Family

Questions

Q: How does family affect our faith?

Q: How does family affect our mission?

Q: What does ‘family’ mean in your community?

Family facts

• 17 million families in the UK

• 237,000 marriages in England and Wales – the lowest number recorded since 1895.

• 15 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents to Aids.

• The teenage birth rate is 94% in Mexico, 40% in USA, 25% in the UK, 2% in Korea.

Mission family?Q: Would you take your family overseas

on mission?

“Each of them has contributed to the work in their own unique way.”

“We see our children as a blessing, not a financial burden or distractions from our work.”

Mike & Daveen Wilson, Brazil

Family inspiration

Q: Have you ever been inspired by younger family members to step out of your comfort zone?

Deb & Dug Benn: “We believe that when God calls we must go – the response is not ‘why me?’ but ‘why not?’”

Josh Benn on an Action Team to Ecuador, 2006

Church family

Q: What makes a real church family?

• Common purpose

• Working together

• Shared experience

• Teamwork

A world mission focus is key to being a church family.

Family in the BibleFamily history

God

creates a family,

rescues a family,

and uses a family

as the basis for his mission to humankind.

A family on mission is born:

“Abraham is going to become a large and strong nation; all nations of the world are going to find themselves blessed through him. Yes, I’ve settled on him as the one to train his children and future family to observe God’s way of life, live kindly and generously and fairly, so that God can complete in Abraham what he promised him.”

(Gen 18: 17-19, The Message)

Family through thick and thin

God’s promise to retain a family for himself holds firm through:

• brotherly rivalry• favouritism• adultery• bad parenting• disobedience

Jesus and family

• born into a Middle Eastern family

• honoured his parents

• taught that not even families can take the place of our devotion to God (Matt 10: 37)

•provides the way for all to belong in God’s family

Our mission as family

... to follow God’s way of life, in faith, and to show the world what our Father is like.