Church and Family, Not a Competition

One of the major challenges of ministry with families is the misconception that the church and families exist in different spheres of God's Kingdom. The two are often placed in competition for time, energy and resources. A fruitless debate has emerged: does the church exist to serve the family or does the family exist to serve the church? Such needless contradictions exist only because we wrongly view the church and families as separate entities. It is sometimes stated that the family has priority because it was the first institution created by God. But that simply is not true. God created a people for Himself in the same action in which He created the first couple for each other. In the New Testament, Christian homes are viewed as expressions of the church. Pastors are in error when they give their congregational responsibilities priority over their families not because the family is more important than the church, but for the inverse reason. The family must be our first church. To view our family as anything less than the church is to devalue our family. Love, and all the other shared Christian graces, must begin in the home because the Christian home is the foundational expression of the church. Even our unredeemed family members share in those graces as those who are attached to the church for nurture until the day of their new birth. 
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Jackie Johns
Professor of Discipleship and Christian Formation
​Pentecostal Theological Seminary