Christians have always been very pro-family. In fact, historically and in some parts of the world, Christianity and traditional family values are seen as much the same thing.
This makes the actual content of the Gospels and what Jesus says about family very surprising—even shocking. It’s not as if Jesus is against marriage and family, but his teaching about how to relate to our families brings a radical challenge to our total and unquestioned devotion to our families and to our practice of putting our families first, above all else. CCL Director Tony Payne chats to Simon Flinders, Archdeacon to the Archbishop of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, about Jesus’ radical new perspective on family life.
Links referred to:
- The 2026 Priscilla & Aquila Centre Annual Conference (Mon 2 Feb 2026). Simon Flinders will be delivering the plenary addresses on the topic of “Radical kinship: Men and women in God’s family”. Register and find out more.
- Support the work of the Centre.
Runtime: 36:25 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:05] Tony Payne: I guess you could say that Christians have always been very pro-family. In fact, historically and in some parts of the world, Christianity and traditional family values are seen, really, as much the same thing—which makes the actual content of the Gospels and what Jesus says about family very surprising—in fact, very shocking is probably a better word. It’s not as if Jesus is against marriage and family, but his teaching about how to relate to our families brings a radical challenge to our total and unquestioned devotion to our families and to putting our families first, above all else. This radical new perspective on family life that Jesus brings—that’s our topic on this week’s episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast.
[Music]
[00:01:09] Tony Payne: Well, hello again. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast. I’m Tony Payne, broadcasting—well, podcasting, I suppose I should say, here from Moore College as always. And joining me today on this episode of our podcast is Simon Flinders. Simon, great to have you with us. Tell us a little bit about who you are.
[00:01:27] Simon Flinders: Thanks, Tony. Good to be with you and your listeners. I’m married to Tamara. We have three daughters: Gemma, Lily and Charlotte. We live in Chatswood on Sydney’s leafy North Shore, where we go to church. And I have been an Anglican minister in the Diocese of Sydney for 25 years now. But in the last few years, I’ve begun working for the Archbishop of Sydney as his Chief of Staff.
[00:01:50] Tony Payne: Right, so you help to run the show, so to speak.
[00:01:53] Simon Flinders: Something like that.
[00:01:53] Tony Payne: Something like that.
[00:01:54] Simon Flinders: Help to make sure he runs the show as well as possible. Yeah.
[00:01:56] Tony Payne: Excellent. And we’re particularly speaking with you today—as interesting as that might be to dig into the Archbishop’s schedule and find out all the inside secrets, what we really want to speak about is the talks that you are due to give next February—February 2nd is the Priscilla & Aquila Conference here at Moore College.
“Kinship”
[00:02:12] Tony Payne: You’re the keynote speaker this year, and your theme—your title—struck me as a really interesting one, and thought it would make a great conversation about the nature of family and kinship and household, and how we live as Christians in our families and what all that means—’cause the title of your talk is “Radical kinship: Men and women in God’s family”. And perhaps we could start by just “radical kinship”. What’s that? What do you mean kinship?
[00:02:37] Simon Flinders: Yeah, thanks, Tony. Really looking forward to the conference next year. And I look forward to people’s interaction with these ideas. P&A is a conference for thinking about Complementarianism in lots of ways, and what I want to do in this conference is take a step back, in some ways, to thinking about the relationships of men and women in Christian communities, in our churches, in the most sort of basic sense. What does it mean for us to be brothers and sisters? And how does the Bible arrive at that kind of language for talking about the relationships between Christian people?
[00:03:14] So “kinship”: I guess we’re using in the sense of who we belong to—you know, I guess as a surrogate for the word “family”.
[00:03:23] Simon Flinders: Although noticing, I suppose, that “family” is not a word the Bible itself uses very much. So we’re thinking about who we belong to in our families.
[00:03:31] Tony Payne: Who we’re related to.
[00:03:32] Simon Flinders: We’re related to, but not just kind of, I guess, in the way we normally think about that. I guess the word “family” in our cultural context is understood in a particular way. Whereas, I guess a word like “kinship” can invite us out of thinking in that category and thinking about who we belong to in Christ and not just who we belong to by blood.
“Radical”
[00:03:52] Tony Payne: Sure. But there’s this other word, “radical”, in the title of your talks that you’re going to be giving. In what sense “radical”? How does the gospel call us to a kind of radical kinship?
[00:04:02] Tony Payne: What are you getting at there?
[00:04:03] Simon Flinders: Yeah. I think the word “radical” strikes me as a great word for thinking about the kinds of things Jesus does and says in relation to family.
[00:04:14] Tony Payne: Right.
[00:04:15] Simon Flinders: And I think it’s radical—Jesus’ kind of teaching about family, his own interactions with his human family and others, I think, poses a very radical challenge to the way that our culture, and even our Christian culture, often thinks about who we belong to and what that means for our lives. So as I think about the things Jesus teaches us about and the way they rub up against the things we believe and accept in our current cultural moment in our country, at least, it’s hard for me to think of a topic on which he’s more radical, actually.
Family our cultural values vs the Bible
[00:04:47] Tony Payne: What sort of ideas—when you say that the way we tend to think about family now, you’ve got something in mind there. What do you mean “how we tend to think about family now”? Before we think about how Jesus really challenges it in some surprising and shocking ways.
[00:05:01] Tony Payne: What is our cultural value with respect to family, do you think?
[00:05:04] Simon Flinders: Yes, I definitely think helpful to describe it as a cultural value, because I don’t think this is true across all cultures. I think the way different cultures think about family are actually very different. So I guess I’m going to answer your question by thinking about the culture of the country and the city that I live in, where it seems to me that people have a very transcendent kind of loyalty to their nuclear family in particular. That loyalty often looks like really investing in each other’s happiness and wellbeing. It seems to me that in our culture, we tend to sort of think about our priorities in a way that elevates family usually to the top of the tree, or somewhere very near it.
[00:05:49] Tony Payne: If you haven’t got family, what have you got? It’s all about the family. We hear that expression a lot. And we see it also just in people’s behaviour, just how much they do invest in their families, and the degree to which my investment in my children and them having absolutely every opportunity, and devoting enormous time and resources to our children expresses that as well—almost in a totalising sense—almost, like you say, a transcendent sense. This is the meaning of my life. My family is the meaning of my life.
[00:06:18] Simon Flinders: Yes. Even the way we tend to think about the meaning of our life after death in our culture, I think, has this sense in which I’m leaving a legacy for my children, or those who come after me and my family. Even in the way we think about what our life was about, when we get to the end, I think we tend to think about family as the highest priority.
[00:06:38] Tony Payne: Now, this is interesting, because we would normally say that Christians—Christians have a reputation for being pro-family—for being family people, for being very big on the family and standing up for family values and all these kind of family-oriented things. And you’d say that’s certainly true in the Bible—that we’d say the Bible’s very pro-family, right?
[00:06:57] Tony Payne: You’re not saying it’s not.
[00:06:58] Simon Flinders: No, I’m saying that the Bible is definitely pro-family. It’s pro-marriage, it’s pro-godly parenting. It’s pro- the care of parents and grandparents as well, I think, which is something maybe some other cultures do better than we do.
[00:07:14] Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:07:14] Simon Flinders: So the Bible is definitely pro-family, in that sense. And I think even in the teaching of Jesus, we hear echoes of those really positive affirmations of the importance of those relationships—the importance of God’s word for shaping those relationships. So absolutely.
[00:07:31] But I think Jesus says some other things about family as well, which are much more uncomfortable for us, and that will be kind of some of what I want to dig into in the talks of the people.
Jesus’ uncomfortable words and deeds
[00:07:40] Tony Payne: Give us a sample. What sort of uncomfortable things did Jesus say?
[00:07:44] Simon Flinders: I guess I’d want to start by saying there are some uncomfortable things Jesus does in relation to his own family. So one of the things that I think is fascinating in the Gospels is just reflecting on Jesus’ relationship with his own siblings and his own parents—especially his mother, which we get a bit of an insight into in the Gospels. The way he speaks about them and to them, I think, can be quite confronting for us. You know, there’s famously that moment where people tell Jesus that his mother and siblings have come to find him and they’re concerned for him, and they want to see him and make sure he is all right. And Jesus responds by kind of raising questions about “Who are my brothers and sisters?” And says things like, “Well, those who are in my family are those who listen to and accept the word of God.” So there are these kind of moments where Jesus’ own interaction with his family seems unconventional or a little bit troubling to us—like he’s treating his family in ways that we wouldn’t want to treat ours.
[00:08:39] So there’s what Jesus does, I guess, in the first place. But lots of things Jesus says about families as well, that are, I think, quite stimulating and provoking. He talks about the way that loyalty to his kingdom will produce divisions in families. He suggests that accepting and recognising his lordship in your life is going to have implications for the priority that you give to your human family. He even suggests, I think, that families can be an impediment to following after Christ or entering his kingdom. So these sorts of things that Jesus says, I think, are arresting in our cultural moment.
[00:09:19] Tony Payne: Very much. I was giving a talk to a dads and daughters, or dads and Father’s Day kind of thing, and I decided I’d just raise that passage in Luke’s Gospel where Jesus talks about hating your mother, father—hating your family, if you’re going to be my disciple. Let’s go to the most extreme one. And it provoked a really interesting conversation in the room, because it is uncomfortable. It is shocking. What does it mean? I love my kids. What do you mean, “hate my kids”? What on earth could that mean?
[00:09:46] He does say some very shocking things about the possibility that by entering his kingdom, there is a different family—a different father, perhaps, that we now have that relativises our transcendent loyalty to this family or something like that.
[00:10:02] Simon Flinders: Yes, I think “relativises” is a really good word, Tony. It’s not that he so diminishes our family affections or responsibilities as to become meaningless in the kingdom. But they’re certainly relativised, aren’t they? They’re relativised chiefly by Jesus’ own lordship.
[00:10:18] I think what’s going on as you read the Gospels is that Jesus is calling people to a loyalty to him that will transcend all other loyalties. And part of what we learn in the Gospels, and which, of course, the writers of the New Testament flesh out, is that following Jesus as Lord means embracing Jesus’ own Father as our father. And so, that’s right: we’re introduced into a new family that has a claim on our lives that transcends the claim that the families we were born into have in Christ.
Fathers and family
[00:10:47] Tony Payne: I wonder if that’s also connected with the fact that in the Bible—and I’ve written about this in the past and gone on about this in the past—that in the Bible, the father has a place in defining the identity of the family—in a way that is less the case for us in our culture. It was a more patrilineal kind of culture. In the Old Testament, if you wanted to say, “This was my family”, you would say, “This is my father’s house.” “I’m going back to my father’s house”, is the way you would say, “I’m going back to my family.” And so, whose father you were, in a sense, kind of defined the relationships. That’s the people you hung with and related to both immediately—your immediate blood relations—but also more extended. And that house, the father’s house, became a broader thing that included other people who were drawn into the orbit of that household: servants and slaves and foreigners, and all sorts of people who would be welcome into this house and be part of this house that owed its generation—came from and belonged to, in some way, identified with this father.
[00:11:49] Tony Payne: And so, it’s striking, then, when Jesus is in the temple as a 12-year-old and his parents go off without even—that whole incident unfolds where they’re indignant and “What are you doing” and “Why? Where were you?” “I was in my Father’s house.” “Where did you expect me to be?” And right from the—that early stage in the Gospel, a sense that Jesus has two fathers. Or an earthly father, but his heavenly Father is his father. And where else would he be?
[00:12:12] Simon Flinders: Yeah. And that’s why I think trying to use a word like “kinship” for these talks is important, because what you’ve just described is a picture of thinking about “family” life, if we wanted to use that word, that’s very different to the way we think about family life. You’ve talked about those who are drawn into the orbit, as it were. And the New Testament’s picture of a household is like what you described. And I think the New Testament picture of church is very much like that as well.
Jesus’ challenge
[00:12:38] Tony Payne: We will come to that, because you’re right: when we think of church as family, we often import some of our ideas, and maybe church as household is a better way to think about it. Well, we’ll come back to that. I just want to dig into what this might mean—what Jesus kind of semi shocking kind of—I mean, for example, “Look, I can’t come with you. I need to go and bury my father.” Like, is there a greater obligation you can imagine in our family now or in the ancient world—to go and honour and bury your own father? And he says, “No, forget about that. Let the dead bury their dead. You come and follow me.” There’s a shocking degree of that kind of challenge.
[00:13:12] Tony Payne: Well, how do you think this challenges our own attitudes, our own contemporary attitudes, to family? Before we get onto talking about church. How does that challenge us? And so, I certainly tend to think of the supreme loyalty being owed to my kids and my wife and my family, and there’s a sort of a primacy there. And yet this, the word we used: “relativised”, It does change it.
[00:13:31] Simon Flinders: Yeah, absolutely. I guess that passage you just referred to in Luke 9, where Jesus talks about letting the dead bury their own dead is—”shocking” is a good word. Jesus is saying some things about what it means to follow him, which has a huge implication for the kinds of priority we would give to things that we would normally consider to be basic kind of family responsibilities. That will play out, I guess, in what our love for our family members looks like.
[00:14:02] One of the things I’ll probably share in my talks is that I was preaching on Matthew 10 at the time, my first daughter was born. And—
[00:14:10] Tony Payne: We share an eldest daughter named Gemma.
[00:14:12] Simon Flinders: Yeah, we do! That’s right. So this is when my Gemma was born.
[00:14:15] Tony Payne: When was your Gemma born?
[00:14:16] Simon Flinders: Uh, she was born in 2005.
[00:14:18] Tony Payne: Oh, right.
[00:14:18] Simon Flinders: So she’s a little younger than your Gemma.
[00:14:20] Tony Payne: Yeah, my Gemma was born in—well, I won’t say. A little earlier than that.
[00:14:23] Simon Flinders: Fair enough. Protecting the non-present.
[00:14:26] Tony Payne: Exactly.
[00:14:26] Simon Flinders: Yeah. And very struck by the sorts of things Jesus was saying in the Gospels—in Matthew 10 in particular at that time. And it really struck me at that moment in my life that when my heart was filled with this new surge of love and affection for a child that I was meeting for the first time in the world, that what Jesus called me to was certainly to love her, but never to love her more than I loved him. And that thought landed on me in that moment in my life in a very profound way, and I’ve thought and prayed about that a lot since, I guess.
[00:15:02] What does it look like for me to love my daughters generously as a father? But what does it also mean for me to love them in a way that makes it clear to them that they don’t come first to me—that I love the Lord Jesus, and I love my Father in heaven in a way that outstrips my love for them, because, actually, to love them well in the Kingdom of Christ is to teach them that—is to show them that Christ deserves a higher loyalty than our own families, and that God is a Father greater than any father I could ever be. So I’ve wanted my daughters to learn that, and I’ve tried to reflect on what it looks like to love them in that relativised way you’re talking about.
[00:15:42] Tony Payne: It’s almost like it reorders and kind of reconfigures our love. And gives in light of the greatest love, which is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, ‘cause he’s the greatest good. He’s my greatest good. He’s my end. His glory. And presence with him and life with him is the purpose and end of my life. And it’s the purpose and end of my daughter’s life. In God’s kindness. And so, that greatest of all goods that draws our love and shapes every other love has to shape our love for our daughters and our wives and our children and for everybody. It’s a reordering of what we think we are loving this person towards. Are we just loving them towards their own flourishing and happiness and wellbeing considered independently, which is just a definition of sin? That’s just me loving myself, wanting the best for me. This wonderful new life is kind of part of me and mine.
[00:16:37] And is it going to just be an expression of an inward-looking, promoting our own flourishing and wellbeing and health and success at all costs? Or is it that my good and her good, and everything I want for her and for me, first of all, lies in loving God and who he is, and through and from that loving everything else in his world—appropriately?
[00:16:56] Simon Flinders: That’s right. And even, I think, in our marriages, that’s a significant shift in thinking, isn’t it? That the Scriptures urge us to make—I think you see the seeds of that right back in Genesis 2: that the man and the woman are not just made for each other, but for the service of God’s purposes in the world together. A point that, I guess, Christopher Ash so helpfully reminded us of in his writings on marriage, and that it’s so important to Christian thinking about marriage, even from the outset. God’s creatures were made to love and serve him, and the human relationships that we enter into, as precious and as important as they are, find their proper context and their proper object in that higher loyalty—that submission to our creator, our following of our Lord Jesus. The love of God our Father.
[00:17:39] At church on Sunday, we were reading Revelation 2, where Jesus writes to the church in Ephesus and calls them back to their first love. And I think that’s what we’re talking about, Tony. We’re talking about the first love that the Lord Jesus calls his people into, which is love for God and love for him. And that ought to shape how we love everyone else.
[00:18:00] Tony Payne: Or it cascades down and orders all our loves, doesn’t it? And in his normal, shocking, parabolic kind of way, Jesus keeps bringing this home all the time. And how our tendency to turn inwards, our tendency to turn in on ourselves and ignore God, can lead to a corrupt love, not just of ourselves, but of our families. In the kind of way we started talking about them, when we opened our conversation, to make the family so that they’re the transcendent kind of good, the ultimate good that we live for, is a perversion, in a way.
[00:18:31] I remember Philip Jensen once preaching a series. I can’t remember anything in the series except the title, the memorable title. The title was “The Family and Other False Gods”. And it can be that.
[00:18:41] Simon Flinders: Yes, absolutely. And there’s a—I mean, again, I think it’s not like Jesus has completely innovated here. I think the roots of these principles are in the Old Testament Scripture as well. I think it’s Deuteronomy 13—correct me if I’ve got that wrong, but—where the Old Testament law encouraged Old Testament Israelites to stone their family members if they led them into idolatry, right? So absolutely what you’re saying is true: even from the Old Testament law, anything including our families that lead us away from the worship of the one true God is to be shunned and rejected in the most severe way.
[00:19:15] Tony Payne: And in the positive sense, the family life is to be built around talking about the worship of the one Lord, in Deuteronomy 6, with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. That one Lord; the Lord is one. And you talk about this with your children: you talk about with them on the way, and you talk about it with them on your going out and you’re coming in and all this kind of stuff. It’s to be at the centre of family life.
[00:19:34] Simon Flinders: Yeah. And it shapes your ambitions for your families. Not only do I want to love my daughters and my wife in a way that reflects my higher love for Christ, but I want them to love Christ more than they love me. And so, that’s shaped my prayers for my daughters as well as I think about that, you know, I want them to love me, but what I want for them more than anything else is that they will grow up knowing and loving God their Father and Christ, their Lord and Saviour.
[Music]
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[00:20:29] Karen Beilharz: Every year, the Priscilla & Aquila Centre, a Centre of Moore Theological College, holds a conference that focuses on the application end of Complementarianism in order to encourage women in ministry, and in order to think more seriously and creatively about how men and women can work better together in ministry.
[00:20:48] In 2026, plenary speaker Simon Flinders will be exploring the concept of the church as the family of God. What can we learn from Jesus’ teaching about family, as well as other familial language in the Bible? And how do we apply this as siblings within God’s family? Find out more at the Priscilla & Aquila Centre Annual Conference on Monday, 2nd of February, 2026, held at Moore College.
[00:21:12] To view the program and to register, visit the Priscilla & Aquila website: paa.moore.edu.au. That’s m-o-o-r-e.edu.au. That’s paa.moore.edu.au.
[00:21:26] Tony Payne: And now, let’s get back to our program.
Church as family
[00:21:28] Tony Payne: Now, God being our Father; us being coheirs with Christ. Sons of God. Adopted sons of God. Creates a house, a relation, a family. We’re going to talk about what that kinship with the other people in God’s house who have God as their Father. It creates those relationships. A different kind of—a new kind of relation, a new kind of kinship. And I want to move on and talk about that now. I guess it’s talking about what does it mean? That in a sense, our church—we talk about church being a family. I’m part of this church family. We use that language a lot. But how does all this that we’re talking about—having a new father—relate to church being some kind of house or household or kinship?
[00:22:10] Simon Flinders: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s really important for those things to be connected—for us to think about church as family—Christian relationships as family relationships—because God is our Father. It’s important we don’t abstract our sibling relationships from that common belonging to God as Father. That seems really important theologically to me.
[00:22:32] Our adoption as children into God’s family is a fundamental building block of the way the New Testament thinks about who we are as Christians, and therefore, as Christians with one another. So I think that’s crucial.
[00:22:45] I guess Christians as family is a concept that’s bigger than our local churches. I think it’s important to say that as well—that we belong to all those who call God their Father. And so, this says something about Christian fellowship that transcends our local church experience—the church to which we particularly belong. This is why you can fly across the world and go on holidays, and go to church somewhere else, and find Christian siblings, and have a kind of a fellowship with them that’s unique and rich. That too is a product of our common Father.
[00:23:16] But I guess in our local churches, we give particular expression to the privilege of being siblings with one another in the Lord. And I think that has all sorts of implications for how we think about belonging to each other and our obligations and responsibilities to one another.
Metaphors vs reality
[00:23:33] Tony Payne: Yeah, there are number of ways the New Testament talks about the gathering—a number of metaphors, I guess you’d say. And they’re corporate-type metaphors, like body. Parts of a body drawn together under the one head or in the one head. What else is there? Temple. One building with lots of stones being built together. Where does “household”—the idea of household—fit into that? Do you think? Is it another one of the metaphors? Is it different from that?
[00:24:00] Simon Flinders: Yeah. I think the conviction that I’ve arrived at, Tony, and not everybody will share this conclusion, but is that our belonging to one another as Christian family is not metaphorical in the way those other things like temple, body are metaphors in the New Testament. I think to belong to one another as siblings could only be metaphorical if to belong to God as Father was metaphorical, and I don’t think that’s a metaphor.
[00:24:24] Simon Flinders: You know, God really is our Father. We really are adopted into his family. God’s fatherhood is not an idea drawn from our human families by which we can understand who he is to us. He is our Father. Our human family is a derivative of him, not the other way around. So I think in the same way, our relationship to one another as siblings is real, not metaphorical. I think that’s an important distinction to make. Yeah. Does that make any sense?
[00:24:54] Tony Payne: It does. I mean, metaphor is one of those things that you know it when you see it, and we all know what a metaphor is, and we use metaphors all the time. But as soon as you try and explain metaphor or account for metaphor theoretically, it all of a sudden gets really, really, really complicated. Because there’s a sense in which all language is metaphorical. In that if I say the syllables “father”, that’s clearly not a father; it’s a set of syllables. So it’s different from the thing that is a father, but it refers to that father. So in one kind of, you know, really big sense, language is metaphorical.
[00:25:25] Simon Flinders: You’re taking me back to my English degree at university.
[00:25:27] Tony Payne: That’s right! Exactly. We’re going to get lost in, in semiotics and all kinds of linguistics in a second.
[00:25:31] Simon Flinders: Oh, Jacques Derrida just entered the room.
[00:25:34] Tony Payne: I don’t know whether to take that as an insult or a compliment. Um, probably both. But I think I like where you’re going with this, because the normal way we use a metaphor is to say, a metaphor is a way of talking about something by comparing it or talking about it in terms to something that it clearly is not.
[00:25:52] So “my love is a red, red rose”. My love, my—the woman I’m talking about is clearly not a rose in all kinds of ways. But the fact that it isn’t like a rose, but is like a rose is where the power of metaphor comes.
[00:26:04] And in that sense, the church as a body, well, it’s clearly not a body. It’s not a single being consisting of elbows and other things, but it clearly is in another way. And you’d say the same about a temple: it clearly isn’t a temple. It’s not a physical building. But it is in other ways.
[00:26:17] And I think if, what I hear you saying is when we come to think of church as family, it’s not quite metaphorical in that sense. And then you say, “Oh, it is like fatherhood, family and relation, except not at all. But no, actually, it is very much like kinship and father and family. In fact, it is a kinship and a father and a family in a way that we wouldn’t normally say is metaphorical. It’s not as obviously different than in a way that many metaphors, or most metaphors, are. So I like what you’re saying—that we really do have a new Father and therefore, we really do have a new kinship/relationship of brothers and sisters with one another. And that says something profound about the relationship we have with every person we gather with on a Sunday, but also the broader Christian—we would say community or the broader Christian fellowship.
[00:27:04] Fellowship’s another very interesting concept that connects with the—a group of people who have someone or something profoundly in common. In this case, when it’s a fellowship that has a Father in common, we call them a household. Or a family.
[00:27:17] Simon Flinders: Yeah. And I think the reason this is important is because we tend to think about metaphorical languages sort of being poetic and therefore almost sort of fictional. You know, whereas, I think it’s so important for us to understand that there’s no fiction to this. There’s a kind of fiction to saying that church is a body: it’s like a body in these ways, but there’s a very real sense in which it’s not, like you’re just saying.
[00:27:39] I don’t think that’s true of our kinship—of our belonging to God and his people. My brother I sit next to in the pew at church on a Sunday is not just like a brother; he is my brother, and my relationship to him ought to reflect that reality. There’s no fiction to that, and I think that’s really important.
Dangers
[00:27:59] Tony Payne: Two things I’d like to follow up on this—this this is really interesting. Firstly, while I agree with where you’ve come to that we do really have a different family—a different fatherhood, a different house we belong to, in a sense, there is a danger, isn’t there, in kind of reading what we think of as family. So we think family, we think the nature of what we think of family being and our culture, and kind of reading certain values off that, and saying church should be like that. So I feel like it ought to run the other way, in many ways—that maybe we should read off what we see happening in God’s family, into our family rather than necessarily the other way. But do you want to comment on that?
[00:28:36] Simon Flinders: Yes, I do. I mean, I think that’s why this is so important, because we get ourselves in all sorts of trouble, don’t we, when we run in the other direction. And when we say God is a Father to us like our fathers, when we sort of read in that direction, you know: what is God’s fatherhood like? Well, the Bible must use that language, because it wants us to think about our own fathers, and then think about what God’s like, when that gets us in all sorts of trouble, doesn’t it?
[00:28:58] And I think the same is true: if we think of our Christian community, our church family, as something that we must interpret in the light of our own experiences of our family, we’re going to run aground in all sorts of ways. We’re going to have expectations that are actually different to the kind of expectations the New Testament gives us.
[00:29:15] One of those might be something like intimacy: we have a kind of intimacy in the best versions of our human families, and obviously not everybody experiences intimacy in their human family. But if we bring that expectation with us to church and expect that everybody who’s my brother and sister in church, I’m going to have the kind of very close relationship I have with my siblings at home, we’re going to develop an expectation about the life of our Christian community that can never be met and which will lead to lots of disappointment and possibly disappointment in God. So yeah, I think we’ll have all sorts of problems if we work in that direction. And we must work from the direction of, “Well, what does the Bible say about God and his family?” and working from there back into our families is a more productive line of thought, I think.
[00:29:56] Tony Payne: And it would help us with some of the things we saw earlier, because if we start from God and how he conceives of family and what his purposes are for all of us as humans and for people in fellowship with him, with households, it’s always, as we were saying, not an inward-looking self-focused, preserve-our-wellbeing-and-flourishing-at-all-costs, kind of make ourselves the project of our lives kind of vision. It’s how are we loving and serving those around us? How are we looking outwards to the love of neighbour?
[00:30:26] And so, it can be a problem if we have a family, a family culture in our heads of “Let’s focus inwards. Let’s all care for each other. All that really matters is we care for each other.” Which is a kind of a slightly dysfunctional view of family, we’re saying.
[00:30:40] But if we take that across the church and church becomes, “Let’s all look inwards. Let’s make looking after each other and having our close relationships the ultimate transcendent ideal of what we are”, it becomes that dysfunctional kind of church community. It becomes an inward-looking one, a kind of selfish one, almost.
[00:30:55] Simon Flinders: Yes. And you won’t end up paying attention to the sorts of things that the Bible actually draws our attention to—things like hospitality. What does it mean for a church to be hospitable? That’s kind of household language, right? And yet, it’s precisely that kind of openness to the outsider, the willingness to welcome in those who didn’t start here. And when we read in that direction, that will challenge us to think about what our homes look like as well, won’t it? What does Christian hospitality look like in our homes? That will turn us outside of ourselves again.
[00:31:28] Tony Payne: It kind of connects with that old sort of debate back and forward about the degree to which your church is outward-looking or inward-looking. Is it mission-focused or more family focused? And in the end, they’re kind of false dichotomies, aren’t they?
[00:31:41] The kind of family or household we are as the church is one that looks around us to the world and seeks to reach out with the gospel and make disciples. And the kind of mission team we are is a team of brothers and sisters, who are profoundly committed to one another and to the care and love of one another in Jesus Christ and in God our Father. And so, we kind of seem to flip back and forward between these two things in my experience, in our fellowship and our approach to things, whereas they lie together and they belong together in a quite unique way that we don’t see in any other kind of human family or even human society or mission or purpose-focused team. The church family, the church household, is this unique mix of them in in a—in a completely new way, I think.
[00:32:23] Simon Flinders: Yeah, yeah. There’s probably a whole other podcast there, Tony.
[00:32:26] Tony Payne: There is. There probably is. But we could go there.
Implications
[00:32:28] Tony Payne: Look, let’s finish this one, though, by saying what are the implications, do you think, Simon, for thinking of our church, our congregation, our fellowship, as the household of God? In terms of practically, what does it mean for us, do you think, as Christians?
[00:32:41] Simon Flinders: Yeah. Look, I think there are hundreds and, in many respects, I think the New Testament was written to help us sort of tease out these implications of what it means to belong to our Father and to one another, and to live in the world.
[00:32:57] I think there are some fascinating ways the New Testament does kind of spell out some of these implications. There are some really key passages. I think passages like 1 Timothy 5, you know, which starts with talking about the way we might rebuke an older man, as if he were your father. The way we might treat younger women as if they were your sisters, with absolute purity. So the New Testament sort of draws on household language for helping us think about how we speak to one another in the family, how we relate to one another in the family.
[00:33:28] Purity is an interesting thing, I think, because again, fascinatingly, places like 1 Thessalonians 4 talk about sexual morality in this context. Sexual morality as an expression of brotherly love, Paul says. That’s not a category we tend to think in.
[00:33:42] Tony Payne: Let no one wrong his brother in this.
[00:33:44] Simon Flinders: Yeah. So he’s asking us to consider how we use our bodies in a way that reflects the fact that the people around us in Christ are our siblings. So I think there are lots of really interesting and provocative ways the New Testament presses us to think about that.
[00:34:00] It definitely presses us into thinking about what our affection for each other looks like, how we carry each other’s burdens, how we rejoice with each other when we are rejoicing, and mourn with each other when we mourn. I think there are a thousand directions we could go in.
Conclusion
[00:34:16] Tony Payne: It makes me think that I should come along—well, I am coming along to your talk on February 2nd. And let me encourage those of you who are listening to sign up and come along to the Priscilla & Aquila conference if you can. It’s an all-day conference on Monday, 2nd of February here at Moore College, and it’d be a great opportunity to think this through further as you think it through further with us, Simon.
[00:34:35] But if you have any questions, dear listener, from what we’ve been saying—things that have arisen in your minds as we’ve talked about this issue, perhaps concerns or things that have struck you that make a difference in your own family, or questions you want to ask—please get in touch. We do love to hear from you, and I’ll tell you how to do that in just a moment.
[00:34:50] But in the meantime, Simon, thanks so much for preparing for next February and bringing that to us, and thanks for giving us a sneak peek today.
[00:34:56] Simon Flinders: Great. Thanks for having me.
[Music]
[00:35:12] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website: that’s ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events and articles that we’ve published through the Centre.
[00:35:38] And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make an tax-deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College. We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch. You can email us at [email protected].
[00:36:07] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:36:22] I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
Photo by Christian Harb on Unsplash
