Church as Family: Creating Healing and Transformative Spaces for Children at Risk through a Reimagining of Ecclesiology

Abstract

Children growing up in contexts of toxic stress face a cascade of deleterious realities that impact them at every level of their being. However, when children are securely attached to healthy adults in their lives, those supportive relationships can be both protective and transformative for those young people. Given the power of secure attachment and the New Testament’s frequent use of the metaphor of family to describe the church, this paper proposes that when ecclesial communities operate as real and healthy families in their contexts, those communities can thereby create missiologically significant spaces of healing and transformation for the children in their midst. In an effort to reimagine and reshape our ecclesial communities to function as such reciprocal and mutually supportive families, Child Theology and studies of early Christian community, catechesis, and worship are put into conversation with one another.