It is the Lord himself who determines who belongs. It is he who sets people in families and it is he who adopts into his family. That means we don’t get to choose who belongs, we don’t get to decide who we are and aren’t going to love and we don’t get to determine who can belong and how it will function. These things belong to Jesus.
A little while ago, a blog post did the rounds insisting that we should stop saying church is a family and that this is unbiblical. A fair few people responded with an upturned eyebrow and a, ‘huh?’ Amongst them, I did here. I am pretty sure church is meant to be family and the Bible very much refers to the church in familial terms.
One of the many ways church is like a family is that you don’t get to choose who belongs to it. I never asked to have the particular brother and sister that I do. I just arrived and found one of them there already and the other one joined us later. I had no say in the matter. Nor, it turns out, do you get to choose the kind of people in your family either. We have some shared traits, but we’re also quite different people too. It’s entirely possible we might never have become friends had we met some other way but we weren’t related (obviously, both my siblings are privileged to know me…)
The church, a bit like that, is called to be a family. We aren’t supposed to have any specific say in who joins us; we ultimately get the people God has decided to make show up. Nor are we called to only reach one particular kind of people. I am on record on this blog – I don’t think homogenous unit principle churches are a great expression of the manifold wisdom of God in the gospel which specifically removes such barriers and distinctions. I do not think it is legitimate for churches to insist that they are only for or will only reach one kind of person. The church is a family, created by God, that doesn’t get to choose who belongs. Only Jesus gets to do that and only he gets to set what criteria exists to join.
One of the beauties of the church is when we are drawn from many different tribes, tongues and nations, and express our differing cultures in the life of the church and yet all belong together as one people. It is manifestly a manifestation of the gospel when we see such different people welcomed into the same family, all belonging together on the same terms and all in community together that is not centred on personalities or preferences or culture or anything other than the saving gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. We don’t get together because we have some shared affinity; we get together because we belong to the same family even though we are drawn from as varied a range of backgrounds as you can imagine.