When we gather as churches for a celebration of the gospel, or when we sit together for prayer, or when we pore over the scriptures in a group, we are, in those moments, touching something much deeper than we realise. We are engaged in something more eternal than our marriages since at these moments we’ve stepped out of the rehearsal room and onto the stage.

You see, the thing is – here’s the thing – our fraternity (being brothers and sisters) lasts into eternity; our marriages won’t. To look at our churches you wouldn’t know it, but it’s true. I’ll be a husband to Amy until I die, but I’ll be her brother forever. (To be clear for a moment, Marriage will last into eternity but our marriages won’t. Christ will be married to his bride, the Church, forever.)

Our marriages are meant to be signposts. They’re physical displays of a higher reality, and ‘good’ marriages are judged as such based on how well they reflect the Ultimate Reality to which they point. It’s important that we help people do marriage well since marriages are windows into the gospel, but once the marriage of Christ and the Church takes place, all husbands and wives will retire their roles and take off the ‘costume’ of marriage, but remain as members of the Church, Christ’s bride.

When Jesus was confronted by the scribes with a trick and a trap, he challenged his interrogators, the Bible experts of his day, by exposing how little they understood their Bibles…

‘Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven”’ (Matthew 22:29).

The scribes’ question assumes the continuation of human marriage, and it’s a question that reveals how little they’ve reflected on God’s eternal plan. They haven’t meditated long enough on the deeper storylines of Scripture: on Yahweh’s love for his people and on the meaning of marriage. It’s classic ‘You’ve missed the woods for the trees!’

In heaven, your spouse won’t be your spouse, but they will be your brother or your sister, and so for that matter will the person you sit next to during the sermon, or knock arms with in worship, or do rota swaps with. Taking it further still, that person you’re married to, or that child you’re raising to adulthood, or parent for whom you’re arranging social care, they may be your spouse/child/aging parent now, but they’ll primarily be your brother or sister for eternity.

True as all this may be (and I think it is), you often wouldn’t know it if you looked at our churches or scanned our leadership team photos or listened to our sermons or saw how often we platform married people over unmarried ones. How many times have I seen a husband and wife duo host a church gathering or heard of a pastor’s wife running the women’s ministry? How often do we overlook unmarried people or insist on a married woman leading a ministry with her husband? Of course, none of those things are necessarily problems by themselves, but it’s their ubiquity and the unspoken assumptions that are the problem.

So, what should we do about it? Here are seven suggestions for how and why we might rethink some common church practices.

1. Mind your language. Our words make worlds since they create the cultures we inhabit. I hear often from our platforms ‘This is my wife…’ or ‘Let me introduce my friend…’ and whilst not being a problem by itself, I noticed a difference by contrast whilst attending a conference in the Middle East. It struck me how often those from the Middle East welcomed one another with ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ and how often the preachers addressed the room as ‘brothers and sisters’. This elevates our fraternal relationships and emphasises our family connection. As a related point, I can see how this kind of language also changes the nature of our interactions online. Addressing someone as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ (on Twitter/X, say) ensures I write to them respectfully and with honour. The language of siblings is also a valuable safeguard in the prevention of unbiblical hierarchies. (Jesus’ prohibition against calling one another ‘rabbi’ may be instructive here.)
2. Purity is promoted. As men and women, we are all too easily drawn toward trading insults and objectifying one another which leads to suspicion and mistrust. How often do women feel themselves treated like radioactive material, too dangerous to get close to? How often have men felt depressed by wandering thoughts they wish they could control but can’t? Cultures that have been mindful of the dangers that sexual attraction creates respond by erecting fences of separation that keep unmarried adults away from each other. But Scripture’s answer is different: ‘Treat younger women as sisters in absolute purity’ (1 Timothy 5:2). Emphasising our fraternity brings with it a code of conduct that’s based on honour and trust, but that also has clear barriers that mustn’t be violated. It allows for affection for sure, but it also allows for conflict (what siblings do you know who don’t fight?), reconciliation, and partnership. A consequence of this, of course, is that women will be safer in churches. In general, men feel a duty of protection for the women in their lives which means that not only would they resist objectifying their sisters, they are also more inclined to act with their safety and protection in mind. Note, however, that we are ‘brothers and sisters’ not ‘fathers and daughters’. This is an important distinction to bear in mind to avoid unhealthy paternalism.
3. Seating plans matter. We’re creatures of habit and are also drawn toward comfort. In a crowded room with unfamiliar people, we’re anxious and seek reassurance. Often the easiest way to do this is to sit with the people we know best of all: our nuclear family. But by placing a biblical emphasis on the church as family we find a seat of reassurance and safety next to almost any brother and sister we know. This goes beyond simply ‘including’ unmarried people and gets to the heart of who we actually are. In our houses we ‘have a go’ at family, but on Sundays we practise the real thing, the eternal family. Sit with your spouse on Sundays if you want, but you don’t need to. The same goes for training our children in worship. Imagine a community who understood that on Sundays it’s the job of the whole to help out. When a family arrives for worship, they should be able to sigh with relief because the church will ‘take it from here’. An older brother will encourage your son to sit with them in worship or a younger sibling will follow your toddler around the hall for a while.
4. Singleness is stupid. The word, not the experience. No one is called to singleness. Chastity perhaps, celibacy even, but not singleness. We are not singles and couples, we are family members and we must preserve ways of interaction that emphasise our relationships rather than treating us as atomised individuals bouncing around from one experience of connection to another. Think about the events you run and who they’re for. I used to love putting on men’s events: ‘Hog & Grog’, ‘Beer & Deer’; you name it (and I love naming things!), we ran it as a church! But the trouble I’ve come to see with some gendered events like these is that they define us in terms that aren’t embedded in our relationships. Dads’ nights or mums’ events or sisterhoods and bands of brothers help much more with this.
5. Visibility and partnership problems. No doubt we’re all aware of the positive impact that representation has. Who we put on our platforms highlights what we believe, and what gets ‘celebrated’ in this manner is often the thing that gets replicated in the church. This is as true with our relationship status as it is with our cultural and social demographic. Do unmarried people get much public honour in your church? I don’t mean do you clap them or embarrass them publicly with gifts or compliments, but are they on platforms (where they are literally elevated)? When partnership in ministry is required are spouses preferred to unmarried people for the sake of convenience and neatness? What about your website? Do you profile the man but picture his wife as proof of, what, his fidelity?! Celebrate brothers and sisters not only husbands and wives.
6. Care for and train co-workers as well as elders. In a society like ours many people are bemused or offended by the New Testament’s male-only eldership structure and have concluded that we need to move beyond how the early Church (and the Church through history) structured themselves to a structure that better communicates our anthropology. Partly this is due to our overuse of unbiblical terms like ‘senior leader’ and partly it’s due to practices that have under-utilised (and at times even devalued) the gifts God has given to some of our brothers and sisters who aren’t elders; gifts that are essential for the family’s health. Notice also how little we know of or even hear of elders in the New Testament: in fact, we don’t know any elders (besides the apostle John) by name. Instead, we read about many people (men and women) whom Paul describes as ‘co-workers’. Elevated among and by the early Church (and naming someone publicly does elevate them) are servants: people known not for their office of ministry but for their service in the church. This naming/honouring is perhaps also them applying Jesus’s declaration: the servant shall be the greatest (Matthew 23:11). Our practice is different to the New Testament’s. We elevate and name elders as leaders (a term that doesn’t imply relationship), often at the expense of terms more embedded in social networks. The ‘co’ of ‘co-workers’ makes relationship essential. As much as we equate elders with fathers, the term traditionally speaks of a position of hierarchy and authority more than an individual enmeshed in social ties. It’s important that we care for elders (a whole other article), since elders carry burdens and take hits for the church, but so do workers, grafters, and servants. Emphasising our fraternal bonds also unlocks for us the importance of providing proper profile, pastoral support and power to non-elders, people who may not be our pastors, but who are our siblings. And let’s notice that ‘pastors’ also will cease but siblings won’t.
7. Family loyalty matters. I’m aware of how quickly things can turn ‘heavy’ when a leader uses the church ‘family’ language to manipulate people into allegiance and loyalty, but don’t miss why that abuse is possible. It’s possible because most people are loyal people and, even in a digitised and fragmented society like ours, we still recognise the claim that family has on us. By stressing the family (or even ‘extended family’) component of church life we help people feel rooted and at home, which actually serves to stabilise identity anxiety. Of course, it’s not enough to use words like ‘family’; we have to breakdown what that means for people, and with multiple cultures and expectations around what family should be, it’s going to require us to be patient and adaptable.

In light of all this I want to appeal to you brothers and sisters, in view of the manifold wisdom of God on display in the Church – a wisdom displayed in the uniting of Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female – to not be conformed to the pattern of this age that couples-up, idolises sex, and retreats into domestic huddles. Rather let your churches be transformed by allowing the eschaton to renew your life and leadership, and in so doing let us all prove the good, acceptable and perfect will of God. Viva la resistance!

Amen

Jez Field is an elder at Life Church Seaford and host of the New Ground Life and Leadership podcast.