If we are to get our understanding of church right, I’ve contended that we need to start with who God says He is. We work from the vocabulary that God himself chooses, look at the actions God has taken that flow from that revelation and let that inform the identity of the church and its mission.

‘Our Father’ is an excellent starting point not just for prayer but for our self-understanding. And try as you might you can’t and shouldn’t separate a Father from their family.

If it was simply a household we might be servants and God our Master (which is true), or a nation in which we are citizens and God is our King (also true) but God is also, wonderfully & significantly, a Father.

This identity that God is Father results in one of the key benefits of faith in Christ: adoption. The destiny of all those who place their faith in Christ is to be adopted (Eph 1:5) into God’s family.

The Spirit of God testifies with our Spirit that we are God’s children (Rom 8:16-17) and this brings a glorious freedom (Rom 8:21) and a wonderful inheritance as sons and heirs (Gal 4:7).

That is who God is and what God has done and as a result of both those things it is who we, the church are. Adopted children in the family of a Heavenly Father.

This shapes, or should shape, us in a multitude of ways. We recognise one another as brothers and sisters not according to the flesh but according to faith in Christ (2 Cor 5:16). We have been given life because of our Father, a home, a calling, an identity, a name (Eph 3:15).

We look for fathers in the church who can take care of their family well (1 Tim 3:4) because that is what our Father has done. We look for mothers who love and care for not just their own flesh (Rom 16:13).

And part of our mission is to extend the welcome of the Father to all who would come to Him.