3 Reasons To Have A Family Ministry in your Church

There are moments when you realize everyone around you is asking the same question.

I believe that has been happening for over a decade within the Youth Ministry and Children’s Ministry Nation.

It was as if we collectively woke up and said, “We need to minister to the whole family, not just the kid.”

This immediately spawned a new question, “So how do we do that?”

Answering that question has now become my life’s work. It is the reason I created Ministry to Parents.

Everything changed for me when a ministry mentor challenged me. He leaned forward and said, “Stop praying to see teenagers become Christians, but ask God to use your ministry to give teenagers a Christian family.”

I began to re-think everything about the way I led my student ministry.

Here are 3 game changers that happen in your ministry when you focus on Parent Ministry:

#1 You Follow God’s Blueprint

When you study the Old Testament you see clearly that God’s Plan for passing down faith was to pass it down through the family from generation to generation.

In Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the pace was set in a section of Scripture referred to as the Shema. It tells parents to teach their children God’s Word and God’s Ways.

I am just crazy enough to believe that there is still an unexplored territory in the frontier of student ministry and children’s ministry. I don’t think the whole book has been written.

In fact, I believe God is calling us to focus on family ministry to bring balance to all the years we ignored them.

Since the beginning of student ministry in the 1940’s and 1950’s we have spent over 70 years focusing on teenagers and learning how to connect to them. Let’s spend the next 700 years teaching their parents what we know, and setting them up to connect with their teenager on a spiritual level.

The Shema has said for generations what recent research has affirmed. The parents are the greatest spiritual influence in the life of a teenager, not us.

#2 You Discover that Parents are Needy

When I began shifting the attention in my ministry to parents I did so with fear and trembling. I had never parented a teenager, and I had just begun parenting children. I do not have a Phd in Child and Adolescent Development. Why would they listen to me?

I was genuinely shocked by what happened. The parents I served welcomed me as a voice of encouragement in their life with open arms.

As I got to know the parents of my students I saw great amounts of discouragement and confusion in their lives. They longed for someone to come alongside of them and say, “It’s going to be OK. You can do this. Talk to me about it, let me pray for you, and I want you to know you are not alone.”

Parents in your ministry don’t desire more knowledge from you. They can Google all the parenting tips in the world. What they are hungering for is encouragement.

I approached the parents in my ministry with the same love and attention that I gave to the students in my ministry. When I did that, I instantly began my parent ministry without even realizing it.

#3 You Identify Spiritual Orphans

The bonus that came from focusing on parent ministry was how it opened a new door to the students who’s parents did not come to church.

One of the big critiques I often hear from folks who do not value parent ministry is, “When you focus on the parents of students, you are leaving out the students whose parents don’t go to church. It’s not fair.”

I disagree.

What is not fair is to have a room full of students and never take the time to determine who’s parents are involved and who has no spiritual support in their family.

Here is a test for you. Do you have a list somewhere of the students in your ministry whose parents do not support them spiritually?

I believe you should.

When I encouraged and engaged the parents in our church’s ministry I was easily able to determine which students had spiritual support from their family and which ones didn’t.

The ones that did not get spiritual support from home became a special group. They were the “spiritual orphans”.

We need to focus on parent ministry so we can stand in the gap for the spiritual orphans that are in our church every week.

We can’t help the spiritual orphans if we don’t know who they are.

MORE THAN A NEWSLETTER…

My challenge to you is to creatively pursue the parents in your ministry. Give them more than a newsletter and a seminar. Give them a dream to believe in of what God can do in the life of their kid if they had parents who engaged them spiritually.

Inspire them, don’t guilt them. Help them, don’t say, “it’s your job, now go do it”. Lead the parents in your ministry by showing them how to be the minister to their own kid.

Give them a strategic way to pass down their faith to their children. Everything will change in your ministry when you stop fighting against the parents in your ministry and you start fighting for them.

Jeremy Lee is the founder of Ministry to Parents, co-author of Pass It On and has more than twenty-four years of ministry experience. He is passionate about helping ministers create strategic plans for connecting with the parents in their church. He lives outside Nashville, Tn with his wife Elisabeth and two sons. You can contact Jeremy at www.ministrytoparents.com.