The Missional Life

One of the persistent themes for millennials tends to be relational isolation or lack of relational connection. Yes we have Facebook, twitter, and countless youtubes, instagram, skype, texting, and more, yet the basic problem remains. Are we known and do we know others really?

When you look at depression rates, a bad economy (high unemployment for millennials), gaming addiction, and more you realize that at our core our generation is a bit relationally isolated. Obviously this is not true for everyone, but I find very few millennials even the ones with old friendships are relationally satisfied.

In any case if you are still reading, I assume you can identify with at least some of these dynamics. To be loved and to know you are loved are one of the most basic human desires.

So if this is true, why don’t we find a lot of this sort of thing within the church? It is there, but it is not a universal experience.

I want to give you at least one way to look at, and that’s around the language of family and its disuse within the church. Consider the words of Jesus:

 “For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12:50)

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (John 13:34)

“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.” (John 15:15-17)

We know we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, where we have trouble is the application. Too often we love are neighbors in the abstract instead of loving our neighbors actually. Also we are not very intentional about the loving our neighbor aspect of faith. Loving God we think about a bit more fully (read the bible more, pray more, etc.), but loving our neighbor (umm…). Too often, we functionally love our neighbor by not confronting them with things that bug us about them.

So to open us up a bit more, let’s consider the language of family. Brothers, sisters, parents, and children. That’s the language the New Testament most often uses in relation to the church. Think about it this way, if you want to love your neighbor more fully think about loving them as a close relational brother or a close relational sister.

Something about the word family reorients our focus towards the family of God. Especially when we think of specific Christians not just an abstract concept. What would it mean to build the sorts of ties that put you in a more familial posture?

Obviously this is a bit of an imperfect analogy, but not by much or at least not as much as we might think. Our tendency when confronted with more concrete ideas is to explain them away. Instead of trying to wrestle with them on the terms presented.

So, here’s an exercise. Think about one or two people that you might want to build a more brotherly or sisterly relationship with. What might it look like to love them well?

This is not an easy process, it actually takes a long time and there is a fair amount of trial and error on how to do this, but unless there is some explicit intentionality it may very well not happen at all. You say but my neighbor is hard to love? They are too different?

Well put it this way. We don’t choose our biological family. We don’t choose our local community as much as we might think either. So try and work on your own heart first and trust God to make up the difference when it comes to trying to really love our neighbor well.

We are no longer simply friends or acquaintances but we are part of a family and a kingdom. It’s time we took that element of our life of faith a bit more seriously than we do.