For most Muslims, to be truly free as an individual normally means to belong to community. As Muslims come to follow Jesus, ‘family’ concerns will be paramount. Believers will think and act plurally.
Around the Muslim world today there are many examples of such groups, growing amid pain, founded on the heads of families who are able, within their cultural contexts to help build a new family – the family of the church.
In the NT, as the church grew rapidly among Jewish communities, it is twice recorded that the number of men who converted or who comprised the community of ‘brothers’ was 3,000 or 5,000. Luke’s intention is not to suggest that there were no female nor young members included. It is simply that in such a society, decisions were group decisions, expressed through the senior male.
The gospel is at home in a culture which functions on a tribal or family basis.
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