What is the role of the pastor’s wife? Amber Williams and Karen Cheong serve faithfully as members of Sojourn Church Midtown in inner-city Louisville, Kentucky, and they join Timothy Paul Jones to discuss the unique role that the pastor’s wife plays in the urban church. For more information about Sojourn Church Midtown, please go to […]
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Family Ministry: Why the Church Needs Single Parents and Single Parents Need the Church
Some time back, I was interviewed by Ruth Moon Mari for an article on single parents and the church. Here’s an excerpt from the article.
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Family Ministry: The Simplicity of Family Discipleship
How does family discipleship happen? The same way that we “disciple” our children in certain sports and certain teams. Read this brief post to find out how to form your children’s souls in the same way you form their preferences in sports.
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Sermon: Learning to Live in Awe
“For this reason,” Paul declared in his letter to the Ephesians, “I fall to my knees before the Father” (3:14). When people fall to their knees in the Bible, we tend to assume that the primary purpose of their prostration is prayer—and that was indeed part of what Paul was expressing here. But that’s not […]
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Family Ministry: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We Might Go
The first family ministry book I ever read was Family-Based Youth Ministry by Mark DeVries. My first response was to reject family ministry as a preposterous idea in my particular context. It took two years for the struggles of ministry and the work of the Holy Spirit to change my mind.
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Family Ministry: Caring for Your Pastor’s Children
Pastors’ children see the best and the worst of the church. My father served as a pastor throughout much of my childhood, and my oldest daughter spent her first several years in our household as a pastor’s child. Although I no longer serve as a paid pastoral staff member, I teach and preach frequently in […]
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Leadership: “No, You Idiot, Your Team at Home …”
Dayton Moore, general manager of the Kansas City Royals, had a friend who asked him from time to time how his team was doing. Moore would begin talking about his baseball team and the friend would respond, “No, you idiot, … your team at home”—reminding Moore that his faithfulness as a husband and father mattered […]
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Family Ministry: The First Step Toward Launching Your Church’s Family Ministry
Strangely enough, the hardest first step toward family-equipping ministry for most churches is not an organizational step. The hardest step and the first step, when a church catches the vision for family ministry, is to draw the staff together to make sure that the staff is doing, in their homes, what they’re going to ask […]
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Family Ministry: Three Motivations to Avoid
Jason K. Allen, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has written recently on various facets of parenting. He encourages parents to avoid three specific motivations: ambition, fear and pride. He concludes: Parenting is the most enjoyable and exhilarating responsibility I know. I feel as though I am getting to create, invest, sculpt, build, and nurture […]
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Family Ministry: Training to Launch Your Church’s Family Ministry
Have you ever wondered how to promote a family ministry model in your church? Perhaps you’re just curious about what family ministry is all about. Whether you’re ready to dive in or just testing the waters, RightNow Media and I have partnered together to provide a practical online course to help those who might […]
[Read More...]Family Ministry: How Paul’s Teachings About the Family Apply Today
Not long ago, I shared with Christianity.com some thoughts about how Christians can apply Paul’s teaching in their homes. Paul established a priority-changing paradigm for marriages and families in Ephesians 5 and 6. He invited parents to view their task not simply as behavioral management but as gospel proclamation, viewing their children not only as […]
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Family Ministry: How Pastors Can Care for Their Children
Chap Bettis, executive director of The Apollos Project, previously wrote on ways in which church members can participate in the task of helping pastors shepherd their children. In a recent post, he directly engages pastors and offers practical ways to help them guard their children from church burnout and instill in them a love for the gospel […]
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Family Ministry: Caring for Your Pastor’s Kids
Chap Betts, executive director of The Apollos Project, provides a grace-saturated way to encourage your pastor and minister to his children. He states: “Too many children of pastors are casualties in the spiritual battle. After seeing the inner workings of the church, many do not want anything to do with the Lord or his people. […]
[Read More...]Family Ministry: Growth, Retention, and Gospel-Motivated Ministry
Sometimes, when a ministry makes much of Jesus and the gospel, the results do include numeric gains or stellar retention rates. Seven weeks after Jesus erupted alive from a garden tomb, three thousand women and men confessed Jesus as the risen Lord, and the congregation still kept growing (Acts 2:41–47). Before long, well over five […]
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Family Ministry: Family Discipleship in the Middle Ages and Reformation
With the dawning of imperial favor in the early fourth century and the crumbling of the Roman Empire in the fifth, the primary locus of Christian practice drifted from homes to dedicated institutional structures. Especially in the early Middle Ages, there appears to have been a loss of the ancient model for discipleship in families. […]
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Family Ministry: An Ancient Christian Perspective on Family Ministry
This model for family ministry not only began before Paul’s generation but also persisted far beyond the lifetimes of the first followers of Jesus. Didache and Letter of Barnabas provide summaries of Christian practices that date to the first and second centuries A.D. Both of these writings include an identical command for parents—a command […]
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Family Ministry: Building a Biblical Model for Your Church’s Family Ministry
So what does it mean to build a family ministry model for your church? And how can we be certain our model is biblical? Taking a moment to consider the meaning of a “model” in other fields of study may be helpful here. In other fields of study, a model must meet three criteria: (1) […]
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Family Ministry: When Inviting Parents Isn’t Enough
How can your ministry equip parents with the resources they need? In the first place, help parents to see that if they are believers in Jesus Christ, God has already equipped them with his Spirit, his Word, and the community of faith (John 16:12–14; Eph. 4:11–16; 2 Tim. 3:16–17; Heb. 13:21). Through these gifts from […]
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Family Ministry: Why Going Far Requires Us First to Go Near
Family ministry is not a series of activities. Family-equipping ministry in particular flows out of an identity that begins in the homes of ministry leaders. But this doesn’t mean that equipping families should become the identity that drives our ministry. Jesus alone is our identity, and his gospel is our story. Anything more or less […]
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Family Ministry: Stop Inviting and Start Involving
Without thinking too hard, you could probably tell me exactly who they are. In many smaller and mid-sized ministries, you wouldn’t even need two hands to tally them. What we’re talking about are the parents who will actually be present at a typical youth or children’s event. What about all the other parents? Well, like […]
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