I have been challenged again lately with what defines a church at its most basic level. Many will know that my bottom line has always been that a church is a group of people who are committed to eating together, praying together, learning together, worshipping together, having communion together and doing the great commission together. In the last month I have begun to wonder if there is actually an even deeper level of simplicity within this form of church. I wonder if the most pared back form of church is the extended family.

The reason why I propose this; the history and culture of the Jewish people. Below I want to look at this in a bit more detail.

It would be hard to argue the fact that the Jewish people have been one of the most persecuted people’s in history. For thousands and thousands of years the world has conspired to destroy this small minority of people, physically, culturally, geographically and religiously. Somehow the Jewish faith and the Jewish people have survived, prospered and regained their land after two thousand years.

On one level we can state that it is because of God’s grace and favour on that people as to why they have prospered. God often does miraculous things through ordinary every day things, so I ask myself what ordinary things has god used to perform this amazing work of grace on the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. What things do the Jews do which makes them able to survive and flourish despite being placed in numerous kinds of difficulty as a people, over the centuries? Is it the temple? Well, that hasn’t existed for two thousand years, and even when it did it was being destroyed, or the Jewish people had been forced out of their homeland so they could not worship corporately for considerable amounts of time. Has the system of synagogues provided the unbreakable back bone of the Jews? Jewish synagogues can play an important part in Jewish life, but they are far more fragmented and in the background compared to what the church is to committed Christians. It also seems unlikely as most other cultures and faiths have similar systems (Church for Christians, Mosques for Moslems, temples for Hindus or Buddhists), yet I believe they would have found it extremely difficult to survive the trials that the Jewish faith endured.

For me, I believe that the ordinary thing that God used to perform his miracle of seeing Judaism survive and thrive is the Jewish family. You can often hear Jews crack jokes about the family and the family is often rather an ‘overpowering’ presence in their lives. One can watch sitcoms like ‘Seinfeld’ where jokes are made about the crazy relations, crazy Mothers, over the top emotion, and expectations to toe the family line and help support the family group. In many ways these jokes reflect the centrality of the family and the ‘home’ to Jews. A perfect example of the importance of the family and the home is the way Jews celebrate Shabbat (Sabbath), in comparison to the way most Christians think of celebrating the Sabbath. Christian families GO to church to celebrate the Sabbath, while Jewish families COME home to celebrate the Sabbath.

The centre of the Jewish Sabbath is the big family meal on Friday night. Part of the meal includes the bread to be blessed, and a goblet for blessing the wine. The family then enjoys a leisurely meal, talk and meditation and maybe some songs and the children are encouraged to ask questions. This is the central part of their upbringing in the faith. (Affairs of the world are avoided). The Sabbath scene in the film "Fiddler on the roof" gives the atmosphere of this celebration. All of the Jewish faith’s festivals can be enacted in the family home, and it is in the home that children are primarily instructed. The home is where individuals get emotional and physical support, and it is where they learn and are most intimate with their religious faith. Because the education, law and religious activity have been given to the ‘home’ to fulfil primarily, when the destruction of national or local structures have happened the faith could continue on by these strong and powerful family units. Because each individual in that family was permeated in living out their culture and faith even when the family unit was broken or fragmented (such as in the Holocaust), the individuals who survived could once again rebuild a strong powerful family unit with the DNA which had been placed in them.