jesus was not speaking from a bed, nor from weakness. He was not speaking in poetic format, as Jacob did. He was not talking about death, but He was talking about departure. What He was saying was, “I am the father in this little family, and I am going away. But I am not leaving you alone. You have each other. The head of the family will be gone, but you still have each other. You are a family. I want you to act like a family.”

God’s Provision for Their Future

By calling them little children, He establishes the family relationship. They are brothers! If the owner and head of a business dies, his top employees may battle with each other to take control of the business. They are not family, but competitors. The Lord’s disciples had for some days been competing with each other, jockeying for position, like politicians or like business associates. But not like brothers. Even at the last supper itself, some of this maneuvering had been going on, much to the grief of the Lord. So now the Lord says, “Cut out all that competitive stuff and start acting like a family.”

Thus the new commandment becomes a provision, a provision for the future. I am going away, but you are not alone. You have each other. There will be tough times ahead. You will need each other. You are to serve each other just as I have served you (vv. 14–15). You are to love each other just as I have loved you (v. 34).

The “as I have loved you” part of the command is not an issue of degree (“as much as I have loved you”) but an issue of relationship (“in the same way that I loved you”). When so understood, the command can be fulfilled. The Lord was saying, “Just as my love held you together in the past, so now in my absence, your love for each other must hold you together. You are family.” It is in this sense that His words can be called a charter for the local church.

His words were a command because He wanted them to stop competing and start teaming up like brothers. His words were a provision because He knew they would need each other after He went away. They would not be alone. They would have each other. If they would stand together as brothers, they could withstand the attacks of the enemy and spread the Gospel far and wide. Their love and unity would show the world that they were His disciples (v. 35). That is, of course, exactly what happened.

There are at least two other provisions that the Lord made for the centuries of His absence. In John 14, He promised to send another Comforter (Greek: παράκλητος, paraklētos, Paraclete, one called along side). This is the Holy Spirit, sent to take His place beside us (vv. 16–17). In chapter 17, He prayed that God would keep them during His absence (vv. 9–15), a ministry of intercession that the Lord continues until the present day (Hebrews 7:25).

The Paraclete and the Intercessor sustain us as individual believers, apart from any local assembly connection. It is the new commandment that defines us as a family, provides us with a family, and puts us into that family. Families have always been the provision of God for human beings. “God setteth the solitary in families.” The local assembly is a major provision for our well-being.

The Family Characteristics

What are the implications of the local church as a family? What are the family characteristics that the assembly displays? Or, should display? We will summarize a few of them.

Love and Support

One set of characteristics has been evident already in John 13, both in the foot washing scene and in the new commandment. There is love and support in the family. We learn to get along with each other, to love each other, to enjoy each other, to serve each other. We learn to strengthen and encourage one another. Also, and this can be hard for some of us, we learn to be strengthened and to be encouraged, for there is a mutuality here. We are brothers and sisters.

Verse 35: “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another.” The family character of the local church will make it attractive to people around us. That was what attracted me, when I was a straight-A high school student, but not a good mixer, and not one of the popular kids on campus. Nor was I a follower of the popular kids. When I got drawn into an off-campus Bible club, I found a warmth that kept me coming back week after week. In time, the message of salvation brought me under conviction. Without that family welcome, this lonely kid wouldn’t have been there to hear it more than once. When a church behaves like a family, people will know that our message has reality.

History and Tradition

There is history and tradition in a family. I speak of traditions in the good sense of customs handed down from generation to generation, but not in the bad sense of practices that claim an equal standing with Scripture. Paul used the term favorably in respect to teachings when he wrote: “Brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which you have been taught, whether by word or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15).

Let me illustrate this from biological families. Family history and family traditions help bind biological families together, more so in some cultures than others. Some families search the genealogical archives for records of their ancestors. Other families pride themselves in things they do together, whether it be camping trips, musical emphasis, or going to the public library each Sunday afternoon. We hear of families creating elaborate Christmas traditions, including preparation of special foods that are traditional in their countries of origin. In doing so, they develop in their children a sense of family.

Local churches can develop traditions, too. Things like potluck suppers on the first Sunday evening of each month, or a mid-June camping weekend for assembly families, or an annual Bible conference to which other assemblies are invited. Some churches get quite involved with a children’s camp, or an inner city rescue mission, or grading Emmaus courses for the prison ministry in their state. Things like this that are “special” make for special families.

We should not overlook the role of church practices that are unique as compared to the majority of churches around us. A weekly communion service, or the ability to function without an employed pastor, are examples of things that contribute to family identity, but only if they are handled in a positive way. They should be thought of as unique things that we can contribute to the wider body of Christ, not as sectarian things or things for which we must apologize.

You will lose your children if you are negative about your local church. If you want to hold them, you must convey a sense that there are some real important reasons, something really special about being a part of your particular congregation.

Examples: We are a big church. We have outstanding music and preaching. Or, we are a small church. We get to know each other in a way folks in big churches cannot. Whatever your situation, emphasize the positive. Putting down your own assembly is just as unbecoming and destructive as publicly criticizing your own wife or husband.

Share with your children and your fellow-believers something of your great historical heritage. Make them acquainted with the leaders of the Reformation in the 1600s — men like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and John Knox. Include also those men and women who brought the Brethren movement into being in the early 1800s — Anthony Norris Groves, John Nelson Darby, George Müller, and Lady Powerscourt. Both of these movements were marked by wonderful recoveries of biblical truth. Both movements saw the counterattack of Satan. If you want to build a family, emphasize the recovery of truth. If you want the opposite result, focus on the divisions and failures that followed both of those recoveries.

The Jewish families were instructed by Joshua to remind their children of their glorious history. Joshua ordered his soldiers to take twelve large stones from the bed of the Jordan River, one stone for each tribe, and erect them as a cairn on the west bank. Then Joshua addressed the nation:

When your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying, “What mean these stones?” Then you shall let your children know, saying, “Israel came over this Jordan on dry land. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of Jordan…as [He] did to the Red Sea,…until we were gone over” (Joshua 4:21–23).

The counterpart in the assembly family is the remembrance meeting. Jesus

took bread, and gave thanks, and broke it, and gave unto them, saying, “This is my body which is given for you; this do in remembrance of Me.” Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” (Luke 22:19–20).

In many assemblies, the emphasis is shifting away from remembrance toward a worship focused more on praise. Praise is an important aspect of worship, but the loss of remembrance is ill-advised. Our faith and our unity are rooted in our family history. No part of our great heritage has more power to bind us together then remembering the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Doctrine and Discipline

Third, there is doctrine and discipline in a family. The family structure of many evangelical churches is fading because of the disappearance of doctrine and discipline. When these are gone the church becomes a loose collection of individuals, held together by music or entertainment, perhaps, but not by standards and beliefs that make a group a family.

Again, we find an example in the Jewish family. This was not true of the Jewish nation, which, as I have said, was hardly a family. Rather, we find it in the instructions Moses gave to parents for the upbringing of their children.

Deuteronomy 6 contains a doctrinal assertion called the Shema [pronounced shmah] which is the Hebrew word translated “hear.”

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord (6:4).

This sentence, like the first commandment, sets forth what is perhaps the most fundamental doctrine of the Bible. There is only one God. The next sentence links that proclamation to the nation Israel:

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might (6:5).

The religious life of Israel was to embody the truth of monotheism in the midst of a world given over to idolatry and polytheism. But was it Israel’s mission to teach monotheism to the world? There is no such commission in Deuteronomy 6. There is a commission here for each biological family in Israel. The parents were commanded to teach these truths to their children:

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children (6:6–7).

A family, be it the Jewish biological family or the New Testament church family, has an essential core of doctrine which must be passed on in the family from generation to generation. In 1 Timothy 3:15 we are told that the local church, “the house of God,” is “the pillar and ground of the truth.” Timothy himself was exhorted to take the truths he had learned from Paul and “commit [them] to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2).

Inevitably discipline must accompany doctrine. We live in an age in which truth is relative. Whatever religious view suits your thinking, that is your truth. Today this philosophy is invading the evangelical church, and doctrine is being driven out before it. That does not change the New Testament, which tells us in more than one passage that those who fall into doctrinal apostasy must be rejected by the local church and by its members [1 Tim. 1:3–4; 6:3–5; 2 Tim. 2:16–18; 2 John 9–11]. Other passages call for the expulsion of those who turn aside into serious moral sin.

Hebrews 12 talks about “the chastening of the Lord” and about being rebuked by Him (vv. 5–6). This passage uses the biological family as an illustration, telling us that it is characteristic of human fathers to chasten their sons (vv. 7, 9). Does it not follow, then, that if the local church is a family, it, too, will deal with sin among its people?

In the days of the American Revolution, there was an office of exhorter in churches. The service did not end when the sermon ended. Instead the exhorter took over and began applying the word just preached to the conduct of the listeners. Not just in general terms, but individually, personally. In our culture, that would be considered an intrusion on our personal space. Even that limited form of discipline is unknown in evangelical churches today.

We have spoken of love and support in the assembly family, then history and tradition, and after that doctrine and discipline. These are all related to the family character of the local church. I want to add one more family-related characteristic.

Loyalty

There is loyalty in a family. Brothers and sisters are loyal to each other. Husbands and wives are loyal to each other. It is a family tragedy when this is not the case. So when a brother or sister or spouse says the wrong thing to you, you might get offended, but you do not walk out on your family. You do not say to your brother, “I am not going to be your brother any more because you offended me. I am going to look for a different set of brothers. I am going to change families.”

We are living in days when changing church families is far too common. The ease and frequency of switching churches arises from the loss of the concept of the church as a family. I began to be aware of this more than forty-five years ago when I had a short conversation with a woman I met in one of the New Jersey suburbs west of Newark. In Newark at that time there was a strong Bible-believing church, Evangel Baptist. I am hopeless when it comes to remembering the words of conversations, yet once in a while something hangs on in my mind. I can still hear the words of that woman as if they were spoken to me yesterday.

“What church do you go to?” I asked.
“I go to Evangel Baptist. He’s a very good man.”

I knew what she meant, because in my mind I could supply a middle sentence that would make her response logical and grammatically correct. “I go to Evangel Baptist. The pastor is Rev. So-and-So. He is a very good man.”

People often take shortcuts like that in conversation. We should not get picky with them about logic and grammar. We understand the meaning. But did she not also, inadvertently, reveal her concept of the local church? For her the church was a place to go and hear a good preacher. Just let that church change ministers, and she might well move on to some other church.

Her way of thinking is not uncommon. Many people see the church as an auditorium where you go to hear the minister. If the next preacher is a mediocre speaker, you start looking around for another place to go.

There are other concepts of the local church that do not generate loyalty. For some the church is a theater, a place to be entertained. Or it is a classroom, where you can get a good Bible education. Hopefully good preaching, good music, and good teaching will be present in your local church. But God places lonely people into families, not into auditoriums, theaters, or classrooms. And if God puts you in a family, you do not lightly leave that family just because the talents of a professional staff no longer please you.

Some of us attend churches that have a variety of preachers, not all of them outstanding. When such is the case, it is easier to think of the assembly as a family rather than as an auditorium. With the modern tendency to hire professional staff, that may change.

From today’s culture, we learn to evaluate the church by what it can do for us instead of asking what can we do to serve the church. Try to resist this attitude by developing in yourself and in your people the concept of the church as a family. Not as a social club where everyone puts their best foot forward and no one ever disagrees with you. Nor as a one-owner business, where you are the owner and everyone has to do whatever you say. Nor as a hospital, where everybody waits on you and you wait on nobody.

Have you learned to think “family” with respect to the local church? Do you understand now why I say John 13:34 can well be called the charter of the local church? There is loyalty in a family. You do not lightly walk out on your family. Brothers and sisters stand together!

Marriages do not always hold together. Sometimes divorce is unavoidable. Divorce is less likely when a man and a woman “think family” and see that God joined them together as such. Separation in assemblies will be less common when we really believe that the Lord Jesus meant for us to act like family. “What God has joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6).

Vignettes of the Local Church

Now let me illustrate the family character of the local church by quoting eight short passages from the New Testament. I call these passages “vignettes,” from a French word meaning “little vines.” In early books, the beginnings and endings of chapters were often decorated with small vine-like illustrations. The definition of vignette applicable to my usage is “any small, pleasing picture or view.” These Bible passages, each from a different New Testament epistle, give us small, pleasing pictures of the assembly family.

Quotations here are from the New International Version. Note the frequency of phrases such as “one another” or “each other.” Also observe that in four of the eight quotations, some of the words set in italics indicate that the behavior of the Christians is to be patterned after the behavior and the teaching of the Father and the Son toward us. That is, the character of the local church is to reflect the character of the Lord.

Spend some time pondering these passages. As you consider each one, visualize a healthy, happy assembly family.

1. Romans 15:5–7, “May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.”
2. Galatians 6:1–2, “Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently.… Carry each other’s burdens.”
3. Ephesians 4:31–32, “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”
4. Colossians 3:12–16, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other, and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.… Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.… And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.”
5. 1 Thessalonians 4:9–10, “Now about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. And in fact, you do love all the brothers throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more.”
6. Hebrews 10:24–25. “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”
7. 1 Peter 3:8–9, “Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing.”
8. 1 John 3:23, “And this is [God’s] command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as He commanded us.” [7]

Conclusion

I will conclude with my two original texts, which also can be considered vignettes:

• Psalm 68:6, “God sets the lonely in families. He leads forth the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land” (NIV).
• John 13:33–36, “My children, I will be with you only a little longer.… Where I am going you cannot come. A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (NIV).

Notes

1. This article was originally prepared for delivery at “Understanding the Church: A Colloquium for Serious Christians” in St. Louis on May 15-17, 1997. The colloquium was sponsored by Grace Bible Chapel.
2. After serving the Lord for many years in pioneer ministry in eastern Canada, Jim Stahr was editor of Interest Magazine for fifteen years. He is a board member of two important ministries, Emmaus Bible College and the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He continues to be actively involved in a Bible teaching and preaching ministry.
3. Not “male and male,” nor “female and female;” if you want a biblical indictment of the homosexual lifestyle, you get it right here.
4. As to the timing of the rapture of the church, the importance of our Lord’s words in John 14:3 should not be overlooked. He describes His church as being transported from earth to His Father’s house in heaven. This event is more fully described in 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17. It is commonly called the rapture, from the Latin word raptus, meaning “to carry away.” The movement of the church here is an upward journey (from earth to heaven). Someday the Lord will return to judge the nations and establish His kingdom. He will return all the way to the earth (Zech. 14:2–4), not just to the clouds (1 Thess. 4:17). This is often called the “second coming proper.” At that time He will bring His saints with Him (1 Thess. 3:13; Jude 14–15; Rev. 19:11–16). This will be a downward journey (heaven to earth). Of necessity this journey must take place at a different time from the rapture, because it is impossible to travel in opposite directions at the same time. So the church waits patiently for the rapture, when it will be caught up to heaven to take residence in the place the Lord has gone to prepare (John 14:2–3). At some later time it will return with Him to the earth. Thus the rapture and the return are distinctly different events, with some interval of time between them.
5. Matt. 5:9, 45; 8:12; 13:38; Luke 16:8; 20:36; John 11:52; 12:36.
6. Other religious leaders were not to be called “father”—Matthew 23:8–10.
7. See also: Romans 12:10–13; 14:13, 19; 1 Thess. 3:12; 5:9–11; James 5:16; 1 Peter 1:22.