I want to remind you what we mean by Family Ministry and why we are pursuing it. The Elders and other ministry leaders have prayed and listened to thought leaders in this field for the last two or three years. These have challenged our thinking and caused us to aim at reworking our approach. God greatly used traditional student and children’s ministry approaches for the last two generations in many of our lives, but they may leave out an important Biblical focus this thought reveals. 

Even active students receive only forty hours or so of biblical instruction each year from their churches. Parents, on the other hand, have more than three thousand hours a year in which they’re constantly ‘teaching’ their children in some way! Our church recognized that—if we wanted to see an emerging generation that loves God with everything in them—we would have to redirect our ministry’s time and energies toward equipping parents to impress truth in their children’s lives day-by-day.” — Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples by Timothy Paul Jones

The same resource defines family ministry in this way: 

The process of intentionally and persistently coordinating a ministry’s proclamation and practices so that parents are acknowledged, trained, and held accountable as primary disciple-makers in their children’s lives.” He goes on to say that this, “is less about a particular program and more about how we can redeploy the programs that we already have.”

That’s an important point: we are not undoing the approaches to student and children’s ministries we already pursue. Rather, we seek to rework them so that they have a greater focus on training and equipping parents to impress the gospel in the everyday lives of their children. Also, this approach does not attempt to manipulate parents into serving in existing student and children’s ministries who don’t feel that they can serve in those areas. Rather, it aims at how parents specifically and all of us generally influence children outside of church activities. 

You can hear more about my heart toward this ministry in a message I preached at Bethany Placed in February called Why We Must Be In the Family Ministry Business. You can also listen to a message called Kids in the Kingdom by Dr. Ryan Steenburg who preached in our services in August 2019 on this subject.