When people find out I’m a minister, they usually change the subject. Sometimes they apologize for cursing in my presence (“My ears! They are melting!” I said … never). Sometimes they just start slowly backing away, looking for the nearest exit.

But sometimes it starts a great conversation.

Recently someone who knows I’m a minister wanted my perspective on a challenging family and relationship issue. She was dating a guy with a dramatically different experience with his family of origin than she had with hers. His was negative, even traumatic. Hers was mostly idyllic, at least in her memory. She wondered if that difference would prevent them from having a family like she had.

She explained that she grew up at church every time the doors were opened. She didn’t believe in that stuff anymore, but she wanted me – pastor – to know that.

Her dad was loving and faithful to her mom. He’d kiss both her and her mom every day before going out the door. They’d pray each evening at the dinner table. Her mom read her Bible over her daughter before bed. Dad would take her to get ice cream, or on a hike, and ask her spiritual questions. There were people in their home all the time, mostly from church, always around the dinner table. There were people who came to her high school games and plays, and who called her to check on her when she went to college. Dad and Mom both worked hard day jobs. They weren’t rich. But their family life was happy, grounded, stable. It always had this sense of focus, purpose.

His family background couldn’t have been more different. It was difficult, even traumatic to an extent. She asked, “Do you think we’ll be compatible? I mean, do you think he and I can have a family like I had, or will that just be impossible with him?”

Here’s what struck me: even though her description of her biological family was laced with language of faith and the presence of a larger faith family at nearly every point, she still was trying to convince herself that stuff had nothing to do with the character and quality of her family experience. She thought those were things her family did, but she failed to see those were the very reasons her family was the way it was.

I advised her not to get married yet. Not because of his past, but because of her present. “I don’t think you understand family,” I told her.

There’s a hard story in Mark 3, when Jesus’s mother and siblings come to take him home, and he denies them.

His mother and brothers arrived. They stood outside and sent word to him, calling for him. A crowd was seated around him, and those sent to him said, “Look, your mother, brothers, and sisters are outside looking for you.”

He replied, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” Looking around at those seated around him in a circle, he said, “Look, here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does God’s will is my brother, sister, and mother.” (Mark 3:31-34 CEB, emphasis added)

The visual is striking. You have a crowd of people, “here,” “around” Jesus. You can imagine the thick “circle” of faces pressing in around Jesus at their center, trying to draw closer to him.

Then you have his family “outside.” Twice, we read they are outside the circle. His family sends word to Jesus through others, who come closer. They call to him. But his family is on the outside.

One of my heroes is a lawyer named Bryan Stevenson, whose whole life has been shaped by something his grandmother told him: “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close” (Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy).

I can’t help but think of that line here, as we see the distance in this scene, set within the larger context of a debate on Jesus’s identity. His own family – those who should know him best – are unclear about who Jesus is because they are too far away from him.

They aren’t inside the circle with Christ at its center.

This story provides the church – the church family – with a clear sense of its purpose: to circle around Christ, drawing one another nearer to him. It’s not so much that the church explains Jesus’s identity. Rather, the church family creates proximity to Jesus and a centralizing focus on him, until his identity becomes clear to all in the circle.

Many see their nuclear families as the bigger circle in life, with the church family as a smaller circle inside it. The young woman I spoke with recalled her childhood in that way.

But she was wrong. Her parents saw their nuclear family as a smaller circle inside the larger circle of the church family. Their lives reflected the dominant influence of the church upon their family. It was only because the church family was pushing their nuclear family closer to Christ, that their family looked the way it did.

As I listened to that young woman – now sadly distant from Christ – and as I reflect on this passage, I wonder if this is not one of the more significant and damaging disassociations affecting modern faith.

When we view church as part of the family, instead of family as part of the church, how does Jesus stay at the center? How do we stay close to him? How do we know him for who he really is?