Building the Church as Families

On the mission field, and especially in mission fields in areas of persecution, there are two things of importance the seminar speaker has discovered. They are both connected to family.

First of all, in persecuted countries, association by the locals with the outsider, the Westerner, is enough to get them jailed or killed. They don’t have to be a Christian for this to happen. They are guilty by association. As a result, the Westerner, the missionary, has to be very careful how he handles this matter of associating with the locals and it is highly recommended (there was tons of teaching leading up to this, explaining it and giving it logic and sense) that missionaries do NOT join local churches—even those (especially those) they’ve helped create. Instead, they need to find other ways to provide their needs for worship and fellowship with Christians. They can worship with other expatriates, they can create church with their team and/or they can worship together as a family—mom, dad and kids. The ability to come before the throne of God as a family is vital but many missionaries going overseas don’t have a clue how to do this because they never did it at home.

Secondly, the old missionary style is that the wife stays home with the kids, homeschooling them, running the home, etc., and the husband is the one who goes out and works with the local people. However, in many countries and cultures, and especially in those where persecution is rife, men don’t have access to the women of the local culture and so only men come to Christ. But Christianity is a religion where community is vital and, the speaker argued, you don’t have real community when only one gender is present. You need men and women (and children and varying ages, etc.).

So how does one “fix” this problem? The missionary family does a paradigm shift and, through hospitality in their home, inviting whole families over for a meal or whatever, they relate together as families. In cultures where the wife and kids are kept separate from the husband, where the women are less than nothing, the local family visiting the missionary family begins to see Christianity working out in family and community. They see how a Christian man treats his wife, how a wife is honoured, what healthy interaction is like between husband and wife, parents and children and it draws them into community.

In this style of witnessing, the missionary’s home because almost an open house. People come for dinner and stay to talk—often about spiritual matters. People come when it’s time to put the kids to bed and Dad says, “I’m going to have to help my wife put the kids to bed.” The visitors are shocked because they’ve never heard of such a thing and are even more shocked when they learn the bedtime “ritual” is a time of family worship—coming before the throne of God to worship, share His stories and pray. The visitor watches all this and, simply through the regular rhythm of the missionaries’ lives, is witnessed to.

I know a family in my city that lives like this. It’s simply the way they function as a natural course of events. They’ve developed a ministry to international students who stay a few days with them or who are invited to come have a meal and the family simply carries on its life of prayer and worship with the guests present.

Interestingly, I read the following on an anti-Christian, pro-gay site that focuses on “recovery from Bible abuse”:

Informal home small group study and dialogue may be the most viable replacement for contemporary church type religion, which is based primarily in medieval points of view and methods. Small group home study allows individuals to be open and accepting of each other and themselves and to be non-judgmental and willing to share and learn from each other.

Perhaps we have failed large segments of our North American population by the way we do church.