Get Your Pretense On!

136 • Get Your Pretense On!

The Concept of Evangelism, the Family, and Oikos Oikos relates to the most effective way we can engage our urban communities that communicates the Gospel in a credible, effective, and non-invasive manner. When we look at the Scriptures, one of the first things we find is the notion of family , the place of our parental lineage and historical descent. Patria is one of the most common concepts in our New Testament. For instance, Joseph is of the patria of David, Luke 2.4, and God’s promise to us is that all the families ( patria ) of the earth will be blessed in Abraham (cf. Acts 3.25). Almighty God is our Father, from whom the entire ( patria ) in heaven and earth is named (Eph. 3.14-15). Truly, God has placed all human beings in a patria , a network of relationships and kinship that is constituted by our physical and parental lineage . One of the great concepts of the Bible is that through our belief in Christ as Savior and Lord, we are made members of the very family of God (1 John 3.1-3), one which we can only enter through a new birth effected by our faith in Christ (John 1.12-13). Our “natural” state before our sonship and daughterhood in the Father through Christ, is our relationship to God’s enemy Satan. Those who do not believe are referred to as children of the devil (John 8.44; 1 John 3.10), as children of wrath (Eph. 2.1-3), children of disobedience (Col. 3.6), and children of Adam (Rom. 5.12-21). All of these associations speak to our need to be born from above, from God’s own life through faith in Christ through the Gospel (Rom. 10.9-10).

Note Paul’s rendering of this concept to the Galatians:

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, [26] for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. [27] For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. [28] There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in