When the Church Was a Family Quotes

“Long-term interpersonal relationships are the crucible of genuine progress in the Christian life. People who stay also grow. People who leave do not grow. We all know people who are consumed with spiritual wanderlust. But we never get to know them very well because they cannot seem to stay put. They move along from church to church, ever searching for a congregation that will better satisfy their felt needs. Like trees repeatedly transplanted from soil to soil, these spiritual nomads fail to put down roots and seldom experience lasting and fruitful growth in their Christian lives.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“It is rather revealing that we feel the need to offer special programs (and hire special staff) for single adult ministry in our churches. We struggle somehow to fit single adults into a kingdom plan that we have designed primarily for married folks. Perhaps the problem is with how we have framed the plan. Paul's concern in 1 Corinthians 7 was not to ask how singleness fits into God's kingdom plan. Paul was addressing the issue of how marriage fits into His kingdom plan. Single people are already with the program. They are "concerned about the things of the Lord" (v. 32). Married people are the ones who need help sorting out their priorities.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“The “let us meet your needs” approach to marketing the church, which became so popular among baby boomers in the 1980s and 1990s, 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”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“As church-going Americans, we have been socialized to believe that our individual fulfillment and our personal relationship with God are more important than any connection we might have with our fellow human beings, whether in the home or in the church. We have, in a most subtle and insidious way, been conformed to this world.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“They call it radical individualism. What this amounts to is simple enough. We in America have been socialized to believe that our own dreams, goals, and personal fulfillment ought to take precedence over the well-being of any group—our church or our family, for example—to which we belong. The immediate needs of the individual are more important than the long-term health of the group. So we leave and withdraw, rather than stay and grow up, when the going gets rough in the church or in the home.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“Consider the contrast with the church in the West today. The early Christians made tremendous demands of their converts – demands that affected the most important areas of their lives. And people came in droves. But we bend over backwards in our churches to accommodate the radical individualism of people who come to us to find a “personal” Saviour who, we assure them, will meet their every felt need. And the overwhelming tide of secular culture threatens to suffocate what is left of the spiritual life of our churches, as the West becomes less and less Christian.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“God’s intention is not to become the feel-good Father of a myriad of isolated individuals who appropriate the Christian faith as yet another avenue toward personal enlightenment.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“Consider our fixation upon Jesus as personal Savior, so central to the evangelistic strategies of the previous generation. Such privatization of the Christian faith turns out to be little more than a regrettable accommodation to a pagan culture's unbiblical obsession with individual determinism and personal subjective experience. And we are now paying the price for peddling a less-than-holistic gospel. Framing conversion to Christ in solely individualistic terms has left us with little social capital to draw on in our churches as we try to encourage our people to stay in community and grow together as brothers and sisters in Christ.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“The idea of salvation cannot be reduced to a personal relationship with Jesus. God's plan is much more encompassing. God intends for salvation to be a community-creating event.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“Paul's point is not simply that God is now my Father and I am now His son. God, in Jesus' great work of redemption, was not establishing a series of isolated personal relationships with His individual followers. He was creating a family of sons and daughters—siblings—who are now "all one in Christ Jesus" (v. 28). The saving work of Christ therefore has a corporate, as well as an individual, dimension. For Paul, the church is a family.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“Neither Paul nor Jesus can be cited in support of a life-priority list that generates a false dichotomy between commitment to God and commitment to His group in order to stick natural family relations somewhere in between: (1st) God — (2nd) Family — (3rd) Church — (4th) Others For both Jesus and Paul, commitment to God was commitment to God's group. Such an outlook generates a rather different list of priorities, one that more accurately reflects the strong-group perspective of the early Christians: (1st) God's Family — (2nd) My Family — (3rd) Others”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community

“To become a Christian is to enter into a relationship with a new Father, with little or no emphasis on our relationship with a new set of brothers and sisters. In our typical gospel presentations, we introduce God's family only as a sort of utilitarian afterthought—church is there to help us grow in our newfound faith in Christ.”
― Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community