WE ARE FAMILY – Part 2

“If someone says, 'I love God,' but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don't love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see?”  (1 John 4:20 NLT)

We need to reflect on the implications of this image [of family] for our experiences of church. We frequently talk of churches and act as though they were branches of an organization, rather than as extended families. We often reduce the lists of qualities in passages like Galatians 5:22 and Colossians 3:12-14 to a purely individual affair. We lift ourselves out of our family context and speak about confidence and generosity etc. in some vague and abstract sense, rather than as a call to love deeply from the heart those people with whom we church. Without concrete long-term evidence of such love for each other our “Christian” communities are a [sham] (John 13:34-35).

-- Mark Strom in “The Symphony of Scripture: Making Sense of the Bible’s Many Themes”

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