A short sentence from Rome went past me this morning: Pope Leo encouraging families to actively participate in the life of the Church. On the surface it reads like the kind of thing a church leader is supposed to say. But I kept circling back to one word in it. Not families. Not Church. The word doing all the work in that sentence is actively.
Because you can be present without being part of something. Anyone who has led people — in a company, on a board, in a congregation — learns that difference quickly. There is a roster, and then there is the work. There are names on a list, and then there are the people who actually pick up the end of the table. Nobody is being lazy. Most of the time the gap is simply that no one ever told them they were allowed to be more than an audience.
The first church looked like a household
Read the end of Acts 2 and notice how ordinary it all is. "Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people, and the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved" (Acts 2:46-47). Temple courts and kitchen tables. Public worship and somebody's house. The same people in both.
That is what participation looked like before there were committees and sign-up sheets. It was shared food, shared rooms, shared praise. The Holy Spirit had fallen in power a few verses earlier, and here is what the power produced: people who would not leave each other alone. Not a program. A household.
And I want to say plainly — this is still how the Spirit works. I watch it here. A teenager prays out loud for a friend and something shifts in the room. A kid asks God for something with no theological hedging and God answers it. Someone brings a hurt they have carried for years and lays it down, and the next Sunday their face is different. None of that requires a stage. It requires people who showed up willing to be in it rather than near it.
And if your family isn't like that?
Here is where a word about families can land hard, so let me go slowly. Maybe you are the only believer under your roof. Maybe you came alone this morning and will go home to a quiet house. Maybe your family is far away, or fractured, or you are twenty-three and nobody you grew up with prays.
Scripture does not skip over you. "A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing" (Psalm 68:5-6). That is not poetry about how nice it would be. It is a description of what God actually does. He sets people in families. He builds households out of strangers. The word Paul uses is just as direct: "you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household" (Ephesians 2:19).
So when we say a family church, we do not mean a church for people who already have one. We mean a church where God is still in the business of giving people one.
What joining in actually looks like
It is smaller than you think. Learn one name you did not know last week. Stay eleven minutes after the last song. Pray out loud once, badly, in front of someone. Bring a person with you. Put your hand on the end of the table.
If you have children, understand that they are not learning the faith primarily from the lesson they get in their class. They are learning it from watching whether you sing, whether you pray, whether you go find the person sitting alone. That is the curriculum, and you are teaching it whether or not you intend to.
Mission Sunday, November 1
If you have been wondering where the door is, here is one. Mission Sunday on November 1 is exactly the kind of thing a whole household can step into together — and exactly the kind of thing one person on their own can step into and not be alone by the end of it. No audition. No long history with us required.
And if today you are tired, or you prayed for your family and the answer has not come, hear this: the Lord is not grading your participation. Jesus did not build this household out of qualified people. He built it out of fishermen, tax collectors, and a woman at a well who went and told the whole town. He is still building it. There is room, and there is a place with your name on it — and the Spirit who filled that first room has not gone quiet.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.