Leadership Thoughts: Family and Ministry

As I have spent the last 6 years of my life focused on family and ministry, I have found great wisdom in the fact that God established the family first, in the Old Testament, and the church second, in the New Testament, as the primary means by which He intended truth to be passed form one generation to the next. The primary wisdom there is that family must come first in Family Ministry.
That is why the primary event this summer was the birth of our fourth child Aaron Gabriel Marcus Ward. Our children are our most precious gift from God, after our own salvation, and I believe the way we view family says a lot about the way we view ministry. I think it is important that we view families, particularly large families as a blessing and that we ought to honor multi-generational families.
Not only in the way we view families, but also the way we lead our families says a lot about the way we view ministry. We, as leaders, must make the investment that we are calling others to make. We must be leading our families spiritually, through family worship, bible reading, prayer and formal discipleship, as age appropriate.
The other important fact that we must remember is that anyone can lead a church, but I am the only man in the universe that can be the husband of my wife and the father of my children. God established the family first and the church second. Therefore, when He calls you to church ministry that does not allow you to abdicate your Family Ministry. For a generation we were told that was right and that was part of the sacrifice that had to be made by a minister and his family. We see now that produced a deadly trend both in our churches and in our homes.
That leads to the next big idea about Family Ministry. Ministry has to be about people, not running the organizational machine. In recent days there have been a lot of discussion in Baptist circles about the Great Commission Resurgence. I think the reason it resonates with so many is that they feel disconnected from the organizational machine that is their local church and denomination. Somewhere in our production mentality and event driven ministry models we have lost the idea that ministry is about people.
The church is people. The ministry of Jesus was always about people and never about position, power, or programming. His ministry was not about self-promotion and self-protection. It was about service and sacrifice.
Family Ministry is investment in people. When we set our focus on ideas like generational faithfulness, we begin to make investments in people and not in institutions and organizational structures. We begin to see those things for what they are, simply a means to an end. Some people find it hard to invest in this kind of real ministry because it is not cool and does not produce numbers and other tangible results. I guess that is why Jesus fed the crowd with a few pieces of fish and bread from a small boys lunch.
Finally, people represent families, no matter how “normal” or broken they may be, and all people have an innate desire to be connected to a family. At the deepest level, our people long to be connected, and their deepest need for connection is between parents and their children, and God the Father and his children. That is why the church is most often spoken of in the NT as a family, and why the church must function as a family, working as an extended family where generational faithfulness is promoted; where older men mentor younger men, and fathers disciple their sons and mothers disciple their daughters.
We must not neglect the missional aspect of Family Ministry. There is a generation of people out there who do not have believing parents, or even parents who live at home. They are lost and without father and mothers. The church must be a family to them. That is why the heart of the gospel is the heart of adoption. We must take the widows (single moms) and orphans (kids from broken homes) into the family of God, into our church family and into our personal families. We must invest in those lives and reach out through them to their families and work to restore what has been broken in this world back to newness of life in Christ.