Family Ministry Field Guide Quotes

“Other leaders center on those who are far, designing their programs to bypass parents and reach children whose families are fractured and fragmented. The problem is this focus on reaching children directly can become so thoroughgoing that the church never explicitly expects any parents— even Christian parents—to disciple their children.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“The principle is simply this: What you accomplish for God beyond your home will typically never be greater than what you practice with God within your home.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“its simplest definition, family-equipping ministry simply means coordinating every aspect of your present ministry so that parents are acknowledged, equipped, and held accountable as primary disciple-makers in their children’s lives. Family-equipping”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“am not suggesting that successes in academics, athletics, or vocation somehow stand outside God’s good plan. Learning and play are joys that God himself wove into the very fabric of creation. Although cursed in the fall, work was also part of God’s good design before the fall (Gen. 2:15; 3:17–23). And yet, whenever any activity, however good it may be, becomes amplified to the point that no time remains for family members to disciple one another, a divinely designed joy has been distorted into a hell-spawned idol. God”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“This faulty model places the professional minister at the center and makes gaining and retaining students the goal. In the case of student ministry, it turns youth group into a holding pattern for the church’s future instead of calling students to live as servants of the gospel in their community of faith here and now.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“The overwhelming majority of Christian parents are not actively engaged in any sort of battle for their children’s souls. When it comes to the process of discipling their progeny, most Christian parents—especially fathers—have abandoned the field.”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples

“When I sit at that table with my daughter, building on a week of family devotions and father-daughter discussions, I am at war. This is not war with my daughter; it is war for my child’s soul. Even as I train Hannah to take up her cross and root her identity in Jesus Christ, the surrounding culture calls her to celebrate immaturity, smirk at sin, and center her passions on pleasures that will slip away. This”
― Timothy Paul Jones, Family Ministry Field Guide: how your church can equip parents to make disciples