family...

I love NT Wright...

"The common life of the church, centred upon this symbolic praxis and focus on Jesus, seems to have functioned from the first in terms of an alternative family. The impetus to pool resources speaks of a community organization which resembles in some quite striking ways the discipline of the Essenes. The problems which arose in relation to the care of the needy, particularly widows, are most readily comprehensible if we envisage the church, not as a part time voluntary organization of the like-minded which left normal social and familial attachments unaffected, but as a group with definite boundaries. If one belonged to it, one did not belong any more, certainly not in the same way, to one’s previous unit, whether familial or racial. The fact that contact with one’s original family, race and culture would most likely be continue was taken for granted, but the way it was addressed proves the point…From baptism onward, one’s basic family consisted of one’s fellow-Christians…The early church was thus marked out from the first as a familial community, loyalty to which overrode all other considerations…What we seem to be faced with is the existence of a community which was perceived to be subverting the normal social and cultural life of the empire precisely by its quasi-familial, quasi-ethnic life as a community. The fact of widespread persecution, regarded by both pagans and Christians as the normal state of affairs within a century of the beginnings of Christianity, is powerful evidence of the sort of thing that Christianity was, and was perceived to be. It was a new family, and “third race”, neither Jew nor Gentile but “in Christ”. Its very existence threatened the foundational assumptions of pagan society."

ht: shaeman