In my last essay, we saw how consumer culture has gutted the familial category necessary to understand the church. When a consumer visits a church, he expects another service-provider, such as a hospital or a restaurant. He doesn’t understand the role of men in ministry, and thus, not the role of women in ministry.

The New Testament provides several metaphors for the church, each in their own way incompatible with the paradigms of consumerism, like a branch to Christ the vine (John 15:5), a field of crops (1 Cor. 3:6-9), the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12-27, Eph. 1:22f, 4:15f; Col. 2:19), and God’s temple (1 Peter 2:5). Most antithetical to the service-provider paradigm of the church is the Bible’s teaching that the church is the household or family of God.

Family or house, oikos, occurs 120 times in the New Testament. It is used of literal “houses” and the temple or tabernacle about half those times. The others refer to families, including referring to the God’s people as God’s house or household, as in family (e.g. Matt. 12:44; Luke 1:33, 11:24; Acts 2:36, 7:42; Heb. 3:2-6, 8:8, 10, 10:21).¹

The Household of God

The church is God’s “household.” In Galatians 6:10, the Apostle Paul commends doing good especially to the “household (or family) of faith.” In Ephesians 2:19, Christians are “members of the household of God.” 1 Timothy 3:15 tells us to “know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God. . . .” This verse describes the greater context of the much contested 1 Timothy 2:12 in which women are not allowed to teach or have authority over men. You can’t understand 1 Timothy 2:12 without understanding the church as a family.

The church as God’s oikos underlies her instructions in the New Testament. The Lord Jesus pointed to his disciples and said, in contrast to his natural kin, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt. 12:49-50). Hence, N. T. Wright notes, Jesus “envisaged loyalty to himself and his kingdom-movement as creating an alternative family.”² The frequent “sibling terminology” – 139 occurrences in Paul’s letters – demonstrates that Paul “drew directly on the Mediterranean family as the central social model for his churches.”³ Paul instructs Timothy to relate to the various demographics of the church in familial categories: “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity” (1 Tim. 5:1-2). (This passage, and Titus 2, challenge the “Family Integrated Church” model which can undermine the church as family with the claim that the church is made up of families.⁴) Dhati Lewis notes that the oikos is“so much of the essence of the church that it cannot even properly be called a metaphor.”

Metaphors describe what the church is like or similar to—light, flock, field, building—but family is not metaphorical; it is a literal description of the phenomena we know as church. The church is not like family; it is family.⁵

What Is a Family?

But what is a family? We’ve previously seen how consumerism has marred the family. We cannot take for granted, when reading about “family,” in the Bible, that we understand what it is. The culture of the New Testament, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, had extended families including servants. All people in the household were part of the family. Anyone was a member of the “household” (oikos) if they were in submission to the head. As David Lim explains, “in New Testament times, the oikos was defined primarily not by kinship, but by the relationship of dependence and subordination. . . . Each oikos head ruled over all members and their decisions, including religious ones, were binding upon all of them (e.g., Matt. 18:23-34, 24:49, 25:25).”⁶ Each member was in a family by their relationship to the patriarch.

The early churches built on this model. House churches were not simply in houses as meeting places but apparently extended families serving as the nucleus of the “household of God.” Believers would join an ekklesia (assembly) hosted by an oikos and be included in, as if part of the family. What made them members of that household church was not blood relation or residence, but a common faith which produced a relationship. The elders, like patriarchs, put things “in order” (Titus 1:5). Thus, multiple household-like assemblies in one city sometimes met separately, akin to small groups today, and occasionally coming together to make up “the whole church” (ἡ ἐκκλησία ὅλη) (Rom. 16:23; 1 Cor. 11:20, 14:23–40).⁷ For example, in Romans 16:5 and three other passages the phrase “the church in their house” (κατ’ οἶκον αὐτῶν ἐκκλησίαν), or similar phrases, are used to designate household-based groups.⁸ The phrase does not simply describe the place where the ekklesia met, as a “house church,” because ἐν οἴκῳ (in a house)[1]  would be the more natural expression (cf. 1 Cor. 11:34; 14:35). Thus, “the early churches were patterned after the extended family structure of Greco-Roman households.”⁹

When meeting like families, naturally the fathers of the families would be the elders of the church, when they were mature believers. As such, the church was inherently[2]  patriarchal, in the literal sense of a rule of fathers. They were fathers who cared for their families. They weren’t “patriarchal” in the sense of the caricature of that term now commonly bandied about in our culture. The Lord Jesus had already taught that leaders among his followers are not to “lord it over” the people, “[b]ut whoever would be great among you must be your servant,” himself as the prime example (Matt. 20:25-28). The “head” in the Body of Christ nourishes and knits together the rest of the Body and so heads over little, earthly Christian bodies should be nourishing and coordinating the body (Col. 2:19), not exploiting them. The New Testament fills authorities with a new Spirit but it doesn’t negate the need for authorities.

Further, even Gentile patriarchs who became elders were taught from Scripture that his wife was a “helper fit for him” (Gen. 2:18) and to be honored alongside him (Ex. 20:12). In Proverbs, the mother is paired with the father whom the wise are to heed (Prov. 1:8), and concludes with adulation for the noble wife (Prov. 31:10-31). So, if the early church drew on the Biblical ideal of the patriarchal family as its model for leadership, the role of the woman was honored because Biblical patriarchy honors the role of women.

Patriarchy

Even egalitarian scholars perceive that seeing the church as oikos “can easily be employed to serve the interests of patriarchs (the proverbial paterfamilias).”¹⁰ They just assume that’s bad. In our day, “patriarchal” is now so commonly used as a pejorative many Christians want to avoid the stigma associated with it. So, evangelicals coined the term complementarian.¹¹ It’s an attempt to sell a healthy, Biblical idea, by inventing a new brand name. (In a consumer culture, we’re hyper sensitive to how ideas sell.) But it came with a problem. “Whereas complementarian sought to emphasize how male and female “complimented” (sic) each other, it left vague one key thing: who carries the melody? In other words, where does the authority (and thus responsibility) reside?…”.¹² That is, the term complementarian does not address the salient issue: authority. Whether all members of the church should complement the others is not the controversy. The controversy is the criteria. Egalitarians say sex should not be a criteria, only a function. When the ministry is reduced to performance of functions, like a chef in a restaurant in need of a competent cook, then the consumer sees no reason to exclude women from the pastorate. But the controversy is who leads the households of God. That’s what egalitarianism questions The term patriarchy alone answers.¹³

However, egalitarians like to spin the idea of church-as-family into church-as-egalitarian-commune. For example, Reta Halteman Finger comments, after noting that Jesus taught us to pray for God’s “kingdom” to come, “I think ‘kin-dom’ is a good word and better reflects the kind of society Jesus envisions—as a shared community of equals who serve each other.”¹⁴ Besides the fact that “kindom” isn’t a word, note how Finger assumes that kinship – family – is inherently egalitarian. But it’s not. As described above, families are defined by submission to the head. Thus, you are in the “kindom” (i.e. the oikos) of God if you are under the head. Even if we adopted Finger’s new word “kindom,” the conclusion is the same: patriarchy. A family is defined by its head–its patriarchs. Thus the “kin-dom” of the church is as patriarchal as His Kingdom is hierarchical. It is a patriarchy and hierarchy of shared community in which all members serve each other, as Finger longs for, but it is not a commune of equals, at least not of members of equal authority; equally created in the image of God, yes, but not equally called to leadership.

Terms

While, today, we are inclined to see families as undifferentiated masses of equals, in the societies into which Jesus and the Apostles preached the “Kingdom of God,” such was not the view. To them, families were a community akin to kingdoms, where the patriarch ruled like a king but for the good of His family. When the Lord Jesus gave custody of His mother to John – “the disciple whom Jesus loved” – He showed He is a benevolent patriarch (John 19:26–27).

In the Complementarian-Egalitarian debate, both camps are mislabeled. “Egalitarianism” is not really advocating for what its term would imply: an undifferentiated mass of equals. Indeed, “egalitarians” believe in complementarity, just a complementarity based on functional aptitude alone, like we choose our doctors or chefs. It assumes the church is akin to a hospital or restaurant. Consumerism naturally produces egalitarianism since its goal is to satisfy the customer, not disciple him.

“Complementarianism,” as a term, obfuscates the key issue – authority, headship. It’s meant to affirm the proper roles of women, to imply that they have roles in the church that complement the roles of men. That’s good. But it doesn’t imply anything about what the roles of men are. That’s a crucial omission. The better term, but the one short-sighted but market-savvy church leaders are keen to avoid, is “patriarchy.” The church is patriarchal because it is familial.

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John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.

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1. Luke. 12:52; Acts 10:2, 11:14, 16:15, 31, 34, 18:8; 1 Cor. 1:16; 1 Tim. 3:4-5, 12; 5:4; 2 Tim. 1:16; 4:19; Titus 1:11; Heb. 11:7. Also for a lineage (extended family over generations): Luke. 1:27, 69; 2:4 (apparently synonymous with πατριά). 1 Peter 4:17 notes that judgment begins at the “household of God.” ↩︎
2. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 401. ↩︎
3. Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2009), 77-78, 95. ↩︎
4. See John B. Carpenter, If the Family is Central, Christ Isn’t, The Christian Post, March 26, 2013. ↩︎
5. Dhati Lewis, “The Church Is a Family,” Lifeway Research, February 24, 2017; emphasis original, accessed August 13, 2021. ↩︎
6. David S. Lim, “God’s Kingdom as Oikos Church Networks: A Biblical Theology,” International Journal of Frontier Missiology, 34:1—4, 2017, 27. ↩︎
7. Lim, “God’s Kingdom as Oikos Church Networks,” 26. ↩︎
8. τῇ κατ’ οἶκον αὐτῶν ἐκκλησίᾳ (1 Cor. 16:19); τὴν κατ’ οἶκον αὐτῆς ἐκκλησίαν (Col. 4:15); τῇ κατ’ οἶκόν σου ἐκκλησίᾳ (Philemon 2). ↩︎
9. Lim, “God’s Kingdom as Oikos Church Networks,” 26. ↩︎
10. Ernst M Conradie, “The Whole Household of God (Oikos): Some Ecclesiological Perspectives Part 1,” Scriptura 94 (2007), 1-9, 3. ↩︎
11. Kevin DeYoung, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: A Review, Themelios, Volume 46, Issue 2, August 2021. ↩︎
12. Ben Zornes, “Adios Complementarianism,” May 20, 2021; accessed August 14, 2021. ↩︎
13. For an evangelical defense of patriarchy, see Russell Moore, “After Patriarchy, What?” JETS 49 (2006): 569–76. He defines “patriarchy—a loving, sacrificial, protective patriarchy in which the archetypal Fatherhood of God is reflected in the leadership of human fathers, in the home and in the church (Eph 3:14–15; Matt 7:9–11; Heb 12:5–11)” (575.) ↩︎
14. Reta Halteman Finger, “From Kingdom to Kin-dom—and Beyond, Christian Feminism Today,” Christian Feminism Today, 2013, emphasis original. ↩︎