Dhati Lewis discusses the Church being a family, not an orphanage and explains the difference between the two.
He says, “The Church is a family, not an orphanage. You see, the reality behind an orphanage is usually characterized by a couple of things. Usually have one or two overworked staff trying to serve a bunch of underserved kids and we spend all of our time and all of our responsibility trying to depend on those individuals to take care of all of the work.
There’s really no burden of responsibility for the orphans to maintain, but a family it’s all in. There’s this responsibility that each and every one of us have…The one text I want to point us to is 1 Timothy 3 and as I was looking at this text and looking at the reality of what God is saying as He’s talking about elders, people who are to take leadership and incarnate.
What He says is that he must be a good manager of his home. Why? He says because if he can’t manage his own household how can he care for the household of God…What type of leaders are we training? We spend most of our time training people to lead systems, and not lead people, to lead structures.”
[box type=”shadow” align=”alignright” width=”5″ ]I really believe when we talk about incarnational leadership, we must have the same affection, the same compassion that we have for our kids when we talk about the people in our church.[/box]
1 Timothy 3: 1-5 says, “Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?)”
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