Ron Hunter led the launch of the D6 Conference in 2009. Around 1,400 attendees heard the faith-at-home message in Dallas at that first D6 Conference. Over the next several years, more than ten thousand participants attended D6, and this yearly gathering developed into a catalytic conference for faith-at-home leaders.
As an author and conference speaker, I’ve been privileged to participate firsthand in many of the recent developments in the faith-at-home movement. Dozens of much-needed faith-at-home books have flooded the shelves during this time. Brian Haynes’ The Legacy Path has provided parents with an intentional plan for the discipleship of children, with milestones that mark each stage of their growth. Rob Rienow (Limited Church: Unlimited Kingdom) and Tim Kimmel (Connecting Church and Home) have provided practical strategies for partnerships with parents. Marty Machowski has filled a gap in quality family devotional resources with his books Long Story Short and Old Story New. My book Perspectives on Family Ministry identified three distinct ways that churches pursue faith-at-home ministry; Family Ministry Field Guide explored why parents don’t disciple their children and how churches can change their culture to equip parents for this task; and, Trained in the Fear of God articulated biblical and historical foundations for family ministry.
So, with all these resources available, what else is there to say?
I have crisscrossed four countries over the past few years, speaking to thousands of people about family ministry. In the process, I’ve glimpsed at least three gaps that still remain even among the people most committed to family ministry—and this book is meant to fill one of those gaps.
(1) The faith-at-home movement has flourished in contexts that are far whiter and wealthier than the world as a whole. God’s vision for His people is “a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language” with the walls broken down between them on the basis of the broken body of Christ (Ephesians 2:13-17; Revelation 7:9). Yet most of the churches that have successfully implemented family discipleship practices remain white and suburban. I’ve led family ministries in a multiplicity of low-income contexts, and I am mentoring doctoral students who are studying family ministry models in Korean and Hmong communities—but all of these projects are tiny drops in a vast bucket of need. We desperately need to know what effective faith-at-home ministries might look like in the inner-city congregations, in rural family chapels, in African American churches, among Native American peoples, and with first- and second-generation Hispanic believers.
(2) Parents need to be trained to equip their children to defend their faith in an increasingly hostile context. Apologetics resources for children are almost nonexistent. Nearly all of the apologetics resources for teenagers are designed to be taught at church, not at home. With the rapid growth of Islam and in a culture that increasingly demands not merely the toleration but the celebration of sexual immorality, children must be able to defend their faith—and the persons who are in the best position to equip children are their parents. Their parents are, after all, the ones who spend time with them day-by-day and who usually hear their questions first. That’s why, after the publication of this project and a book on church leadership, I am turning all of my efforts toward the development of apologetics strategies and content to train parents to equip their children to defend the Christian faith.
(3) Churches will slip back into previous unhealthy patterns unless they develop new approaches to support generational integration and family discipleship. In some cases, churches have spent so many years segregating generations and trying to disciple children without parents that they don’t know what else to do. They need ideas for different approaches to the ministries they have been doing for decades. That is why nearly every week, a church contacts me, asking, “What else can we do in this area of ministry?”—and that’s why I’ve developed this book.
Why This Book?
The purpose of this book is to provide a wide range of new approaches and patterns for each of your church’s ministries. Perhaps most important, each of the chapters has been authored by someone who is actively doing what they have describe in their chapter. These ideas are structured around what I believe to be the two key dynamics in faith-at-home ministry: family-as-church and church-as family.
