Recently we were able to take some holidays and spend time with family – the first opportunity to do so since our arrival in Tokyo nearly six months ago – it was a special time and a real blessing.

They say ‘you can choose your friends but not your family’ and the same can be said of the Christian church and the family of God in general.

Recognising that the church is supposed to function more as a hospital for the sick than a hotel for the saints, it goes without saying that within the family of God we will often be called to minister to and alongside all kinds of people including those who are vulnerable, fragile, broken and imperfect just like you and I. 

In their book Compassion, Nouwen, McNeill and Morrison introduce the notion of ‘voluntary displacement’ saying, 

The Christian community is not driven together but drawn together. By leaving the ordinary and proper places and responding to the call to follow Christ, people with very different backgrounds discover each other as fellow travelers brought together in common discipleship (p75).

It is out of a common desire to make the compassion of God a visible and tangible element within the world in which we live and participate daily that we voluntarily choose to leave our ‘familial environments’ in order to come together with others in a spiritual sense as the family of God – an act of compassion in itself. 

“…no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields – along with persecutions – and in the age to come eternal life.” (Mark 10:29-30 NIV)