SPEAKER_00 0:07

You're tuned into Everyday Theology in Plain English, making sense of God's truth for your everyday life. Here's your host, Charlie Miller. Hey there, welcome back to Everyday Theology in Plain English. I'm so glad that you're here. Now, if you've been following along, you know that season two has officially wrapped up. We put a bow on it just last week. But I didn't want to just disappear for the whole month of August because there's something that has been very close to my heart lately, and I wanted to take a few of these summer weeks to share it with you. I wrote my next book. It's called Strategically Small: Why a Bigger Church Was Never the Point. And over the next few weeks, I want to sit down here at my kitchen table, no fancy studio setup, and just talk to you about a few of the ideas that's inside it. So that's what these little bonus episodes are for. So here's where I want to start with a word you've probably said a hundred times without ever really hearing it. Family. We say it all the time in church, don't we? Church family, the brothers and sisters in Christ, the family of God. It's on the welcome banner, it's on the new member class. It rolls off the tongue so easily that most of us have stopped hearing what it actually means. For a lot of us, church family has become the kind of phrase that just means these are nice people who care about each other. It's a warm feeling, right? It's a vibe. And that's lovely, that's great, but I want to tell you that when the New Testament calls the church a family, it is not handing out a warm feeling. It's not giving out warm fuzzies, it's making a claim. Listen to how the Apostle Paul says it in Ephesians. He says, So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Members of the household. Now, Paul had a lot of words he could have reached for, right? He could have said audience, he could have said organization or movement or institution, and he said household. A family under one roof, bound together not by preference, not by shared interests, but by adoption into the same home. And here's the thing: this is how God has always worked. When he set out to build a people for himself, he didn't launch a movement. He called one man, Abraham. And he made him a promise about a family. When he formed the nation of Israel, he organized them as 12 tribes, 12 extended families. And when Jesus came, I mean, he could have gathered a crowd and kept it. By the end, he was drawing thousands, but he chose 12. 12 men that he could eat with, that he could argue with, that he could know deeply enough to call by name when they failed. God keeps reaching for the family. Now, here's why this matters for a church, maybe like yours and maybe like mine. A family works best when it's small enough for everyone to have a seat at the table. You can sit in an audience of 2,000. You cannot be in a family of 2,000. Not really. Not in the way where everyone knows your name and knows when you're missing. So the small church has a gift that the big church has to work really hard to recreate. In your church, the family is the whole room. When you don't show up, people notice. When you're hurting, somebody sees it because they are close enough to see it. That's not a weakness, that's the design. And I just want to say to somebody who needs to hear it: family is the highest thing a church can be. It is not a consolation prize. It is not what you call the church that couldn't quite grow into something bigger. When Jesus described his own people, he didn't use the language of organizations, he used the language of family. Brothers, sisters, household, home. Your church is a family. And families don't have to be big to be real, they just have to be faithful. That's the heart of one chapter in the book. There's a lot more where that came from. If any of this stirs something in you, I'd love for you to read the whole thing. Strategically Small is available right now on Amazon in paperback, hardback, ebook, and audiobook versions that I narrate. And I'll drop a link right in the show notes so it's easy for you to find. You can also head over to strategiclysmall.com where there's more information about the book. There's information for walking your small group through it, and there's free tools to help you and your whole church work through it together. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next week.