Conversation Starters

1. Read Romans 16:1-16.

2.What is something new you learned about the people listed here by Paul?

3. Why do you think it is important that Paul specifically named so many people in this passage? What do you think is the significance in knowing people by name?

4. Think about how it feels when someone either does or doesn’t know your name. How might knowing (and actually using) the names of people within a church community help to strengthen that community? How might not knowing them have an adverse effect?

Title: A Family Where We Are Known
Reference: Romans 16:1-16
Speaker: Jonathan Neef, JonathanN@cckc.church

After an ordinary delivery, after the first few startled cries, newborn infants typically spend an hour or so in the stage doctors call “quiet alert.” Though they can only focus their vision roughly eight to twelve inches away, their eyes are wide open. They are searching, with an instinct far deeper than intention. They are looking for a face, and when they find one — especially a face that gazes back at them — they fix their eyes on it, having found what they were most urgently looking for. ~ Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For

We arrive in the world looking for the one looking for us. ~ Curt Thompson

– Caring Families are deeply relational

– Caring Families are beautifully diverse

Diversity shaped every moment of the Roman house churches, but Paul sought for a unity in the diversity, a sibling relationship in Christ that both transcended and affirmed one’s ethnicity, gender, and status. Paul was never non-Jewish, and he often affirmed his Jewishness (cf. Rom 9:1–5; 11:1; Phil 3:5–6), but he also celebrated sibling relationships that transcended his Jewishness (Gal 3:28 with 1:13). Every person in each of the house churches in Rome had formed an identity apart from Christ and then in Christ, and the emphasis on “in Christ” or “in the Lord” in the names is as emphatic as it is often unobserved. Life for the Christians in Rome is life in Christ, which they share with others throughout the Pauline mission churches. What they share now is a sibling relationship. For those in Christ, then, the ideal vision is Christoformity. That pattern meant saying some No’s to their former identity and some Yes’s to their identity as siblings in Christ. ~ Scott McKnight

– Caring Families work together for the mission