We aren’t colleagues. We aren’t comrades. We aren’t neighbors. We are family. If we are to understand the nature of the relationship between believers, we don’t need to understand work, politics, or geography. We need to understand family.
The Bible displays this truth in any number of ways. Together we call God “Father,” and if he is Father, then we are sons and daughters. We call Christ our elder brother, making us his siblings as well as one another’s. Young men are told to relate to older men with all the respect of sons to fathers and to older women with all the love of sons to mothers. They are to treat younger women with all the purity of sisters and to relate to widows as if they are their very own mothers. We are to love one another with brotherly affection and to understand that whoever does the will of the Father is a brother, sister, mother.
We see it in another way as well—in the way pastors are to be evaluated for their suitability to the office. If the church is more like a family than a business or nation, then pastors are more like
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