Why do we call it "family"?

FULL TEXT: Hi, I'm Kent, and I have a question: Why do we call it "family"? That is, why do we use that particular word? It's a word that, for most English speakers, is used a lot, in many different ways. We talk about having a family, visiting family, the family car, family dinner, and we use a lot of words that derive from it, like familiar and familial. But that word, family, has taken an interesting route to get where it is today. It comes from Latin, and it was a very common word for Latin speakers thousands of years ago, too - but with a meaning that will seem very different. In Latin, familia means "slave." The word for the people you were closely related to and lived in your household was totally different. The familia were those servants that made the home work, doing the essential things that nobody would have been able to live without.

It's an odd thing, then, that over time that word came to be the one we use for the people we're closest to. Or maybe it isn't. Family is a fraught word for most people. Sometimes they do feel like they're slaves to family, forced to do things they don't want to for people they don't necessarily care for. Other times, it's family that makes life work, and without them you couldn't have made it.

There's no question that the Bible uses the language of family to describe what should result from being part of a faith community. But in what way, and what kind? And what definitions or versions of family are not God's intent? In this Spotlight, we'll explore the ways that the community God's love produces will hopefully be personally intimate and connected, a.k.a. familial, as well as have a sense of something you always knew and were meant to know, a.k.a. familiar. Where these are happening, the church is putting out the kind of community it was meant to foster and encourage.