“Then he spoke to the children of Israel, saying: ‘When you children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, ‘What are these stones?’ then you shall let your children know…that all the peoples of the earth may know the hand of the LORD, that it is mighty, that you may fear the LORD your God forever.” Joshua 4:21-22a, 24 NKJV
Throughout biblical and church history up until the turn of the twentieth century, “a theology of family” was frequently preached and regularly taught whereas this terminology is rarely used anymore in the modern era (Rienow, 2013, pp. 147, 195). Foundational to this theology is the biblical reality, Rienow (2013) explains, that 1. God created families to be robust centers of intentional discipleship, 2. The purpose of parenting and grand parenting is to impress on the hearts of their progeny a love for God and His Word, and 3. God created the family as a dynamic engine central to world evangelization through the transforming power of multi-generational faithfulness (p. 147).
At the heart of this deliberate transmission of truth to the next generation is training young hearts and minds in the fear of God which is to be disciplined to live with reverence for an order that transcends immediate experience or comprehension (Stinson, 2011, p. 17). In other words, it is disciplined guidance that calls young people to seek the unseen ways of God’s mighty hand at work as demonstrated by lives of growing contentment, sanctification, and gospel-centeredness (Stinson, 2011, p. 17).
This spirit of deliberately passing on the faith to the next generation is the precedent of Holy Scripture and was shared by the early church fathers, revived during the Reformation era, and championed by the 17th century English Puritans.* Intentional family discipleship was reclaimed once again in recent decades after a degeneration of family ministry subsequent to the Industrial Revolution along with unprecedented cultural upheaval in the twentieth century.
*See the author’s four part series: “Family Ministry Throughout Church History” on GFM’s website linked below.
Prior to zeroing in on the modern revival of family ministry and its attendant models implemented in churches, it is necessary to analyze turn-of-the-century history of family ministry. This era was unique because on the heels of the Industrial Revolution and the proliferation of young people’s associations, the invention of adolescence and the rise of a teenage youth culture set the stage for what scholars describe as the comprehensive and programmatic models for family ministry in the twentieth century (Jones, 2009, pp. 28-29).
Comprehensive and Programmatic Family Ministry Models
By the turn of the twentieth century, it is fascinating to see that a single local church might have Sunday schools for each age group, mission societies, temperance leagues, youth prayer meetings, literary societies, and a Young People’s Association besides Christian Endeavor societies for youth and perhaps even one for children and adults too (Anthony, 2011, pp. 167-168). Peculiarly, it is noted that not only did Christian Endeavor societies function outside the church but so also did Sunday schools as the self-appointed nursery, feeder, and agency (Anthony, 2011, p. 168). Into this culture of the church did various approaches to family ministry attempt to strengthen the home and to reconstruct ruptured relationships as parents, particularly fathers, had released “the discipline of faults and the moral and religious education of children to the school, the state, and the church” (Anthony, 2011, pp. 168-169). At the heart of this historical analysis of the twentieth century’s comprehensive and programmatic family ministry models are the 1. Comprehensive-Coordinative Approach, 2. Segmented-Programmatic Approach, and 3. Educational-Programmatic Approach.
Comprehensive-coordinative approach. This family ministry model was one of the first modern attempts to coordinate church-based learning with home-based parent-led discipleship by equipping parents with resources and training to function as the primary disciple-makers of their children’s lives in and through the context of family life at home (Anthony, 2011, p. 169, 172). Timothy Paul Jones has traced the seminal roots of the comprehensive-coordinative approach in the modern era to the ministry of the late nineteenth century Vermont pastor, Samuel W. Dike (Stinson, 2011, p. 19). Dike established the Home Department for the purpose of calling parents back to their divinely ordained role as the primary disciple-makers in the lives of their children (Stinson, 2011, p. 155). Churches of the 1880s, Dike lamented, were
enriching [their own programs] of centralized activities at the expense of the home’s chance to cultivate family religion. Sunday-school sessions, missionary societies, temperance and other reformatory meetings, young people’s meetings, brotherhoods and guilds—each as it came in seized on some Sunday or week-day hour and appropriated it for the use of its own church-centered activity. The churches, in fact, have done for religious training what the factories had done for industrial training. They have taken it out of the home. (Dike as cited in Anthony, 2011, p. 169)
At the heart of Dike’s contention was not that the age-organized gatherings of church societies were not doing some good as they were making a positive difference, but rather, he contended that they had usurped the jurisdictional authority of the family who was primarily responsible for the initiation of these habits of religious training that should occur first and foremost in the Christian home (Anthony, 2011, p. 169). Eradicating these programs was never his desire as the full name of this initiative was “the Home Department of the Sunday School” (Stinson, 2011, p. 155).
The goal was to align existing church programs with Christian training in the homes through the planned strategy of ministers and laypeople being trained to visit the homes of church members, resourcing parents with curriculum, and equipping them to lead in family worship (Stinson, 2011, p. 155). The Home Department was declared in 1904 as the only invention of any importance that had been made in the last hundred years in the interests of the home as a religious force and by 1906 some 12,000 churches had one established in their respective ministries (Anthony, 2011, p. 169). Unfortunately, this growth also fueled considerable confusion regarding the purpose of the Home Department as Dike failed to publish a definitively clear statement of his plan until 1904 (Anthony, 2011, p. 169).
Many churches were mistaken in their thinking that the Home Department was a further development of W. A. Duncan’s “home classes” which were merely an attempt to boost Sunday school attendance by counting shut-ins who received the printed lessons and pledged to study them for at least thirty minutes every week (Stinson, 2011, p. 155). By 1920, a clear understanding of this misdirection was communicated by one church leader who declared that the “first big thing” needed in Schools was to reinstitute the original function of the Home Department as something more than a literature distribution ministry to shut-ins and rather an initiative to give parents a vision of the home as the finest education institution on earth and themselves as the child’s naturally best educators (Anthony, 2011, p. 170). This was merely wishful thinking that fell on deaf ears as Dike’s ministry continued to decline before expiring completely in a time when the pragmatic philosophy of efficiency, centralization, and professionalization were the watchwords of the day (Stinson, 2011, p. 156).
Segmented-programmatic approach. This family ministry model is characterized as having every program of the local church being segmented by age with very little interaction or continuity between them, yet united around a common goal but organizationally separated, as ministry to families is defined, explains Timothy Paul Jones, as having a separate program that tends to exists in a “silo” for each family member (Stinson, 2011, p. 20, 158). Segmented-programmatic ministry reflected the manifold changes that were transpiring in the larger American culture as well as the church itself during the late 1800s and well into the mid-1900s (Stinson, 2011, p. 20). These included the proliferation of public education with its tightly graded class structure, the fading pledge-based youth societies that were shifting to church-based gatherings, the industrialized efficiency movement, the rise of adolescence as a distinct culture comprised of teenage youth with economic clout after the Second World War, and the professionalization of ministry to youth through the influence of parachurch organizations like Young Life and Youth for Christ (Stinson, 2011, pp. 20, 156-157).
Dr. Alvin Reid, former chair of the Evangelism Department at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary poignantly notes in his book, Raising the Bar: Ministry to Youth in the New Millennium, that this professionalization has produced “the largest rise of full-time youth ministers in history [and] has been accompanied by the biggest decline in youth evangelism effectiveness” (Baucham, 2007, p. 185). Salvation is one thing but discipleship of the next generation in a full-orbed understanding of the Christian worldview rooted in Holy Scripture is quite another as Reid, an advocate of youth ministry himself, observes that:
For the past three decades, then, youth ministry has exploded across America, accompanied by a rise in the number of degrees in youth ministry granted by colleges and seminaries, an abundance of books and other resources, and a network of cottage industries devoted solely to youth ministry. Yet those same three decades have failed to produce a generation of young people who graduate from high school or leave youth groups ready to change the world for Christ. (Reid as cited in Baucham, 2007, p. 186)
Whether or not the professionalization of the segmented-programmatic approach is a legitimate “family ministry” is debatable, according to noted experts, but what is indeed beyond argument is that this paradigm of ministry so dominated the landscape of twentieth century ministry to families that many churches today simply refer to it as the “traditional” approach even though it has not even celebrated its sesquicentennial birthday (Anthony, 2011, p. 171).
The age-segregated, church-building based ministry model was a new experiment, that Rienow (2013) notes, over time made churches become the primary tool for children’s ministry while rendering parents to be merely secondary (p. 229). One of the unfortunate results of this well-meaning disintegrated approach to family ministry has been that parents have increasingly perceived the professionally trained church workers as those who are primarily responsible to personally disciple their children (Anthony, 2011, p. 171). Thankfully, there are practitioners like Mark DeVries whose Family-Based Youth Ministry, promoted in the late twentieth century, represents a reorientation of the segmented-programmatic approach to deliberately empower parents for active participation in the discipleship of children and youth (Stinson, 2011, pp. 25, 157).
Educational-programmatic approach. This family ministry model is expressed through the establishment of ambulance programs that assist distressed families in crisis and guardrail programs that serve as preventative maintenance to healthy families whose relationships are strong (Anthony, 2011, p. 171). As family improvement societies and maternal associations gave way to formalized Family Life Education departments, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both the state and academy provided such community helps which quickly led many churches to also jump on the bandwagon (Anthony, 2001, p. 171). By the mid-twentieth century, notes Jones, this perspective of church-based family ministry was promoted in some of the most popular Christian education textbooks including Oscar Feucht’s 1957 work entitled, Helping Families through the Church: A Symposium on Family Education (Stinson, 2011, pp. 20-21). On into the 1960s and 1970s, church-based Family Life Education expanded to include therapeutic components of counseling by utilizing the texts of Charles Sells and Diana Garland (Stinson, 2011, p. 21).
The educational-programmatic approach functions, in some churches, as an additional arm of the segmented-programmatic method and is known as “family life ministries” or “family life education” thus remaining as a popular partner in the twenty-first century (Stinson, 2011, p. 158). Family ministry expert, Reggie Joiner, describes this approach in his book, Think Orange: Imagine the Impact When Church and Family Collide, as departmental family ministry (Joiner as cited in Stinson, 2011, p. 157). While not disregarding the responsibility of parents to be the primary disciple-makers in the lives of their children, Jones concludes that the educational-programmatic approach of Family Life Education is focused primarily on developing healthy family relationships (Stinson, 2011, p. 21).
Contemporary-Modern Models of Family Ministry
As the twentieth century faded into the twenty-first, a movement of God’s Spirit stirred the hearts of men, women, and church leaders worldwide to return to the biblical plan for family life thus igniting a reformation of family ministry across diverse denominations and theological traditions (Rienow, 2013, p. 201). Quite unlike the segmented-programmatic and educational-programmatic family ministry models, these newer contemporary models require far more than an addition of another program as a remedy to parental abdication of responsibility but much rather a reorientation of every ministry of the church to acknowledge, equip, and empower parents to engage their children in discipleship (Anthony, 2011, p. 173).
To be continued (part 2 linked below)…
Soli Deo Gloria!
References
Anthony, M. & Anthony, M., eds. (2011) A theology for family ministries. Nashville, TN: B&H Academic.
Baucham, Jr., V. (2007) Family driven faith: doing what it takes to raise sons and daughters who walk with God. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.
Jones, T. P., ed. (2009) Perspectives on family ministry: 3 Views. Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group.
Rienow, R. (2013) Limited church: unlimited kingdom – uniting church and family in the great commission. Nashville, TN: Randall House Publications. (2021 edition retitled, “Visionary Church: How Your Church Can Strengthen Families)
Stinson, R. & Jones, T. P., eds. (2011) Trained in the fear of God: family ministry in theological, historical, and practical perspective. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications.
