Mission as Family — The Lk10 Vision of Vibrant Families of Jesus

Based on Luke 10:1-3 — “After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go.”

Jesus did not send them alone.

That detail — two by two — is easy to read past. It is easy to treat it as a logistical arrangement, a safety measure, a practical accommodation to the realities of first-century travel. But I think it is far more than that. I think it is one of the most quietly significant missional design decisions Jesus ever made.

He could have sent them individually — maximizing geographical coverage, deploying the maximum number of mission units across the maximum number of locations. By any rational efficiency calculation, solo sending makes more sense than paired sending when your goal is coverage.

But Jesus was not optimizing for coverage. He was modeling something. He was demonstrating, in the very structure of the sending, that mission is not an individual activity — it is a relational one. That the kingdom does not advance most powerfully through the lone, heroic, highly capable individual but through the specific, irreplaceable, mutually accountable, genuinely loving relationship of people who go together.

Two by two. Not one by one. Mission as relationship, from the very beginning.

The Lk10 community — founded by Kent Smith, Toni Daniels, and John White — has built its entire vision on this insight.

The vision is simple and radical in equal measure: vibrant families of Jesus within reach of everyone on the planet. Not churches within reach of everyone. Not programs within reach of everyone. Families — the specific, intimate, genuinely relational quality of community that the New Testament describes and that most expressions of Christianity have systematically failed to produce at scale.

Lois and I came to Lk10 with years of house church experience behind us — the Philippines gatherings, the Japan season, the Michigan home fellowship. We were not strangers to the organic church vision. But what Lk10 gave us that we had not fully articulated before was the specific language and the specific missional framework that brought the two by two principle into practical, daily, reproducible expression.

The family of Jesus is not a metaphor in the Lk10 vision. It is a functional reality — a small enough, intimate enough, genuinely relational enough community of believers to embody, in the midst of their neighborhood and their daily life, the actual quality of love and belonging and mutual formation that Jesus described as the primary evidence that His disciples were genuinely His.

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples — not by your doctrine, not by your church attendance, not by your moral performance — if you love one another. John 13:35.

Love one another. That is the mission strategy. That is the witness. That is the thing that Lk10 is training people to build — and that two by two sending is designed to embody from the very first step.

Frank Viola describes the family of God as the central image of the New Testament’s ecclesiology — more fundamental than any other metaphor for the church.

“The church is not primarily an organization,” he writes. “It is not primarily a movement, a mission society, a theological tradition, or a worship community. It is a family — the family of God, born of the same Father, sharing the same life, bearing the same name, called to embody in their life together the quality of love and belonging and mutual care that the world is desperately searching for and almost never finding inside religious institutions” (Reimagining Church, p. 231, Frank Viola).

The quality of love and belonging that the world is desperately searching for.

That is the missional power of the family of Jesus. Not its programs. Not its theology. Its love — genuine, costly, proximate, staying-in-the-room love that the world recognizes as something it has always wanted and rarely found.

When the family of Jesus is genuinely functioning — when two or three or twelve people are living in that quality of mutual love and genuine shared life — it becomes the most powerful missional force available. Not because it is strategically impressive. Because it is genuinely real. And genuine reality, in a world saturated with performance and pretense, is irresistible.

Bob Hamp connects the mission-as-family vision to the identity transformation that is the foundation of the entire Lifechoicely framework.

The reason mission is most powerful when it flows from family, he argues, is that family is the primary context in which identity is formed and transmitted. Children do not primarily learn who they are from programs or curricula. They learn from the consistent, proximate, daily presence of people who know them, love them, call out their gifts, name their identity, and model what the fully formed human life looks like.

“The family of Jesus,” Hamp writes, “is God’s primary formation environment. It is the context in which identity is received, tested, affirmed, and deepened — in which the new creation discovers what it actually means to live as a new creation, in genuine relationship with other new creations who are on the same journey. Mission that flows from that family context carries a quality that no program can replicate — because it is not driven by strategy or obligation but by the overflow of genuine love between people who are genuinely being formed together” (Think Differently, Live Differently, p. 435, Bob Hamp).

Overflow of genuine love between people who are genuinely being formed together.

That is the Lk10 vision in a sentence. And it is the vision that Lois and I have been living into — imperfectly, progressively, with the patient, unglamorous faithfulness of people who believe that God is building something through the small, genuine, two-by-two realities of our daily life that is more significant than anything we could produce through more impressive means.

Graham Cooke describes the family of Jesus as the primary context in which God’s nature is most fully revealed to a watching world.

“The world does not need more religious arguments,” he writes. “It does not need more theological propositions or moral imperatives or programmatic demonstrations of Christian activity. It needs to see what love actually looks like when it is genuinely lived — what it looks like when people who have been genuinely transformed by the love of God turn that love toward each other and toward their neighbors with the specific, costly, staying-in-the-room quality that Jesus modeled and that the world recognizes, somewhere deep in its hunger, as the thing it has always been looking for” (The Nature of God, p. 127, Graham Cooke).

The thing it has always been looking for.

That is the missional power of the family of Jesus. Not an argument for Christianity. A demonstration of it — lived out in the ordinary, daily, two-by-two reality of people who are genuinely, specifically, practically loving each other and their neighbors in the name and the power and the overflowing life of the Jesus who sent them.

John Eldredge describes the two-by-two sending as the structural embodiment of a theological conviction that runs through the entire New Testament:

You were not designed to do this alone.

“The lone ranger Christian,” he writes, “is not a New Testament figure. The New Testament knows nothing of the solitary believer who takes on the mission of God independently, without companions, without mutual accountability, without the specific, irreplaceable covering and complementarity of genuine partnership. Jesus sent them two by two not because mission is impossible alone — some things can be accomplished alone. But because the kind of mission He had in mind — the embodiment of the kingdom, the demonstration of genuine love, the building of the family of God — that kind requires at least two. It requires relationship. It requires the very thing it is trying to produce” (Fathered by God, p. 239, John Eldredge).

It requires the very thing it is trying to produce.

Mission as family requires family to do it. You cannot demonstrate the love of genuine community while operating as a solo unit. The medium is the message. The family of Jesus is both the method and the product of the mission Jesus has in mind.

In our Lk10 community, Lois and I have experienced what two-by-two mission looks like in the most personal and practical sense.

We are each other’s primary missional partner. Not just spouse and spouse — though that is the foundation. But genuinely sent together, carrying complementary gifts, covering each other’s blind spots, providing the specific quality of mutual accountability and mutual encouragement that the two-by-two principle was designed to produce.

When I am too much in my head — theologizing when I should be present, analyzing when I should be listening — Lois brings me back to the room, to the person, to the specific, proximate, relational reality of the mission that is happening right in front of us. And when she is carrying the weight of a caregiving season or a slow season in the ministry, I carry the theological framework and the forward vision that keeps us both oriented toward what God is doing.

We are better together. Not because we are perfectly complementary — we are not. But because we are genuinely committed to each other and to the mission, and the commitment produces a quality of shared presence and shared fruitfulness that neither of us could produce alone.

That is the two-by-two principle lived out. And it is available to every believer — not just to married couples, but to any two people who are willing to commit to genuine, mutual, mission-oriented relationship in the name of the Jesus who sends them together.

The Lk10 training that Lois and I are part of is built around equipping ordinary believers to build these vibrant families of Jesus in their specific, ordinary, daily contexts.

Not in foreign mission fields only — though that is included. In neighborhoods. In workplaces. In the spaces between other obligations where the people of peace are already waiting, already hungry, already carrying the unnamed longing for the genuine family of God that they have not yet found.

The training is not about technique. It is about formation — the ongoing, community-sustained, Spirit-led formation of people who are becoming the kind of families of Jesus that can actually embody and transmit the kingdom in the specific places God has sent them.

And the vision — vibrant families of Jesus within reach of everyone on the planet — is not a utopian dream. It is a reproducible, Spirit-empowered, two-by-two-grounded reality that is happening right now, in living rooms and around kitchen tables and in the ordinary daily life of ordinary believers who have simply said yes to the sending.

Including ours.

Including, perhaps, yours.

TAKEAWAY LESSON:

Jesus sent them two by two because mission is relational before it is strategic. The family of Jesus is not just the context for mission — it is the content of mission. Build the genuine, loving, mutually formed family of Jesus in your specific daily context, and you will have built the most powerful missional force available. You were never meant to go alone.

Two by Two Practice: Identify one person with whom you could commit to a genuine two-by-two missional partnership — not a program partnership but a relational one. Someone who complements your gifts, who covers your blind spots, who is willing to go together into the specific context God has placed you both in. Reach out to them this week. Begin the conversation. Let the partnership form around genuine relationship and genuine shared calling.

— Ed Baulete Lifechoicely.com