Why Family Discipleship?
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.
Deuteronomy 6:5-7
The home is God’s Plan A for the discipleship of our kids. Mum and dad, no one will have a more profound influence on your children’s discipleship than you. For better or for worse, no one will influence your child towards - or away from - the things of God than you. This is God’s beautiful design for the home. That’s why family discipleship matters.
What is family discipleship?
Simply put, Family Discipleship is leading your home by doing whatever you can, whenever you can, to help your kids become friends and followers of Jesus. It’s seeing our homes be places where Christ is intentionally treasured. To help us think through this, we’ve adopted the Family Discipleship Framework. This framework takes what is ordinary, and it creates a sustainable rhythm of life together that fosters a culture that values spiritual growth above all. Rather than seeing this as something to add on, it’s going to call us to consider our ordinary rhythms of life and orient them towards treasuring Christ.
- Modelling: Serving as a godly example for your family. Personal spiritual life, Living out a genuine walk with Jesus. Demonstrating true repentance when and where you fall short.
- Time: Creating intentional time built into the rhythm of your daily life for the purpose of thinking about, talking about and living out the gospel.
- Moments: capturing and leveraging opportunities over the course of everyday life for the purpose of gospel centered conversations.
- Milestones: marking and making occasions to celebrate and commemorate significant spiritual milestones in the life of your family.
Every family is different and unique, but this framework can be applied regardless of the make-up of your home. And by God’s sovereign grace, may He move in the hearts and minds of the kids entrusted to us. May they see Him as He is: bigger and better than anything else.