The household and the local church are not separate institutions. The household is the building block of the body; the local body is the family of the household. Each is essential to the other.
5.1 The Household as Building Block of the Body
The New Testament treats the household as the basic unit of the church. Acts records households coming to faith together (Cornelius’s household, Acts 10:24; the Philippian jailer’s household, Acts 16:31-34; Crispus’s household, Acts 18:8). The early church met in homes (Romans 16:5 — “the church that meets at their house”; 1 Corinthians 16:19). The Pastoral Epistles assume the household as the unit within which faith is held and transmitted. The household is, in a deep sense, where the body of Christ begins.
Where households are strong — marriages walking faithfully, parents discipling children, generational faith transmission working — the body is strong. Where households are weak, the body is weak. No amount of church programming can substitute for the household. This is why this document exists as a companion to Documents 5 (The Annual Plan) and 6 (Elder & Deacon Identification): the eldership of the body must equip households as much as the body itself.
5.2 How the Church Supports Families
A healthy body equips and supports its households in several specific ways:
- Teaching that consistently addresses marriage, parenting, and household life — not as occasional special sermons but as part of the normal teaching diet of the body.
- Mentoring relationships across generations — older couples walking with younger; spiritual mothers walking with younger women; spiritual fathers walking with younger men; experienced parents walking with new parents.
- Premarital preparation — the eldership ensuring that engaged couples are properly prepared before marriage, not leaving this to chance.
- Marriage support — ongoing teaching, weekend retreats where possible, pastoral availability for marriages in trouble.
- Parenting equipping — resources, classes, and ongoing conversation about raising children in the Lord.
- Singles community — active integration of single Saints into the life of the body, with intentional inclusion in households and church family.
- Crisis response — immediate, organised support when a household faces serious illness, bereavement, financial collapse, or marital breakdown.
- Practical help for the seasons — meals after a baby is born; child-care swaps in the early years; companionship in the empty-nest season; care in the elderly years.
5.3 How Families Support the Church
The traffic is two-way. Strong households contribute to the body in ways no programme can replicate:
- Hospitality — households opening their doors to new attenders, singles, other families, the lonely, the broken.
- Generational discipleship — the children of households who walk with the Lord grow up to be the next generation of Saints, elders, and servants of the body.
- Witness — households living publicly under the Lord become visible parables of the gospel in their neighbourhoods, schools, and workplaces.
- Resources — households that prosper bring their giving to the body’s work (Document 5’s funding pattern).
- Service — the family that serves together as the children grow forms Saints who serve naturally as adults.
- Mission — households that are sent into mission carry the gospel into places no single Saint could go.
5.4 When Family and Church Obligations Compete
In practice, family obligations and church obligations can conflict — a child’s sickness during a small-group meeting; a wedding anniversary the same week as a major ministry event; the demands of a season of family life that limit availability for the body. How to handle this:
Family is not above church or below church. They are different orderings of the same calling. A Saint serves Christ in the household and in the body. Faithfulness in one does not require unfaithfulness in the other.
In seasons of family pressure, the body honours the family. New parents, parents of teenagers in difficulty, parents caring for sick children, sons and daughters caring for aging parents — these Saints need the body to lighten their load, not to add to it. The eldership protects them from over-commitment, and the deacons organise practical support.
In seasons of family stability, the family contributes more to the body. When the children are young but settled, when the household is established, when the empty-nest season opens new capacity — these are the seasons in which the Saints can give more to the body’s work. The wise Saint reads the seasons.
Both family and church are sub-Christ. The ultimate calling is to Christ, lived out in both household and body. Where either family or church demands what Christ does not call for, the Saint declines — with respect, but firmly. Healthy households can occasionally refuse a church demand; healthy churches can occasionally refuse a family expectation. Both belong under the lordship of Christ, not above Him.
5.5 The Family as Mission Field and Mission Sending Base
Two final dimensions of the family’s place in the body. The family is itself the first mission field — the place where the children must be evangelised and discipled, the place where the unbelieving spouse may yet come to faith (1 Peter 3:1; 1 Corinthians 7:14), the place where the gospel must be lived among those who know the household best.
And the family is also a mission sending base. The household that walks with the Lord becomes the launching pad for sons and daughters sent out into ministry, into mission, into the world to carry the gospel. The Psalm 127 arrows are released from the household bow. A body in which households are functioning is a body that sends.