What do you think of when you hear the expression “Christian family”? It actually has two distinct meanings.

When some people hear “Christian family,” they think of having Christian parents and relatives, going to church together on Sunday mornings, sharing family devotions or service projects and growing up in a Christian home. For these people Christian family refers to Christians in families. For others, it means the church as family, something beyond our natural relatives. And you know which meaning is right. They both are.

But which understanding of family, does Jesus consider most important?

In Mark 3:19b-21; 31-35 we meet members of Jesus’ biological family. His mother and siblings go out to where he is teaching in order to restrain him. People are starting to talk: “This guy’s gone out of his mind, off the deep end.” So Jesus’ biological family comes to him to perform a well-known family function: to get one of their members back in line, one whose behavior is tarnishing the family name. There’s a nail sticking up, and we’ve got to pound it down. Jesus can’t seem to get a grip, so we’ll get a grip on him. Sometimes that family function can turn into family dysfunction. But some measure of providing feedback and boundaries is a legitimate part of being family.

There’s such a crowd around Jesus that his mother and siblings can’t get close. So they send him a message that they want to speak with him. When he gets the message, Jesus says something surprising: “Who are my mother and my brothers? … Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” In response to his biological family, Jesus creates a whole new definition of family. Family is the new community of Jesus’ followers; those who strive to do God’s will are Jesus’ family.

How do you suppose those people around Jesus that day would have reacted when he said his followers are his first family? They may well have been shocked. Kinship ties were at least as important in Jesus’ day as they are now. Blood family was the primary building block of society, the primary group that formed one’s identity, the primary group to which one owed loyalty—for the whole life span.

Are we a little shocked too? Don’t we place a high value on biological family? Is it a little unsettling to hear Jesus place natural relatives in a position of lesser importance than our faith relatives?

Maybe this is just a unique, isolated text. Sorry. There’s more. For example, Jesus and Paul both place marriage in a different perspective from what most of the church does today. Jesus and Paul affirm the sanctity of marriage. But they consider singleness the first choice of an adult Christian lifestyle. And singles often expand family to include nonrelatives. Have you ever heard the church putting that forth to young people, that singleness is to be preferred, that singleness is a great gift to the church? I know some wonderful parents who, from the time their child is small, start praying for that child’s future spouse. The assumption is that that child’s future is marriage. In 24 years of ministry, I’ve never heard of a single Christian parent praying for a son or daughter to choose the New Testament’s preferred lifestyle of singleness.

I know many young people who, when they reach a certain age, if they’re not married, think they must be part of the Left Behind series. But Jesus and Paul teach and model that singleness is a tremendous gift to the church. It’s not only the peace and justice values of the Bible that challenge our culture; it’s the family values, too.

Don’t misunderstand. Jesus is not antibiological family. To Jesus, biological family is the second most important family we have.

We can also consider 2 Timothy 1. Paul speaks to Christians in families. Paul acknowledges the importance of Timothy’s biological grandmother Lois and mother Eunice in the development of Timothy’s faith. In 1 Timothy 5, Paul calls on natural sons and daughters to take care of their own widowed mothers. But later in that same chapter, Paul also speaks to Christians as family. Paul says for a widow who has no children, the church is to be her family and to be as responsible for her as if she was a biological parent. Jesus himself practiced this kind of first family. On the cross, Jesus asked a “beloved disciple” to take care of his mother and make her part of his own family. Christians in families are important but Christians as family is even more important.

For the first few centuries, churches met in homes. In Acts 16, an out-of-town businesswoman named Lydia listens to Paul’s message. She accepts Christ and is baptized. She immediately invites Paul and his companions to stay at her house. By the end of Acts 16 it’s clear that a brand new Christian fellowship has begun meeting in Lydia’s home, and Paul goes there to encourage “the brothers and sisters” (Acts 16:40). In the church, “water is thicker than blood.” The waters of Christian baptism initiate us into Jesus’ new definition of family.

But it is the tiny book of Philemon that shows us the most radical implications of practicing first family. While Paul is under arrest, a slave named Onesimus comes to him. Onesimus is owned by one Philemon, a friend of Paul’s. Paul writes to Philemon on behalf of the slave. He calls on the master to receive the slave back favorably, since, in the Lord, their relationship can no longer be defined merely as master and slave; they have become Christian brothers.

Can you imagine? That family language of equals, “brothers,” applied to a Christian master and slave, that revolutionary leveling of relationships was destined to one day make slavery unacceptable in the church.

American Christianity has provided an enormous amount of speaking and writing and counseling and conferences and film production in order to strengthen the biological Christian family. And much good has come from it. But almost none of it has taken account of where Jesus himself puts the emphasis. Jesus’ focus on the family is not so much Christians in families as it is Christians as family. What would happen if the church started putting as much energy into becoming a non-relative family as it has into being families of relatives? What would such a church look like and feel like?

The truth is we are already doing some of that. At child dedications, when we dedicate ourselves to young children, all of us together pledge our responsibility to that child’s upbringing. We are dedicating ourselves to be that child and her parents’ family. We are also obeying Jesus’ understanding of family when we practice ministries of nursery and mentoring and teaching and mutual aid and shared decision-making.

It’s no accident that the church in the New Testament calls its members “adelphoi”—brothers and sisters. It’s no accident that from their beginnings, the Anabaptists called themselves “brothers and sisters”—even the husbands and wives. In Christ, water is thicker than blood. In Christ, the church has become the primary family unit. In the church, there’s a whole new meaning to mothering and fathering and grandparenting.

And that’s good because there’s a tremendous need around us: We have young adults in our communities who have never been parented. Maybe the parents weren’t there, maybe they were preoccupied. Maybe the parents had never grown up from being kids themselves. We have a tremendous opportunity to practice first family to people who have never really known a family.

In their farewell message, a wise pastoral couple told their congregation: “You have strong families in this church. These strong families can be fortresses or they can be oases. We encourage you not to use your families as an end but as a means, as partners with Christ in creating belonging beyond biology.” Their encouragement applies to all of us. The hospitality of Christians in families is a tremendous partnership in God’s mission of creating Christians as family.

What will our children learn from us about Christian family? Hopefully they will learn that Christians in families nurture our faith. We live and serve the Lord together. Hopefully they will also learn that family is a verb; that family is something we do. Christians as family means ever expanding relationships in the mission of God, a home without boundaries that comes from inviting others in.