The Early Church’s View of Biblical Family
When I was a kid growing up down South, my mom always referred to her in-laws as “Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard.” My parents both grew up in the small town of Talladega, Alabama, where every adult was a “Mr.” or “Mrs.” to anyone younger. For my mom, this natural marker of social respect carried over into married life. The rest of the world may have called my dad’s parents “Cowboy and Virginia Hubbard,” but they were always “Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard” to her. I saw nothing strange about this when I was a kid. Perhaps there is nothing that can seem strange to you when your granddaddy’s name is Cowboy.
It was not until I married Katie Hansen that I discovered there was another way of talking to your in-laws. Katie and I first began to date in college, and I naturally referred to her parents as “Mr. and Mrs. Hansen.” The Hansens were from Wisconsin, but we were all living in Alabama at the time. We all knew the drill: Young people call their elders “Mr.” or “Mrs.” Things got decidedly less natural a few months after Katie and I were married, however. Mrs. Hansen made a simple request.
“Please do not call us ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ any longer,” she said. “We are your parents-in-law now.”
I was dumbfounded by this statement. I had continued calling them “Mr. and Mrs.” precisely because they were my in-laws. What alternative do I have? I wondered.
“Just call us ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad,’” Mrs. Hansen went on. I have no idea what my face looked like when my mother-in-law suggested this. I probably stared at her like she had asked me to prepare a dish of falafel from a cookbook written in Farsi. There was no way I could do what she was asking. I couldn’t call my in-laws “Mom and Dad” any more than I could long jump the Grand Canyon. I told my wife as much later. I only had one mom and dad. I liked her parents a lot, but they were my in-laws, not my “mom and dad.”
I had assumed the slow-growing familiarity I had enjoyed with Katie’s mom and dad would never evolve beyond slow-growing familiarity and the formal bounds of “Mr. and Mrs. Hansen.” (It never had for my mom. Why should it be any different for me?) My in-laws took the opposite view, however. They assumed their relationship with me would progressively look and feel—and sound!—like the relationship they had with their three biological sons. Thankfully, “Mrs. Hansen” could sense how awkward this was for me, and she didn’t push things.
How Biblical Family Extends Beyond Blood
Years later, my relationship with my in-laws underwent the strain and sorrow of losing Katie to cancer. After twenty-one years of marriage, Katie went home to be with the Lord while we were living in her parents’ home. We had just moved to Wisconsin because Katie’s health was failing fast, and we were waiting for our new home to be built. Katie died on January 25, 2016. That night, I spent my first night alone in my in-laws’ home. What a mercy that Mr. and Mrs. Hansen had become “Mom and Dad” to me. Two decades earlier, they had decided I would be their “son.” I was not a stranger or a “son-in-law” to them when I needed family most. I was, quite simply, their son.
Over and over since that day in January, they have reaffirmed this relationship. “You are our son. You always will be,” they will say. Mom and Dad Hansen showed me by word and deed that family can mean something more than blood. The earliest generation of Christians discovered the same thing in the same way.
The Early Church’s Use of Family Language
What “Mr. and Mrs. Hansen” taught me about the nature of family the earliest generation of believers learned from the apostles. As members of newly forming communities who had faith in Jesus as Lord, they had to figure out what to call each other. They landed on the term brothers and sisters.
There’s a profound practicality to figuring this kind of thing out, of course. You have to know how to hail someone in the marketplace or greet them at a dinner party. This is especially true in a new social setting. The thing we cannot miss—and the thing we are prone to miss when the New Testament language gets taken for granted—is that the first generation of Christians worked mIagic when they landed on the term brothers and sisters. World-shaping work was done when the earliest generation of Christians started identifying each other as family.
In the early days of the church, no conventions existed for how Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, men and women would address one another. There was no register for people to drop into. There were other communities similar to Christian churches, of course. People could join trade guilds, mystery cults, ethnic associations, and synagogues almost anywhere in the Greco-Roman world. All these groups formed along lines of natural affinity, ancestry, or practical need, however. People chose a guild because they all worked the same craft. People joined a neighborhood association because they lived on the same street (and usually came from the same ethnic group). Christians, however, assembled for a different reason. All they had in common was Christ. They were sitting together in one room because they had come together at one Cross. For most of them, there weren’t multiple options for where to worship. Their union in Christ wasn’t an idea or an ideal but a practical reality. It was an entirely new social situation though. What were they supposed to call each other before they were “Christians”?
All the evidence of the New Testament and beyond says their most common term of self-designation was “brothers and sisters.” It should not take enormous mental effort for us to imagine how awkward this must have felt at first for people so obviously not related (and, in fact, even hostile) to one another. Yet this is precisely what they did.
The writers of the New Testament directly addressed other believers as “brothers and sisters” seventy-seven times outside the Gospels. Though you may be familiar with some of these verses, none would have seemed normal when they were first read aloud in the first century:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Romans 12:1, NIV
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Philippians 4:8, NIV
Brothers and sisters, pray for us. 1 Thessalonians 5:25, NIV
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds. James 1:2, NIV
Over and over in the letters that circulated to the churches of the first century, believers in Jesus directly addressed one another as “brothers and sisters.”
Living as Brothers and Sisters in Christ
Between the 77 instances of direct address and the 111 instances of self-description we find in the New Testament outside the Gospels, we have evidence that believers were continually positioning themselves alongside other believers as a new family. The apostles who wrote these things believed that God had so reconfigured natural social bonds at the Cross that everyone in Christ now belonged to one another as members of one family. Recognizing this new reality God had created meant putting their words to work by repeatedly calling each other “brother” and “sister.”
Norman Hubbard has served on staff with The Navigators collegiate ministries for the past twenty-five years on seven campuses in the Midwest. He currently works in leadership and resource development as well as student outreach, and he speaks at conferences nationally. Norman has a master’s degree in applied linguistics from Auburn University, and he’s currently completing his master’s of divinity at Denver Seminary. He is the author of three Bible study workbooks. His most recent book, More Than Christians, will release from NavPress in January 2025. Norman and his wife have children ranging in age from twenty-eight to thirteen.
Adapted from More than Christians: Practicing Gospel-Shaped Community with the Language of the Early Church by Norm Hubbard. Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries.
