Tag: Joseph Hellerman

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When the Church Was a Family

What does it really mean to be adopted into the family of Christ? Are we truly brothers and sisters in Christ? How far have we drifted from God’s original intent of His church being a family? Below is an excerpt from the book above.

Around AD 260, a devastating plague afflicted the great city of Alexandria. People were dying right and left, and the church family suffered some devastating losses. The response of the local church to the plague constitutes one of the most powerful examples of Christian brotherhood in the annals of church history.

Here is a section of a letter written by Dionysis, the overseer of the Christian community in the city:

“The most, at all events, of our brethren in their exceeding love and affection for the brotherhood were unsparing of themselves and clave to one another, visiting the sick without a thought as to the danger, assiduously ministering to them, tending them in Christ, and so most gladly departed this life along with them; being infected with the disease from others, drawing upon themselves the sickness from their neighbors, and willingly taking over their pains…In this manner the best at any rate of our brethren departed this life, certain presbyters and deacons and some of the laity…So, too, the bodies of the saints they would take up in their open hands to their bosom, closing their eyes and shutting their mouths, carrying them on their shoulders and laying them out; they would cling to them, embrace them, bathe and adorn them with their burial clothes, and after a little while receive the same services themselves, for those that were left behind were ever following those that went before. But the conduct of the heathen was the exact opposite. Even those who were in the first stages of the disease they thrust away, and fled from their dearest. They would even cast them in the road half-dead, and treat the unburied corpses as vile refuse.”

Dionysius began his description with the use of family words: “brethren,” “the brotherhood.” He closed with a pointed contrast, comparing the behavior of his Alexandrian Christians with behavior among the natural families of pagans in the surrounding community (they “fled from their dearest”).

Dionysius clearly viewed his church community as a well-functioning Mediterranean kinship group, and he was proud that they were living up to their family ideals, even at the cost of their very lives. As Tertullian had said some years earlier:

“The practice of such a special love brands us in the eye of some. “See,” they say, “how they love one another and how ready they are to die for each other.”

Tertullian, Dionysius, and the Alexandrian Christians were only following in the footsteps of their Master: “This is how we have come to know love: He laid down His life for us. We should also lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16).

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Books / Videos

Is This Book For You?

I usually wait until I finish reading a book before I add it to my Resources page, write a commentary and then, if something really touches me, create a blog post about it. I had only finished reading the introduction of the book When the Church Was a Family by Joseph H. Hellerman when I came across a truly honest and inspirational few paragraphs which I want to share.

Is this book for you? The author states that his book is for the Traditional Church Leaders and what he defines as the Emerging Church Visionaries (House Church included). The paragraphs below are addressed to the Traditional Church Leaders.

A good portion of those who serve the institutional church sorely recognize the need for renewal and reform in the way we do ministry. Our programs are tired, our services have often become repetitive and nonengaging, and – most notably – we increasingly struggle to keep people connected with one another in ongoing networks of mutual support and accountability.

We tried for a season to play the consumer game by appealing to our people’s felt needs through programs such as “Three Keys to a Healthy Marriage” and “How to Find Success at Work.” You have surely heard the sermons, and you may very well have preached them yourself. The spiritual bankruptcy of consumer Christianity has become quite clear in retrospect. Indeed, it has completely backfired where the cultivation of community is concerned. The “let us meet your needs” approach to marketing the church, which became so popular among the baby boomers in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has only served further to socialize our people to “prefer a variety of church experiences, rather than getting the most out of all that a single church has to offer.” This hardly encourages lasting Christian community, so we continue to long for genuine renewal.

I trust that those of you who are attempting to revitalize an existing congregation’s values and structures will find this book a promising vision for church as God intended it. But I must caution you in advance to prepare yourself for an acute paradigm shift. A return to the community orientation of early Christianity requires much more than a slight course correction in our weekly programming or the addition of another line item to the church budget.

Contextualizing New Testament social values in our congregation requires us to significantly revise the way that we conceive of church. And there will inevitably be a cost to pay as leaders. For as is generally the case during seasons of renewal, those of us who have the most invested in “church as it is” will inevitably be called upon to sacrifice more than the others in order to liberate our people to experience “church as it was” during the New Testament era.