The Greatest Secret: How Being God's Adopted Children Changes EverythingSýnishorn

 Adoption – Church commitment and chaos    

If I were to define parenting simply as remembering to be there to photograph my child’s sports day, piano recital, and birthday party, you would probably argue I had a reductionist and limited understanding of parenting. In the same way we misunderstand what God intended by "Church" if we only turn up to Sunday services, Bible studies and prayer meetings and exclude the Bible’s clear teaching to “love one another”, “carry one another’s burdens”, “encourage one another”, and “spur one another on to love and good deeds”. These ongoing commitments to the members of our church family don’t fit neatly into the confines of a Sunday worship service. Adoption provides us with a new definition of the Church, which locks into our approach to church-life commitments of love and belonging, intimacy and family. 

Adopting my daughter helped me refresh my understanding of the church in two ways. First of all, it helped me grasp that because I was adopted by God, the church was automatically my new family. Therefore our corporate life together is supposed to be marked by a radical and supernatural hospitality, intimacy and covenant commitment to one another. Secondly it helped me understand that just as family is hardly ever straightforward, so in church too there will be complexities, and histories, and personalities that can make life pretty chaotic and complicated. 

Church is not an event or a transaction or a building or even a community or a religious duty – it is family. As with any adoptive family we can expect to find, not only radical hospitality that is prepared to cross boundaries and overcome obstacles, but a certain amount of chaos. And just as we see time and again on the pages of our Bible, it is in the middle of family chaos that God does the most incredible and beautiful things.