Family Shepherds 3

Meet The Joneses

Family Shepherds (By the author of Family Driven Faith): Calling and Equipping Men to Lead Their Homes Chapter Three

Meet the Joneses—a typical churchgoing American family.

Ken and Barbara Jones are longtime members of Third Baptist Church. They’ve been married fifteen years and have three children. Their daughter Susie is thirteen. She’s in seventh grade, active in the church youth ministry, and just starting to spread her wings. Their only son, Billy, is ten. He’s not big on church. He is, however, active in Scouts, Little League, and all things PlayStation. Their daughter Amy is seven. At church, she’s the apple of the children’s director’s eye. She absolutely loves going to church, and cannot wait until Vacation Bible School comes back around.

Barbara Jones is a pillar in the church. She’s active in Bible Study Fellowship and women’s ministry, and has been through Bible studies by Beth Moore, Martha Peace, Kay Arthur, and others. She’s a stay-at-home mom with a busy social calendar, but she keeps a journal, does daily devotions, and always has time for her prayer circle. She’s the unquestioned spiritual leader of the Jones family.

Ken Jones is a good guy. He’s a successful businessman, a devoted husband and father, and a deacon at their church. Ken is not “superspiritual,” but he loves the Lord and always makes sure he has his family in church. Last summer he even went on a mission trip to Mexico with the youth ministry and helped put a roof on a church building there.

On the surface, the Joneses are the epitome of the solid Christian family. No one would even think to challenge, let alone question, the Joneses’ commitment to the Lord and his church. However, the Joneses are precisely the kind of family that led me to write this book. This is the typical family I’ve had to counsel numerous times as a pastor.

Barbara is that woman whose constant refrain before the throne of God has been, “Lord, please give my husband a desire and the ability to lead us.” She sees the inadequacy and impropriety of her own spiritual leadership in their home. She sees the strain on their marriage and the long-term impact on their children. What she doesn’t see is how they got to where they are—or how they can ever escape.

SEPARATION AT HOME

When we look closer at the Jones family, we quickly learn that Ken and Barbara barely know their children. The family’s lifestyle is rife with today’s typical cultural patterns that separate parents from children both at home and at church. These patterns usually go unnoticed by Christian families until a crisis arises, or until the family is actually forced together.

The Jones family is a sad but all-too-familiar example of the separation that has come to characterize life for the typical American Christian. Mom and Dad each run off to work eight to ten hours a day (often more, when you include drive time), while the children are off at school. Then come their extracurricular activities—sports, Scouts, music and dance lessons, and many more. The parents serve as chauffeurs driving children from activity to activity, but they rarely engage the children spiritually.

At home, they rarely take meals together. And like the typical Christian family of the last century and more, they’ve never engaged in regular family worship, nor does the idea ever cross their minds.

If you were to walk in on the Joneses during a typical evening, you would find each member of the family in a different room (often in front of a different electronic device), immersed in a different world. Dad’s on the couch watching SportsCenter, Mom’s getting the children’s clothes prepared for the next day, Susie’s chatting on Facebook, Billy’s playing video games, and young Amy is reading the latest Harry Potter novel on her mother’s Kindle.

It’s not that the members of this family are engaging in “sinful” activities; the problem’s deeper than that. The problem is that this family is in the same house, but they never share the same space. They share an address and a last name, but they don’t share life.

If Joneses can’t experience community at home would they experience it in the church?

Family Shepherds (By the author of Family Driven Faith): Calling and Equipping Men to Lead Their Homes Chapter Three

The passive and more subtle usurpation of spiritual authority is Mr. Jones’s complete absence in the spiritual development of his children. This is what gives the greatest strength to the active usurpation. It was not Mr. Jones, but the children’s minister and youth minister who decided what direction his children’s discipleship should take. Mr. Jones did not catechize his children, or lead them in family worship, or communicate a clear vision for their spiritual development. What he did communicate to them was this: “The professional ministers at church are your spiritual leaders; they’re the ones to whom you must look for vision, direction, and guidance.”

Breaking The Cycle

Once we help Mr. Jones see his proper role and responsibility as a family shepherd, how do we then give him the tools, motivation, confidence, and accountability he needs in order to step into that role and succeed?

What follows is a simple four-part approach designed to show the Mr. Joneses of the world that it can be done.

Those four parts are

(1) family evangelism and discipleship,

(2) marriage enrichment,

(3) child training, and

(4) lifestyle evaluation.

Each of these will be addressed in a separate section of this book; for now, let’s introduce each one.

FAMILY EVANGELISM AND DISCIPLESHIP

Our goal in the first section of this process is to equip and strengthen men in the basics of family evangelism and discipleship.

Stated most simply, we want men to understand the gospel and be able to communicate it at home.

Here we emphasize family worship, catechism, personal evangelism, and apologetics as foundational tools necessary to do the work of making much of Christ at home.

We also emphasize the importance of taking the message to our neighbors and extended family through the ministry of hospitality.

MARRIAGE ENRICHMENT

When the Joneses first understand and adopt an emphasis on family discipleship, any weaknesses in their marriage that may have gone unaddressed or unnoticed will likely come to the surface.

Men who have neglected their responsibilities as their family’s priest, prophet, provider, and protector will often experience pushback from their wives when they suddenly stand up to lead.

It’s therefore important that we help men understand what biblical leadership in the home looks like and how to exercise it in a Christ-honoring manner.

Every man is a leader in his home and marriage. He may have been a poor leader, but he’s a leader nonetheless.

As a result, a man who has led his wife poorly will encounter the fruit of that bad leadership when he first makes an effort to lead her well.

CHILD TRAINING

Parents like the Joneses have usually spent very little time with their children.

In many cases the children have spent the lion’s share of their weekdays in daycare and then school, and a big part of their Sundays in nursery, then children’s church, then youth ministry.

Therefore many parents simply don’t know what their children’s spiritual needs are, let alone how to deal with them.

Family shepherding thrusts parents into an environment where they’re forced to change. The result can be something I call Vacation Syndrome.

Vacation Syndrome is similar to that major meltdown many families experience after the euphoria of the last day of school has worn off.

Children who before were gone all day are now in close contact every day with one another and their parents, and eventually sparks will fly. By summer’s end they’re all at each other’s throats, and Mom and Dad can’t wait for school to start back again.

But what happens if this change is permanent? What happens when you make a decision that will put you in close contact with no relief in sight? Suddenly those issues that are often swept under the rug have to be dealt with.

Parents now actually have to discipline their children; they have to train them.

This section comes with a warning and a promise.

The warning: be prepared to see yourself and your children in a whole new (not-so-attractive) light.

The promise: it’s better to see, know, and address the sin than to pass the buck and fail to engage and disciple your children.

LIFESTYLE EVALUATsION

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of our family shepherds overhaul is this last section, where we tackle lifestyle evaluation.

Here we’ll challenge men to ask hard questions that are rarely asked. Then we do the unthinkable—we take the next step and encourage men to actually answer those tough questions.

They’re questions like these:

Do you watch too much television?

Is your family spread too thin as you run back and forth from soccer to ballet to tennis to piano to whatever else happens to be going on?

Is your mortgage too big? Are you carrying too much debt?

These questions are rarely asked, let alone answered. However, when men decide that it’s time for them to engage in shepherding their families, they often come to a point of crisis where they realize they simply don’t have time and resources; adjustments must be made; something has to give.

Unfortunately, that something tends to be the spiritual commitment that started the process. Men need help to avoid that all-too-likely scenario.

Lifestyle evaluation is a painful yet necessary process. In fact, you could say that this entire book is one big lifestyle evaluation. If you’re a father and family shepherd, you must evaluate your lifestyle in each of these four areas with a view toward bringing your life into conformity with that which God requires of you.

Your love for the Lord, your belief in the gospel, and your pity for your family should compel you to take honest inventory and lay yourself bare before the Lord, knowing that he alone can give you what you need to bear fruit in these areas.

What lies ahead in this book is a call to repentance and faith.

Let us repent of our lack of leadership in our homes, and let us look ahead in faith, believing that God “will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten” (Joel 2:25).