Unit 2 FD

4

A Biblical Frame for Defining Family

When both Old and New Testament writers wanted to describe the love of God for people, they often used family images. God is variously described as mother, father and husband; Jesus is described as brother and bridegroom. Perhaps they utilized these images because no set of human experiences has more potential for describing the depth of emotion and breadth of commitment than that of family relationships. Over and over, then, these images are drawn upon in biblical texts.

God as nursing, nurturing mother (Is 49:15; 66:12-13; Hos 11:1-4) God as father (Ex 4:22-23; Jer 31:9) King as God’s son/adoptive son (2 Sam 7:14; Ps 2:7) Believers as children/adopted children of God (Mt 5:9; Rom 8:14- 16; Gal 4:1-7) God as faithful husband (Hos 1–4) Christ as “firstborn among many brethren” (Rom 8:29 KJV) Paul as “father through the gospel” (1 Cor 4:15) Christians as brothers and sisters (Rom 15:14; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 9:3-5; Phil 3:1; 4:1; Col 1:2; 4:15) Jesus as bridegroom for the new Jerusalem (Rev 21:1-2)

These family images bring visceral responses based on our own family experiences that deepen the meaning for us of who God is. For example, the writer of Deuteronomy assures us that we do not have to rely on our own strength; God carries us as a father picks up a child who is too tired to keep on walking (Deut 1:31). For those of us who can remember being scooped

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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up and carried in strong arms, this is a powerful image. We almost physically relax into God’s presence as we read this Scripture passage. For those of us who have gently lifted tired children and felt them cuddle into our arms and lay their head on our shoulders, we know from experience the kind of care God feels for us. The use of family metaphors indirectly calls the people of God to live in these ways with one another, pointing to a God who loves us even more than the love that we have experienced with one another. The more effective we are in loving one another, the clearer is the image of God we provide for others.

Invoking a different feeling, Paul uses the relationship between husband and wife to picture Christ’s love and relationship with the church (Eph 5:32). Marriage provides an image for us of commitment freely chosen and then lived into day after day, through frustrations and disappointments as well as in joy and intimacy. Whether the marriage is one’s own, one’s parents’ or grandparents’, or that of friends, we all have experienced marriage emotively as well as cognitively.

Family also provides images for describing the relationships Christians are to have with one another in the community of faith, not just in our relationships with God. Paul’s favorite way of referring to the members of the communities to whom he wrote in the epistles was as “brothers” and “sisters” (Rom 15:14; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 9:3-5; Phil 3:1; 4:1; Col 1:2; 4:15). No Roman would have called another person “brother” except one who shared the same biological parents or who had been formally adopted into the family (Winter, 2001). Christians understand themselves to be the adopted children of their heavenly Father (Gal 4:4-6) and therefore also understand themselves to be brothers and sisters.

Paul clearly expected Christians to enter into the same kinds of loving relationships with one another that he modeled for them (Rom 12:9-10). The extensive list of persons that Paul greets in Romans 16 reveals the extensive family-like network of the early church. They shared a sense of unity of purpose that inspired them to turn their lives outward toward others instead of inward toward themselves. Note that Rufus’s mother had become Paul’s mother too (Rom 16:13). Paul encouraged Christians to welcome and support Phoebe from Cenchreae (Rom 16:1-2) because she had welcomed and supported other Christians where she lived. What is done on behalf of

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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one community is to elicit indebtedness in another, creating an extended family that can be even stronger than biological bonds.

Since the letters of Paul to the early churches, Christian leaders have recognized that how Christians live with and love one another demonstrates what it means to be a follower of Christ. The Roman Catholic Church, the Reformers, the Puritans and certainly church leaders in diverse traditions today have had much to say about what a family is, its importance in the lives of Christians, how it should be ordered and how family members should relate to one another. The family is a particularly significant proving ground for Christian discipleship and a vineyard for the fruits of the Spirit. In families, love, forgiveness, grace, long-suffering, patience, kindness and self-sacrifice are often learned and lived most profoundly. The term family ministry may itself be relatively new in the long history of the church, but care for, exhortation about and attempts to intervene in family life have been around since the beginning.

The biblical framework I am about to share with you for understanding families has emerged over the decades at the end of one century and the beginning of another, in my place of living and loving in one small corner of American society and one niche in a modern church rich with diversity. I have sought to understand the implications of the Bible’s themes and teachings and stories for family and congregational life, even as I was being shaped by my own life experiences as a Protestant seminary and university professor, as a creator of family ministry programs in Christian congregations, as a consultant with congregational leaders wanting to more effectively care for families, and as a member of my own changing family as I grew up and grew old within that family in various communities in the midwestern and southwestern United States.

From within those contexts, I have chosen passages of Scripture to discuss the meaning of family and family life for Christians and congregations. As Rodney Clapp (1993) has noted, “To create and live in a truly Christian family, the church in every generation and culture must read the biblical story anew” (p. 15). We cannot simply try to “go back” to the way families have been in the past; instead, we must go forward with the truths we find in the Scriptures as they apply to the challenges and opportunities of our own place and time.

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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The following examination of biblical teachings and themes related to family life should be read as “gleanings,” not an attempt to draw out the central themes and intentions of the biblical writers in each passage. Rather, I will be looking at what I think the texts tell us and imply about family life then and now. What place should family have in the lives of Christians, and how should they live in those family places?

In the Beginning . . .

In the creation account of Genesis 2, God created the man for a reason—to nurture and protect God’s good creation. The creation was not complete, however. The only aspect of creation that God declared “not good” was the aloneness of the man (Gen 2:18). Therefore, God decided to fashion for the man a work partner. Thus the animals were created. Each one God made was brought to the man, and the man named them all, but none of them was quite right. Many could have been good servants for the man. The horse, the ox, the donkey, the llama: all must surely have had great potential as servants for the work and even as companions. They each lacked something, however. The man did not just need someone or something to help him; he needed a partner, someone who could share in all aspects of the work God had for him to do. Although the animals could serve and be companions, they could not be true partners.

Therefore, the Scripture tells us, God put Adam to sleep and took a rib from his side. From that rib bone, God made a woman. God made her not from the dust, as Adam had been made, but from Adam himself, symbolizing their similarity. Here was someone who could truly share in the good work God had given Adam to do. The goodness of God’s creation, when it comes to people, is found in the potential and need for our relationship with one another. It is “not good” for us to be alone. God created in us a need for intimate relationships, a need that draws us to leave the persons from whose bodies we have come—our parents—to form a new “body” with a new partner (Gen 2:23-24). Being family means sharing the same ribs, the same flesh. The old saying that a person cannot know another without “walking in his shoes for awhile” gets taken a step further in families. We become family when we feel like we are walking with the same feet.

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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Family has a place, then, from the very beginning of God’s intention for humanity before the Fall, and even before the advent of children. Jesus’ life and teaching transformed and fulfilled that intention, both as he came into the world as a baby in a family, and as he then lived and taught about family relationships.

Jesus’ Life: A Transformation of “Family”

The stories of Jesus’ own conception, birth and childhood are very human stories shot through with the surprises of direct divine intervention. The surprise begins in the family tree of Matthew 1: “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah . . .” On and on, for 15 verses, the fathers are listed. The series of fathers in the genealogy lead the reader to expect at the climax “and Joseph the father of Jesus.” Instead, the pattern changes abruptly: “And Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born” (Mt 1:16). Joseph did not father Jesus as Jacob, his father, fathered him. This genealogy explains how Jesus, who had no biological, human father, could be the son of David: Joseph claimed him as his own, named him and grafted him into the lineage of David. The next passage, which describes the events surrounding Jesus’ conception (Mt 1:18-25), does not aim at proving that Jesus was born of a virgin; the passage simply takes that for granted. Instead, the passage focuses on the naming of the son by Joseph in obedience to the instructions of the angel. The Scripture’s intention is not to spotlight the virginal conception so much as to narrate how Jesus is the son of David in spite of the virginal conception (D. E. Garland, 2000). Jesus was adopted by Joseph.

Just as Adam had been created by the direct hand of God, so Jesus was formed directly by God, then grafted into this long line of family descendants. Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise of God when God adopted David’s son as his son (2 Sam 7:14). All along, God has not been constrained by biological relationships. The conception and birth of Jesus fulfilled the ancient promise to the ancestors, while at the same time breaking through the definition of what we usually mean by the “ideal” family, the family of husband and wife with their own biological children.

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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Jesus’ birth and teachings challenge this. Family, according to Jesus’ own lineage, now means adoption, not simply biological relationship.

Indeed, the adoption of Jesus by Joseph points to the good news that Jesus will develop later in his teachings (Mt 12:46-50): from this point forward, no one must be without family when wombs are barren, marriages are broken or never formed, or loved ones die. In God’s kingdom, “God sets the lonely in families” (Ps 68:6 NIV). In less spectacular but no less significant ways, the experience of family living takes on new meaning with the conception and birth of Jesus.

Family as Vocation

Boyer (1984) has pointed out that the twelve disciples were not the only ones called to serve Jesus. Before Jesus was born, God called Mary and Joseph. In some ways, they had less free choice involved in their calling than the disciples did when Jesus called them from mending their fishing nets, although perhaps Mary and Joseph could have fled like Jonah, refusing the commission offered them. But how could either of them have graciously said to the angelic visitors, “Well, thanks for the opportunity, but I’m not interested”? The callings of Mary and Joseph were initially not to leave all behind and put their lives on the line, although only a few months later they did make the decision to leave all behind, fleeing to Egypt to protect their infant son from the wrath of the king (Mt 2:13-15). Initially, they were simply called to be family—always a calling of total self for the sake of others.

As Boyer (1984) notes, the disciples were called to follow Jesus, but Mary and Joseph were first called to guide him. The disciples were called to learn from Jesus, but Mary and Joseph were first called to teach him. The disciples were called to stand beside him, but Mary and Joseph were first called to help him learn to stand. The disciples were called to suffer with Jesus the pain of his death so that he might give the gift of life; Mary and Joseph were called to suffer for him the pain of birth and then to let him go. God chose to do it this way. God could have chosen to bring Jesus full grown, walking in on the scene across Lake Galilee. Instead, Jesus was born as a helpless infant, to young parents divinely called to nurture him toward his calling. The call to live faithfully as family to those we find in our care

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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is just as much a response to the call of God as the response to leave everything behind to take up Jesus’ cross.

The Role of Community in Family

Living out their calling was far from easy for Mary and Joseph. Yet they were not alone. Each of the four major events of Jesus’ birth and childhood recorded in the Gospel of Luke tell of God’s presence transforming the family’s experience—a leaping babe in the womb, angelic visitations, the filling of prophets with the Holy Spirit, and the astonishing wisdom of the young Jesus. These are stories not simply of two parents raising their special child while God provided unusual evidence of blessing. More than that, they are stories of God at work blessing them through a community that participated in significant ways in Jesus’ care and preparation for ministry.

A leaping babe. As soon as Mary learns from the angel about the conception that has taken place within her, she goes “with haste” to the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth, her kinswoman. At the sound of Mary’s voice, the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps in recognition. Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit and shouts, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Lk 1:42). Elizabeth continues on with words of hope and promise about the child growing within Mary, leading to Mary’s own song of praise.

We can only imagine how this young girl Mary must have felt, hastily running to her kinswoman’s home in another town, away from her parents and community, toward Elizabeth, whom she had just learned from the angel was pregnant. We do not know if she told her parents about the angel’s disturbing visitation, but her hasty trip seems to signify an attempt to run and hide to ponder what to do. Elizabeth’s greeting must have provided such unexpected comfort. Elizabeth understood and confirmed Mary’s strange experience, before Mary even had to try to tell it. Mary’s running outside the confines of her own parental family to the larger family was divinely affirmed. As Mary faced the daunting task before her, she was nurtured and blessed by this extended family. We are told that her needs for nurture and support during this critical time were met most significantly not by her parents, or even by her husband-to-be, but by the larger family

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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system. In response to Elizabeth’s divinely inspired affirmation and support, Mary praised God.

Angelic visitations. Late in Mary’s pregnancy, Joseph and Mary’s lives were interrupted by a government mandate to travel to Bethlehem. This would be no home birth. There may have been extended family of Joseph’s around, since this was his family’s home territory. We do not hear of anyone “being there” for this young girl having her first baby, however (Lk 2:1-7). If family members were around, Luke considered their roles to be insignificant to the story.

Conception and birth are to be celebrated, and when Mary had fled to her cousin Elizabeth, God prompted the celebration with the leaping babe in the womb. This time, for Jesus’ birth, God provides celebrants by sending angels to shepherds in the fields. The angels tell the shepherds the good news of the birth of the Messiah and send them to see him and to celebrate this new child, the way new babies should be celebrated over, especially this baby (Lk 2:8-20). Imagine what it must have been like for Mary and Joseph, young and away from home, to have this group of sheep herders show up in the night to see their new baby and to talk about how wonderful he was. This group was a significantly different crowd from the usual grandparents and aunts and women friends of the new mother whom we might expect to gather at such a time. These were men, and rough, low- class ones at that. They were a very unlikely group to be making a huge fuss over this new baby. Their words of adoration were the kinds of words that a mother stores in memory to draw from when times are difficult; “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (Lk 2:19).

This story introduces a new understanding of family that later gains full expression in the teaching of Jesus. Sometimes following Jesus requires physical separation or emotional distance from our families. Mary and Joseph are far from the community Mary knows she could find with Elizabeth and Zechariah. We must be willing to leave our families, Jesus said in his teachings, to follow him (Mt 4:22; 8:21-22). Nevertheless, when we follow God’s call, whoever does the will of God becomes our brother or sister or mother (Mt 12:50). When Joseph and Mary find themselves following their calling, giving birth to this baby that was first God’s plan and not theirs, God miraculously surrounds them with these celebrating sheep herders. These men fill the roles normally reserved for family—the

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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uncles and aunts and grandparents with balloons in the waiting room of the hospital—because Mary and Joseph have believed.

Jesus’ birth is evidently not particularly noteworthy, except that the young couple is quartered with farm animals and that Jesus is placed in the animals’ feeding trough, signaling that this is hardly the messianic entrance that everyone expects. There is no word here about whether Joseph finds a midwife or a helpful relative to aid in the delivery. What the Gospel writer finds significant is that God breaks in to this young couple’s aloneness. God’s child needs to be celebrated and welcomed into a larger family and community, and in a lonely world, God provides that family and community. Later, Jesus would teach his followers that every child is his ambassador, his representative with us (Lk 9:47-48). Thus, every child deserves community recognition and celebration.

Spirit-filled prophets. Jesus’ parents take him to the temple in Jerusalem for the rite of purification when he is 40 days old, as prescribed. Imagine how this young couple feels; perhaps people are whispering about this child and about them. Even if others have not heard the unusual circumstances of Jesus’ conception, they probably have heard the shepherds’ tales about angelic visitations. As they walk into the temple, Mary and Joseph are greeted by two prophets, each of them faithful in prayer and waiting for the “consolation of Israel” (Lk 2:25). Each in turn takes the child out of the arms of his parents and praises God. Each of them blesses Mary and Joseph, telling them how wonderful their child is, how important he will be, but how hard it will be for them to love and care for him (Lk 2:21-38).

As with the shepherds in the previous passage, this is a story that tells us nothing about Mary and Joseph’s family. It is instead a story of a community blessing. God intervenes, filling these two old prophets with the Holy Spirit, and they then turn and bless the child and the parents. Their words are not words of comfort but words of challenge. Parenting is difficult, and parenting this child will be especially painful—“and a sword will pierce your own soul too,” says Simeon to Mary (Lk 2:35). This appears to be a forewarning that Jesus’ life will be controversial—“this child is destined for the falling and the rising of many” (Lk 2:34). Nevertheless, the words contain blessing, even if they are not easy to hear. Anna and Simeon in essence are saying to Mary and Joseph, “You are doing

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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important work in raising this child.” These are words every parent needs to hear, of course. It is not as though Mary and Joseph do not know their son is special, but the words are surely added to those Mary stored up for pondering through the difficult times ahead.

Once again, we can read in this passage that God is surrounding this young family with a community that is blessing and challenging them. The role of the community becomes even more significant in the following passage, the last we hear of Jesus’ childhood.

Astonishing wisdom in a child. The final story recorded in the Gospel of Luke from Jesus’ birth and childhood caps the significance of the community in defining this family. Joseph and Mary’s family walks up to Jerusalem for the holidays with a gaggle of friends and relatives when Jesus is 12 years old. On the way home, they share a conversation we might imagine like this:

Joseph says to Mary, “How long did you tell Jesus he could stay with Levi and his folks?”

Mary replies, “I didn’t tell him he could stay with Levi. I thought you had given him permission to go with Uncle Eleazor!”

It has been a whole day by the time either one of them misses Jesus. They live in a world in which the care of children is shared by the community of friends, neighbors and relatives. They may have been alone at the birth event, but they are alone no longer. They had just assumed Jesus was traveling with someone else in the clan. Today we would charge them with child neglect.

My family was haunted by a scene in the television series Planet Earth in which an elephant herd is walking across a desert toward the water they need to survive. When a dust storm overtakes them, a baby elephant becomes separated from the herd and disoriented in the blinding dust, and when the dust clears, the satellite camera shows the baby elephant walking alone, in the wrong direction, back into the depths of the desert, seeking the mother who is in the herd going in the opposite direction. We knew that the baby elephant would not survive. In my years as a mother, I have temporarily lost one of my children more than once; it is a terrifying experience, and that is the modern mindset we bring to this scene. How could Mary and Joseph walk a day’s journey toward home without knowing where their son is?

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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But Jesus is not walking alone in a waterless desert. He is not in a children’s shelter alone and frightened and wondering when they will come for him. He is instead surrounded by a community of faith, where he is both learning and teaching. In Luke 2:49, we hear Jesus for the first time in the Gospels: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” What he says will become a familiar theme in his teaching: the way Jesus defines family is different from how his hearers are used to defining it. When his mother frantically wails, “your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety” (Lk 2:48), he replies with a public announcement of who his Father really is. Jesus points to the fact that more than Joseph’s son, he is God’s son. At the same time he is redefining his relationship with Mary and Joseph, he is also redefining who his followers can trust to be family. He has named God’s house as his home. Later, he will tell his followers, too, that they will find home in God’s house, a mansion with many rooms, and room for them too (Jn 14:2).

These stories of Jesus’ childhood recorded in Luke’s Gospel are enriched by Matthew’s account of the visit of the wise men, the subsequent massacre of the infants by Herod’s soldiers, Joseph’s divinely inspired escape to Egypt with Jesus and Mary, and their return from Egypt after the death of Herod (Mt 2). These events also reveal God’s support and care for this new child and family. Following the stars, the wise men provide this baby and family with a baby shower fit for a king. Then, when an angel reveals the king’s plan to destroy the newborn, Joseph and Mary follow God’s call into a frightening unknown. One can imagine the drama when Joseph awakens from this dream in the middle of the night. Not even waiting for dawn, he scoops up the sleeping infant and his tired young wife to take off on yet another journey. Mary evidently trusts her young husband’s words that God has spoken to him in another dream, and off they go. Following God’s plan does not just call for personal sacrifice; it also involves families sacrificing together, taking risks and trusting one another.

Emerging Themes for Understanding God’s Intention for Family Life

Two themes about family life can be drawn from these stories of Jesus’ childhood. First, we note that they are not sweet, happy stories. They are stories of Mary and Joseph struggling and pondering what was only partly

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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understood, and sometimes not understood at all (Lk 2:50). Even divine visitations did not answer all their questions and uncertainties. The lives of families who choose the path of obedience to God are not made easy by their choice. Mary and Joseph probably did not plan for a life together that would involve visits from shepherds and kings, midnight escapes to foreign countries, or a precocious preteen who disappears in a big city for three days with no apparent remorse for the anxiety visited upon his parents. The newlyweds Mary and Joseph had no time to develop their relationship with one another before they were called to follow God’s leading into all these challenging circumstances.

Second, these stories reveal that Mary and Joseph certainly were committed and willing to follow where parenting this child would lead them, but they did so with the support and involvement of the community. Jesus learned and began to teach himself and others in the nurturing community he found in the temple. His and his parents’ understanding of themselves and their relationships with one another were affirmed and blessed by Elizabeth and prophets and shepherds and kings and the teachers in the temple. Undoubtedly, the stories of Jesus’ birth that Mary had pondered in her heart were told to him; they were stories of his parents’ faithfulness, but they were also stories of a family rooted in and nurtured by a much wider community that God provided.

Jesus’ Teachings by Word and Example

Jesus’ adult ministry also has much to say about families. Jesus dramatically used family relationships in his teachings to illustrate that discipleship costs everything—even one’s family and one’s own self. It should not be entered into lightly. The commitment to God was to be greater even than the most important human commitments—the commitments between family members: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26).

Jesus’ statement of hate for one’s family is a Semitic idiom that means essentially “to love less.” When one said, “I love this and I hate that,” the person was saying, “I prefer this to that.” For example, in the Old Testament it says that Jacob loved Rachel and hated Leah (Gen 29:30-31, 33), and that

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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God loved Jacob and hated Esau (Mal 1:2-3). This does not mean that Jacob actually hated Leah or that God literally hated Esau, but that they preferred Rachel and Jacob. Jesus was simply saying that families were not to be preferred over God. One is to love one’s family, but one is to love God more (D. E. Garland, 2011).

Jesus’ teaching fulfills the Old Testament’s repeated theme that the love of Yahweh must precede all else. The stories that we find most troubling in the Old Testament sound this theme, such as God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22. We ache for Abraham as he travels with his young son, Isaac, to the place God has appointed for him to slaughter Isaac in sacrifice. God stops Abraham at the last moment as Abraham raises his arm, knife in hand. Abraham has proved his willingness to go to this extreme in obedience.

Ezekiel 20 contains a startling reversal of the injunction to honor one’s parents:

I said to their children in the wilderness, Do not follow the statutes of your parents, nor observe their ordinances, nor defile yourselves with their idols. I the Lord am your God; follow my statutes, and be careful to observe my ordinances, and hallow my sabbaths that they may be a sign between me and you, so that you may know that I the Lord am your God. (Ezek 20:18-20)

Faithfulness to God must take precedence over obedience to wrong- headed parents. On a slightly different note but sounding the same theme, Deuteronomy 21:18-21 commands the death of a stubborn and rebellious son in order to purge evil from the midst of Israel, in obedience to Yahweh. Love and obedience to God always must take precedence, even when it means betraying family loyalties.

It is in fulfillment of this expectation, then, that Jesus says he has come to bring a sword to divide families (Mt 10:34-36). Allegiance to God sometimes brings conflict and division in one’s family; this cannot be avoided if there are family members who “loved darkness rather than light” (Jn 3:19). Jesus is speaking about the high cost of being a disciple, not about the desirability of family strife.

Garland, D. R. (2012). Family ministry : A comprehensive guide. InterVarsity Press. Created from liberty on 2026-11-02 22:38:09.

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In fact, Jesus is clear that obedience to God is virtually the only justification for family disloyalty. For example, consider his parable of the rich fool (Lk 12:13-21). A brother, presumably a younger brother, interrupts Jesus’ teaching with a demand that Jesus force his elder brother to share his inheritance. Jesus responds, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?” (ESV).Jesus is indirectly saying that this man should feel shame for arguing with his brother over their inheritance. There is much more to be gained than property and something much greater can be lost. For Jesus, the brother is more important than the money.

As the Gospels record Jesus’ ministry, following Christ often means leaving everything, including one’s family (Mt 10:34-37; Lk 11:27-28; 12:51-53; 14:26)—but not always. Sometimes following Christ means returning with a sense of calling and renewed purpose to the responsibilities of family and community membership. Jesus sometimes sent new followers back to their homes to be his emissaries there. For example, in Mark 5:15, the man who had been bedeviled by a legion of demons, enough to drive 2,000 swine into the sea, is healed by Jesus and clothed and in his right mind when the townspeople arrive. They realize what must have happened and beg Jesus to leave their territory. As Jesus prepares to leave, the man pleads to go with him. But Jesus turns down his request. Instead, Jesus tells him to go home to “your family,” presumably his family and friends (Mk 5:19 NIV). Jesus’ words may sound discouraging, but they were good news for one who yearned for family, for place and a sense of identity (D. E. Garland, 1996).

Jesus never said that those who stayed at home—such as Mary and Martha and Lazarus—were less worthy disciples than those who shared in his traveling ministry. Derek Tidball (1983) has concluded that Jesus provided a two-fold structure of discipleship, that of leaving all behind and following Christ, and that of returning to home and family to live out one’s calling there. Neither is spiritually superior. Jesus gave both messages—“go home” and “follow me”—depending, perhaps, on the needs of the movement as well as on the gifts and circumstances of each individual. This foreshadows Paul’s later teaching that within the body of Christ are many members with different functions, all equally important (1 Cor 12:12-13).

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Clearly, Jesus sometimes did call people to leave their families (Mt 10:34-37; Lk 11:27-28; 12:51-53; 14:26). Interestingly, however, in each case in which a family relationship of the would-be disciple is standing in the way of following Christ, and that family relationship is identified, it is the relationship with the father. For example, in Luke 9:59, the would-be disciple pleads, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” The father represents much more than the individual’s relationship with “Dad”; he brings to mind the lifetime responsibilities and expectations of the patriarchal household on its members. Jesus calls followers instead to responsibility and loyalty to the heavenly Father. Another would-be disciple wants to say farewell to “those at my home” (Lk 9:61).

Some of the disciples were married, and following Jesus probably did involve some travel away from spouses. This was not evidently a severance of these ties, however. We know that Jesus was in the disciples’ homes because on one occasion Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law, in Peter’s home (Mk 1:30-31). This is different from those who would later use Jesus’ teaching to abandon family commitments. We also know from Paul that Peter, the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord were accompanied by their wives on their journeys (1 Cor 9:5). Jesus castigated those who tacitly sanctioned overriding the command to honor parents with a legal loophole that honors religious vows more (Mk 7:10-13). It seems, then, that Jesus was concerned more with priorities of loyalty. He did not call his disciples to sever relationships simply as a means of showing their ultimate commitment to God.

The image of fishing that Jesus used in calling the disciples away from their nets and from their parental families is a rich one for the church in our modern culture. Referring to this passage, I have asked several church congregations what one needs to go fishing. Inevitably, people answer: a line and a pole, bait, and a hook. In our culture, fishing means catching fish one by one; we even sometimes talk about church programs as “bait” to bring in people.

Jesus’ calling to his followers was based on a very different image of fishing, however. Simon and Andrew fished with nets—great nets of strong ropes that were thrown out into the water and used to gather in many fish at one time (Mk 1:16). James and John were mending their nets when Jesus called them (Mk 1:19); broken and frayed nets were not as effective in the

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task of fishing. The church is Jesus’ net—a great big web of relationships that folds people in, gathering them into the net, into the community of faith. We fish not in isolation, as lone fishers in hip boots wading into swift water by ourselves. Instead, it is the relationships between us—the “network” of families and community—that draw others into the community that is the body of Christ. In our me-centered world, it is the relationships of the saints one to another that are most likely to draw people in. It is our loving and caring network of connections with one another. Jesus said that the world should know us by our love for one another (Jn 13:35). This is the good news for our world: God intends none of us to be alone, but to be part of a loving family.

This fishing image suggests the basic tasks of family ministry. First, everyone in the community must be woven into family relationships, even those who are isolated and without family as the world sees family. Second, we have to mend the frays and tears in the net. We have to work on relationships in the community, young and old, keeping the connections strong and repairing damage when it happens. Finally, we are not satisfied simply to display a strong and well-woven net; it is meant to be used for fishing. The purpose of our net-working is not simply to satisfy ourselves that we have a good net; it is to be tossed into the sea to draw in others. We have to toss our relationships as God’s people into the sea, taking them into a society where people feel like they are swimming alone in deep waters and need to be folded in.

This image brings us full circle and shows that calling away from and calling into families are only different facets of the same calling. We are called to use ourselves and our relationships with others—including and especially our families—to serve God and to point to God’s kingdom. In that kingdom, everyone has a place in the family. The role of the church is to equip the saints for their roles in the body of Christ. Sometimes that is calling them forth into new relationships, when their response to Christ has demanded that they put hands to the plow and not look back (Lk 9:62). Other times, the church helps persons live more faithfully and lovingly within the families in which they find themselves. One of the functions of our family lives is to serve a world desperate for the good news that in Christ, we are never alone.

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The Good News: The Faithful Will Have Family

Jesus uses his own family relationships as illustration that following him will lead to a whole new family for the faithful. Matthew 12:46-50 describes the incident when Jesus’ mother and brothers go to speak with him. When told that his mother and brothers are outside, “Jesus replied, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’”

Many have interpreted this passage to mean that family bonds are irrelevant in God’s kingdom (e.g., B. Waters, 2007). Is that the message? If so, then why did Jesus identify his disciples as his family? Certainly, this passage creates sympathy in a mother’s heart for Mary and her sons, for it sounds as though Jesus was saying, “That woman is not my mother and they are not my brothers—these followers and believers are my real family.” Jesus was not denying his relationship with his mother and brothers, however; he was changing the definition of family. When we look at John 19, it is clear that Jesus recognized his mother as his mother (Jn 19:26-27). His mother was with him to the very end of his life. Although she was his biological mother, the more significant tie between them was Mary’s faith, demonstrated before Jesus was even born.

During another of Jesus’ teaching sessions, a woman in the crowd apparently is overcome with adoration and yells, essentially, “Bless your mother!” Jesus responds, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” (Lk 11:27-28). As he underscored repeatedly, family loyalty comes second to our loyalty and obedience to God. The physical fact of motherhood gave Jesus’ mother no special status. According to Jesus, our status is defined by our volitional loyalties and actions, not by biological and cultural connections over which we have little control. Jesus was not doing away with family loyalty but transforming its meaning and putting it in its rightful place.

Mary was indeed a blessed woman. The blessing was based not on her being a biological vessel for birthing Jesus but rather on her receiving the angelic visitation of Gabriel because of her faith. When Gabriel told her that she would conceive as a virgin, she did not question how God could do this;

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rather, she asked how God would do this (Lk 1:34). Just before Gabriel’s visit to Mary, Zechariah had also questioned the angel who announced that his old wife, Elizabeth, would bear a son to be named John. But Zechariah had asked how he could know that the angel was speaking the truth. Even though he had been praying for a child for years, he doubted what God could really do, even though he was a priest who knew well the story of Isaac’s birth to Abraham and Sarah in their old age. Mary, on the other hand, was a young peasant woman confronted with news that something would happen to her that had never happened to anyone before, and she believed.

It was Mary’s faith that was the foundation for her blessing, as Elizabeth recognized. As we see in Luke, Elizabeth’s blessing when she greets Mary begins with, “Blessed are you among women.” She goes on, “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” (Lk 1:42, 45). As punishment for his lack of faith, God had struck Zechariah speechless, able only to gesture what he had heard, until the birth of John (Lk 1:20-22). Mary, by contrast, sings her joyous faith, beginning with the words, “My soul magnifies the Lord” (Lk 1:46). Therefore, years later, when her grown son responds to the woman in the crowd who cried, “Bless your mother!” by saying that the blessing comes instead to those who hear and obey the word of God (Lk 11:27-28), he is not excluding Mary. Instead, he is naming the reason she is blessed—not because of her biological relationship to him but because of her faithful response to God (see Banner, 1999; D. E. Garland, 2011).

Jesus has here defined families by a common purpose: to live out the will of the Father. Bill Leonard (1996) equates the terms church and new family. The church is our new family, bound together not by the biology of blood and flesh but by faith in Jesus Christ and his blood shed and body broken for us. It is faith in Jesus Christ that is the “proof of kinship” in God’s new family.

The significance of this teaching can only be appreciated by knowing how central the kin-defined family was for Jesus’ hearers. Jesus’ sayings about the family were hard for his followers to hear because of the tremendous loyalty and significance families had in their culture. Although love and loyalty still characterize many families today, there is an element of choice in the forming and dissolution of families in our culture that was

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not present in Jesus’ day. The radical nature of his teaching, therefore, has lost some of its sharpness for us.

One more time, Jesus’ relationship with his mother provides the canvas for portraying the good news about family for the faithful.

The Scene at the Cross

John 19:25-27 records that Mary stood at the foot of the cross with the other women, watching her oldest son die. She had presumably followed behind and watched Jesus, bleeding from the untreated wounds of the scourging, struggling and falling under the weight of the crossbeam he was forced to drag to Golgotha. She watched as they beat him, as they stripped him, and as they drove the spikes into his hands and lifted him up on the cross. Every parent can imagine the helplessness and despair that must have enveloped her. She loyally stood there all day. Beside her, perhaps offering support, was Jesus’ beloved disciple. In the Gospel of John, as the end looms, Jesus looks at Mary and says, “Woman, here is your son.” And to the disciple he says, “Here is your mother.” And, the writer says, from that hour the disciple took Mary into his own home (Jn 19:27). When Jesus spoke these words, he knew that “all was now finished” (Jn 19:28).

Jesus’ last action was arranging for family ties between these two people who were his beloveds. He said only two other things after speaking to the disciple and his mother—“I’m thirsty” and “It is finished.” Throughout this passage, the writer states that events happened “in order to fulfill the scripture” (e.g, Jn 19:24, 28, 36). The events of the crucifixion, including this family-making scene, each fulfilled the intention of God recorded in Scripture. This turning of disciple and Mary to one another was part of the grand plan.

Jesus’ words from the cross sound like a marriage ceremony—“I now pronounce you mother and son.” Perhaps the beloved disciple and Mary would have cared for one another, regardless of Jesus’ words. Nevertheless, the Scripture indicates that there was a transforming power in Jesus’ words: “And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home” (Jn 19:27, italics added). The disciple had evidently not done so before, nor did he wait to check out with the folks back home if it was okay to bring Mary home with him. The words were transformative. There is power in being

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named and recognized as family. We do this today in a marriage ceremony; we adopt one another as family, “for better or for worse.”

My husband and I have dear friends who have two sons the same ages as our own children. Almost three decades ago, when the children were preschoolers, our friends asked David and me if we would be willing to be their sons’ godparents. In our culture, that is a sort of social insurance, a promise to raise these children as our own should some unforeseen tragedy leave them orphans; it is a role often played by aunts and uncles. Our friends each had brothers and sisters, and so we were deeply honored and did not blink before we said yes. In essence, we and our friends said to each other, “Yes, we want to be your family.” And from that moment, my relationship changed with those boys. I no longer treated them as “visitors” in my home. They became mine in a very real sense. I expected them to live by our rules at our house, and once they were older, they felt free to scrounge something to eat in my refrigerator. I feel a strong attachment and love for them. Speaking my commitment, and having our friends speak their commitment and need for us to be family, sparked a transformation of our relationship. Speaking the family relationship had power. Our relationship has lasted even though we moved more than a thousand miles away fifteen years ago, and the children have all grown up and into their thirties. Each of the boys lived with us for short stints as young adults. I still feel entitled to give them unsolicited advice.

Many languages have names for people who are part of the family but are not biological kin. We need such family language in the church. Family bonds need to be spoken even more than the kinship bonds. There is power in being named and recognized—“we are a family.” Naming one another as family is part of making family happen.

This “family” is a different relationship from relating to one’s neighbor, or even from the community of the faithful called the church. Putting Luke’s record of the crucifixion alongside John’s account, we see a contrast between the love of neighbor and the love for family. Love for neighbor does not depend on reciprocity or even mutuality. When Jesus said “Father, forgive them” (Lk 23:34), his love for those who crucified him did not depend on their response. They did not have to respond to him at all for him to love them. We are to love our neighbors, even our enemies, regardless of whether or not our love is reciprocated. Families are different; family love

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is based on mutual commitment. In the Gospel of John, Jesus spoke not only to the beloved disciple, telling him to take care of his mother, but he also spoke to Mary. He gave them to one another. We can be a neighbor with no commitment or even expectation from the other, but we can only be in a family with other people who in return see us as family. Family relationships are covenants between persons. And covenants require commitment on both sides.

Mary was now only secondarily Jesus’ biological mother; she was to be primarily defined as “mother” in a family that now included this new son, her son by faith. In this family, those who followed Jesus were defined as her closest relatives. “Now for those who follow Jesus, the critical blood, the blood that most significantly determines their identity and character, is not the blood of the biological family. It is the blood of the Lamb” (Clapp, 1993, p. 78). Moreover, the church is not just one big family. The church is a community of families, a community that bears witness to the coming reign of God.

The genealogy with which Matthew begins and the final scene at the cross in John serve as bookends to the gospel; they are the beginning and the end of Jesus’ life. From beginning to end, Jesus transformed the ideal of family, just as he transformed water into wine at the wedding. Marriage is a form of adoption: a man and a woman leave their biological families to adopt one another as “one flesh.” Those words from the very beginning of Scripture (Gen 2:24), most likely spoken at the wedding in Cana, found fulfillment at the foot of the cross. The new model of family is not biological kinship but adoption. Sometimes our biological kinfolk desert and betray us. Sometimes our own life journeys take us far from kinfolk, or death separates us. Some Christians have been abandoned by their families because of their decision to follow Christ. The Gospel of John records that the last act of Jesus’ earthly ministry enacted that adoptive model, now not limited to marriage and parenting but available to all who would have mothers and brothers and sisters and children created by bonds of shared faith and commitment.

The role of the church is to follow Christ by ensuring that no one in the family of faith is family-less—that everyone is adopted into family. This is not a second-rate way of being family for one another, a way to take care of strays who somehow missed out when families were being formed, or who

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suffered some loss that left them family-less. Instead, the adoptive family has become the ideal, the model, the witness that there are no limits to God’s ability to create goodness, not even the limits of biology. Even families formed by biological links, when transformed by this good news, become adoptive families, choosing and covenanting with one another by giving themselves to following Christ. A person’s biological birth is no longer enough. There must be a second birth based on one’s relationship with God, and the results are more profoundly influential in shaping a person even than the first birth (Rom 8:15-17; Gal 3:26–4:6).

The Ethiopian Eunuch

The early church encountered the full meaning of Jesus’ radical message as recorded in Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8.[1] Here was a person without family and thus without hope for a future. Because of his physical mutilation, he was not even allowed to participate in worship (Deut 23:1). The very label by which he was known defined him as an excluded one. He was not a person with a limitation, he was the limitation —a “eunuch.” Nevertheless, the good news of Jesus Christ offered him a place in God’s new family. He was now equal. God’s new family is not simply a way to include those who are otherwise unacceptable or unwanted. Jesus’ point was that all persons who put their faith in him are acceptable and wanted in his new family. “According to the gospel, family begins with baptism. . . . Here is a whole new family birthed in the waters of baptism, a family that knows that we are related by hope, not biology, a family that remembers that our true home is not the biological family, but the church” (Erdman, 1995, p. 92).

The beautiful promise in Isaiah 56 resonates through Jesus’ teaching, a promise that even the eunuch who holds fast to the covenant has an everlasting place in God’s family, a place even more secure than that of the father of sons and daughters:

Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”; and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my

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covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. (Is 56:3-5)

Indeed in Christ, the eunuch has not only an everlasting name, but the embodiment of that name in the promise of family in the community of faith.

The Family of God

Jesus’ teaching is the fulfillment of Old Testament messages about the meaning and place of family. The story in Genesis 22 of God’s command to sacrifice Isaac foreshadows Jesus’ teaching that obedience to God must always come first, even before family. The highly troubling account in Ezra 9–10 of Ezra’s restoration of the purity of God’s people by putting away their foreign wives and children speaks powerfully and painfully of our first loyalty to God, above all else. The imagery of family is important in the Bible, but it is imagery that points us to the family composed by God, not by human alliances or biological relationships. Jesus’ hard sayings about family point out that there are times when following the will of God means leaving family behind, as when he called the disciples away from their families. Sometimes it even means severing family ties (see Mt 10:34-37; Lk 11:27-28; 12:51-53; 14:26), which will be replaced by a promised new family in God’s kingdom.

Following the will of God, for some people, may mean living a life of singleness. Our culture, instead of honoring singleness and denigrating marriage as a second-best choice, as did the early church (chap. 3), tends to honor marriage and treat singles as though they are second-class citizens in the church, a population group to be ministered to rather than central and key figures in the community. As Rodney Clapp (1993) has pointed out, however, singleness is important because of the vision it provides to all of us of what it means to truly trust God:

The married Christian ultimately should trust that his or her survival is guaranteed in the resurrection; the single Christian ultimately must trust in the resurrection. The married, after all, can fall back on the

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passage of the family name to children, and on being remembered by children. But singles mount the high wire of faith without the net of children and their memory. If singles live on, it will be because there is a resurrection. And if they are remembered, they will be remembered by the family called church. Christian singles are thus radical witnesses to the resurrection. (p. 101)

Our congregation identifies itself as “the family of God in this place,” which seems to assume that the family Jesus promises us is the entire community of faith; that we are one very enormous intimate family. When someone joins my congregation, the whole congregation recites a pledge that says, in part, “We promise to be the family of God to you in this place,” as though all 300 or so of us are going to be “family.” Nevertheless, a congregation can be and should strive to be a community living in anticipation of God’s kingdom (B. Waters, 2007). Moreover, a congregation serves as a vital context for relationships of family love.

A careful examination of Jesus’ own relationships corrects this assumption that the church is one big family. John 11:5 says that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” This statement is interesting, because we assume Jesus loved every follower equally. There is partiality here, though; Mary, Martha and Lazarus were special to Jesus. The Gospels also reveal that Jesus had an inner circle of disciples, those with whom he was especially close (Mt 26:37; Lk 9:28; Jn 13:23). He called on these persons when he was especially troubled; he loved them with a special love. These people were family for Jesus. When Jesus saw Mary’s weeping over Lazarus’s death, he cried with her (Jn 11:33-35). This account of Jesus’ relationship with Mary, Martha and Lazarus raises the somewhat uncomfortable suggestion that Jesus loved differentially, and so does God.

That theme sounds throughout the Bible, from Esau and Jacob on. Ray Anderson and Dennis Guernsey (1985) wrote that if God loved everyone equally, then God would love no one particularly, which is a scandalous idea. Instead, love has its value in the uniqueness that results from being chosen by the other. The basis for love, then, is not equality or inclusiveness, but rather “being chosen” particularly for a unique relationship with the other.

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Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and he made it clear that we are to minister to the needs of all of God’s children. There is no limit on God’s love, and there is to be no limit on our love. That does not cancel our need for special people in our lives, however—a family of folks who have chosen one another, who support one another and are committed to one another. Neighborly love is universal; it calls us beyond our loyalties and special relationships. It does not replace the family, however. Jesus showed us the importance of both neighborly love and family commitment.

Followers of Christ need special relationships—families—within the larger community of faith, and within the ever-widening circle of neighbors for whom we are to show love. As we discussed previously, this special love was given more meaning in the last words of Christ from the cross.

Implications for the Church

We can draw the following implications for congregational ministry in our culture from Jesus’ life and teaching.

1. The Christian family is one of adoption. From the account of Jesus’ conception and adoption by Joseph into David’s line, to Jesus’ last act from the cross, God provides us with the hope and reality of adoption as a way of forming families when we follow Christ. All followers of Christ belong in a family, and it is the work of Christ’s church to turn this hope into reality.

2. Living faithfully as family is a Christian vocation. The call to live faithfully as family with those we find in our care is just as much a response to the call of God as the response to leave everything behind to take up Jesus’ cross. Living faithfully in this calling is a part of God’s divine purpose, and it often requires commitment and faithfulness in difficult times. The family lives of the faithful are not any easier than the solitary following of those who leave all.

3. Family relationships are not our first loyalty. Our faithfulness to follow Christ comes first, even when it requires the ultimate sacrifice of leaving family to do so.

4. A congregation is a community. A congregation of 1,000 people— or even 300 people—cannot really be family to one another except

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in the sense of extended family. Within that community or extended family, everyone needs to be folded into intimate family relationships, just like those Jesus had with his disciples and closest friends. At the same time, families need to be embedded in these larger communities who support and share in the responsibilities of family care. Jesus’ own childhood family gives ample illustrations of the importance of such a community.

The place of family in the life of every Christian has obvious implications for family ministry. These concepts are in many ways ideas quite foreign to our own culture, yet they form the basis for understanding biblical teachings and narratives about family life and, therefore, need to be understood by all Christians. Exploring this biblical content leads to reflection on what it means for us and for our commitments in the historical moment and cultural place in which we find ourselves. The following, then, may be questions for conversation in the community of faith:

In what ways do we experience Christ’s call to leave old responsibilities and constraints behind and to follow him into a life that brings us new family relationships? In what ways do family relationships and community relationships offer a net for fishing in our world? Are there frays and tears to be mended? Into what deep waters do we need to be throwing our relationships, drawing others into the boat? How are we providing experiences for one another that point to God’s love and care for us? How can we help every child of God learn in the community of faith what it means to be tenderly cared for and nurtured and adopted as the chosen heir? How do our family relationships portray to our world who God is? How can we undergird one another’s faithful covenant living?

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