Let me tell you the one line that will send me screaming from any new church I visit.

It’s not: “Would you like to join the property committee?”

Nor is it: “Our organist Ethel has been with the church for eighty years and she’s still going strong!”

It isn’t even: “We went through a kind of split lately but it’s really OK because those people were saying and doing these things and honestly we’re better off without them.” (Well, I might run from this church, too.)

The one line that raises my hackles and sets me on high alert is to all appearances innocuous, innocent, and charming.

It’s this: “Our church is one big family.”

Noooooooooo!

What’s wrong with this? Let me count the ways.

First and most obviously, it’s a lie. Family is given; you’ve got no choice in the matter. Which is one of the reasons it drives us crazy. That’s also the grace of it: you have to accept that these odd ducks are from the same ornithological lineage as your own, and deal with them anyway.

To even resemble a family a church becomes the exact the opposite of what makes family such good training ground for undesired sanctification — its unchosenness. Like it or not, in twenty-first-century post-parish America, a congregation is an affinity group. Which means you’ve already aligned yourself with people who are more like you than your own family members.

Secondly, you don’t join a family by strolling in and sitting down in the living room.

I went to a church once that had obviously been built in the 60s or 70s and it reminded me of a den (of lions?). The altar somehow suggested a TV, the wall behind the altar a fireplace, and the pews, though wooden, gave the impression of being sofas. Plus, the space was wider than it was long and shaped in the round just enough to make visitors feel like they were intruding on Thanksgiving dinner. It was weird.

We liked the pastor well enough and decided to tough it out. A month or two later we talked to him about enrolling our son in the confirmation program. He got a funny look on his face and said, “Can I call you?” Sure enough, he informed us that the conflict in the congregation was so intractable that he had just resigned and was moving to another part of the country.

I don’t know the whole story, but I blame the space. Church is not family, except maybe when it’s having a knock-down, drag-out battle.

Thirdly, you are overinvested in your family. You care disproportionately — because you’re supposed to. The survival of the children literally depends upon it.

But that also means that you have a ton of ego wrapped up in family. You want them to reflect well on you. Anything from an unattractive political opinion to an unattractive piercing takes on extreme personal significance.

Actual family is a good place to work through all the joys and burdens of such a tight bond. Church is not really a good place for it. The chances of it being done successfully are so small, it just redoubles the tendency for forming affinity groups — or going through a nasty schism, which is ecclesiastical language for “divorce.” God has no grandchildren, but church has no stepchildren.

I suppose people praise their churches as families because the tacit alternative is a club or a business or an otherwise impersonal enterprise. I’m not saying church should be without emotion or affection, but what a gift to have that emotion operate on a more reduced scale.

At church, you don’t have to be all up in everyone else’s face. At church, you don’t have to have an opinion on everyone else’s opinion. At church, you can keep enough of a distance to maintain a friendly relationship and take real strength from that sort-of friend’s weekly smile in your direction.

It’s still more than the soulless club or business — or maybe, nowadays, than the fake-friendly club or business that pretends to love you to keep sucking down your dollars. (As in that immortal scene from Idiocracy)

Church is just its own space. It doesn’t have to be justified on any other grounds. It’s neither family nor club nor business nor township nor Twitter. It’s people gathered together for no other reason than that Jesus summoned them there. That is a sufficient good in itself, and an underrated one anymore.

Maybe I’ve overstated the case. Maybe. After all, familial language is invoked in the New Testament (though not always unambiguously). Adoption is the primary metaphor for the new community, but as an adoptive mother I can assure you that the family bonds are just as potent and passionate as with blood relations.

So let me suggest this instead. It’s too much, most of the time, to be brothers and sisters in Christ. The biblical track record of siblings is not so great, after all.

Church is more like extended family: great-nieces and second cousins, the in-laws and the once-removed. The wonderful thing about these farther reaches of your family tree is that they know the kin closest to you, and you know the kin closest to them, and you both are related, but not as much. You and they can listen wisely and well, understandingly and graciously. But you’re not going to end up holding the tense consultations in the garage or undertake screaming matches in the kitchen.

You root for extended family more than for any Joe Schmoe on the street. But you don’t have to indefinitely clear out the spare room for them or change your grocery shopping to accommodate their weird experimental diet.

Extended family, distantly related, a refuge when you need it, and always rooting for you. That’s one church I won’t run away from.

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Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is Associate Pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church, which is blessedly comprised of uncles, aunties, and those relatives you don’t usually talk about. She writes the e-newsletter “Theology & a Recipe” and co-hosts the podcast “Queen of the Sciences: Conversations between a Theologian and Her Dad,” which completely violates the aforementioned proposal of separating church from family. Learn more at her website (and plan to see her speak at the Mockingbird conference in New York in April 2023!).

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