Building Tools for Family Discipleship - Big Ideas for Little Churches & Little Ideas for Serving a Big God

In the Spring of 2018, I had an idea.

School was about to let out for the summer, and I noticed families getting so excited about the Summer Reading Challenge calendars that our local library was distributing. And it made sense.

Parents want to teach and lead their children, but often don’t know how to start. The library was giving parents a tool to motivate and encourage their children to read more, and it was a welcome resource.

Families about to enter a new season often take the opportunity to take inventory on their priorities, and make goals for what comes next. Summer, especially, can look long and intimidating as parents think about losing the routine and structure of school. What will they do with all those hours? How will they make the most of it? How will they keep their kids busy so they don’t drive us crazy??

So that first Summer, I made our first “Family Discipleship Kit” — tools for encouraging and equipping parents in leading their families in worship, discipling their children, and modeling a Christian walk.

The kit was hilariously elaborate in retrospect. It had:

Summer Bucket List BINGO (Try to get seven activities in a row!)
Journal to help guide parents and children respond to the lesson, prayer, and recording their memories.
Bible Bookmark for kids to mark their Bible for Sunday School each week. (1 per child)
12 Mystery Packages – to help families do a specific activity each week. (12 packages/per family)
12 weeks of lessons. Each lesson included:
- Monday: Read & Discuss – A short Bible reading assignment (usually about 15 verses) and discussion question
- Tuesday: Memory Verse – A new verse to memorize each week
- Wednesday: Activity – A family activity or project that uses one of the “Mystery Packages” in the kit
- Thursday: Journal – Each child will receive their own journal.
- Friday or Saturday: Sunday Prep – A preview of what we will be learning in Sunday School. Parents were to use the enclosed bookmark to help their child mark the page they will be reading in their Bible on Sunday.
- D6 Conversation Starter – Each lesson also included a “D6 Conversation Starter” prompt that included instructions on how to envelope conversations about God into one of their family life rhythms.

Over time, I learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t… and most of the time what worked was just a FRACTION of all the content I created that first summer. But the root idea — that parents want to lead and teach their children and are looking for usable, trustworthy tools has stuck. We’ve published Family Discipleship Kits for almost 8 years and I am excited to share what I’ve learned (and continue to learn) through that process.

The Primary Goal

Our initial goal – and it remains our primary goal – of Family Discipleship Kits is to equip parents for the instruction of their children. Parents, obviously, have an important role in forming their child’s worldview.

“If children are not intentionally discipled by their parents, they may become disciples of things far less important than Jesus.”

I think most Christian parents agree with this, and want to do it, but don’t know where to start.

After all, of course engaging your child’s heart for Jesus is important… but it’s a really big job and life is really busy. For new Christians, especially, this can sound intimidating at best and impossible at worst.

But we know two truths: God has given parents the grace for this task, and if they lean on him, he will give them the wisdom and ability to do it.

Second, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. God is not asking parents to run a seminary in their living rooms. He’s not even asking them to teach a Sunday School class. He is just challenging parents to redeem everyday moments with their children. Read how God challenged the Israelites to internalize his commands in Deuteronomy 6:

“These commandments that I give you today are to be upon 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. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:6-9)

Notice how God highlighted everyday moments that are already happening: sitting at home, walking on the road, going to bed at night, getting up in the morning. God is saying, “live your life…but be intentional.”

A child’s Sunday School teacher gets to see them one hour a week, and that’s a special time. But parents get to put them to bed every night, and that is a special time too. It is the daily rhythms of family life that are soaked in opportunity for conversations about God. Discipleship can happen in a formal Family Worship setting, but it is certainly not limited to it.

The goal of a church’s Children’s Ministry is to come along aside parents in this project of building worldviews. Family Discipleship Kits are a tool to help families adopt Bible Study, prayer, and discussions about God into these daily rhythms.

The Secondary Goal

After developing these Family Discipleship Kits over the course of a few years, I realized that I was doing a ton of work for three families. Which was fine, obviously. But, it did make me consider – could members of our congregation benefit from Family Discipleship Kits, even if they didn’t have children in the home?

It was around this time that I first heard someone say, “We want the church to be more like a family and the family to be more like a church.”

It was at this point that I widened the scope of Family Discipleship Kits to be usable by the entire church family – including the homes that didn’t have children. We encouraged everyone to participate so that the empty nesters, widows, and single college students could be studying the same things at the families with children.

I have found that this audience has enjoyed the Family Discipleship Kits even more than the parents! Perhaps it has something to do with more spare time! But it also invites these individuals into the mission of discipling children, if even in a passive way. It’s turned out to be a real blessing.

The Warning

This Family Discipleship Kit is a tool. But I always try to emphasize to our congregation that it is just a tool. These kits are not meant to feel like a burden. The gospel is about grace, not rules. Jesus has already done the work of salvation, so we don’t have to do anything. So I always encourage families to not view this kit as a homework assignment or something that they have to do in order to be discipling their kids.

If they find some of the activities or lessons too intense, they can feel free to skip them. If they want to do just half of the weeks, that’s fine. Want to do one section a day? Go for it! Want to do all the sections one afternoon? That’s ok too. Families might want to do the reading after dinner one night, the discussion questions on a lazy afternoon, and skip the sticker chart. It’s all up to them. The parents know their own family and schedule best.

Along these same lines, I remind them to not punish themselves with guilt if they start out strong but fall off the wagon in the middle of the study. Just like all battles of self-discipline, expect a few false starts – but embrace the opportunity to start again fresh each week.

And if a family doesn’t don’t end up using a Family Discipleship Kit at all, we invite them to reflect on what would be the best way to better incorporate God’s Word into their family life. How could they pursue something that sounds like Deuteronomy 6:6-9?