LOYD IS THE country’s foremost spy, a master of disguise. His current undercover assignment requires that he pose as a psychiatrist and family man, which means finding people to play the role of his wife and child without knowing that he’s really a spy. He begins by recruiting young Anya from an orphanage — or rather, she recruits him, since unbeknownst to Loyd, Anya has telepathic powers as the result of a government experiment. Anya then manipulates Loyd into recruiting Yor as his pretend wife. Like Loyd and Anya, Yor also has a secret: although she works as a meek civil servant during the day, by night she is a martial arts master and an infamously deadly hired assassin.

This is Spy x Family, a popular Japanese manga and anime. The premise is hilariously outlandish. What makes it work, however, is the story’s heart, the trope known as found family. Whatever the specifics of the plot, what these stories share in common is that people who are not biologically related become family to one another. They develop a mutual sense of trust and affection, often filling a void left by their own troubled histories.

Not an anime fan? Then think of the popular Marvel franchise, Guardians of the Galaxy. If you know the story, you know that all of the characters have suffered tremendous trauma, loss, or abuse. But somehow, this gallery of rogues comes together as a team with a common purpose and a deep loyalty to one another. And it’s stories like these that shape our imaginations in a hope-filled direction: maybe, somewhere in the galaxy, there’s a family like that for me.

RECENTLY, I HAD the honor of delivering the so-called “Last Lecture” at our seminary, a tradition established at UCLA. The idea is that the students select a faculty member to give a lecture as if it were their last one. If you knew you only had one final opportunity to speak to the students, what wisdom would you share?

My message, essentially, was this: Don’t give up on the church. Many seminary students, unfortunately, have already had difficult and even traumatic experiences in congregations, including unresolved conflicts, mistreatment, and abuses of power. They are still carrying those emotional wounds and are often deeply ambivalent about church and congregational ministry.

The flip side of our disappointment is the hope that one day we’ll find the congregation that gets it, the place where you can be your flawed self and still be loved and accepted. When we speak of our “church family,” it’s more than mere metaphor, and for good reason. Both Jesus and the apostles spoke as if the relationships between believers should be family-like, a community of loyalty and love under one heavenly Father.

At the same time, the New Testament is also deeply realistic in its portrayal of these communities. Jesus’ own inner circle of disciples, for example, was an unreliable and sometimes thick-headed bunch. The apostle Paul planted a church in Corinth and later, when controversy erupted, was badly mistreated by them. The apostle John wrote to console and encourage those who were left behind when their community split over different understandings of the gospel. We may long for and hope to find the kind of community described in Acts 2. But we will never be done grappling with the challenges portrayed in the rest of the book of Acts and the epistles.

WE NEED TO keep an important distinction in mind. What we call “church” is first and foremost a theological reality, a creation of God through the Holy Spirit. That reality is only imperfectly embodied in local congregations — and in many cases, “imperfectly” is putting it nicely. But the apostle Paul, for example, was able to see past the surface realities of division and conflict in Corinth to the work of the Spirit in their midst. Despite the way the congregation had hurt him, he told them that if someone wanted a letter of reference representing his ministry, they themselves would be it:

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Cor 3:2-3, NIV)

Think about it: if you as a pastor had been mistreated by a congregation, would you be able to speak of them this way? Would you even be able to see them this way?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not in any way suggesting that we just shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh, well, that’s just how congregations are sometimes,” as if it didn’t matter. It does matter. The gospel is not simply something to be believed, but to be embodied in our relationships. We should want to do better; we should recognize and repent of our own inhumanity toward one another.

But we must do so with the realism of the New Testament itself. That doesn’t mean giving up on the hope of found family. It does mean, however, that such hope is always partly eschatological, the kind of hope that strives toward a promised future that we may not see fulfilled in our lifetime. Like Paul, we need to see through the messiness of congregational life to the deeper reality of church within, to the work of the Holy Spirit that flashes out here and there in the midst of a tribe of broken people.

When it comes to congregations, our goal should not be to “find” a church family — although I would indeed be happy for anyone who stumbled onto a warm and supportive congregation! But families aren’t found; they’re made. It takes intentionality. It takes covenant commitment. It requires risk. And yes, there may be times in which we must walk away or allow a ministry to dissolve. The church is eternal, but congregations are not.

What I hope, however, is that people don’t walk away under the influence of an idealized version of the found family narrative. The problem isn’t simply that we were looking in the wrong place by visiting a “bad” congregation. Every congregation, to a greater or lesser extent and in its own way, is a rogues gallery of people with checkered and secret histories.

So, bottom line: learn to look for the signs of the church that may be hidden in the messiness of a local congregation. And don’t try to “find” a family; look for ways to be family, to be the brother or sister to others that you wish others would be to you.