Why the Church Can’t Replace the Family

By Tim Kimmel • September 21, 2016

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Connecting Church and Home: How to create a grace-based partnership between the church and family.

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Strong churches don’t make strong families; strong families make strong churches.
We need strong churches and we need strong families regardless of who rubs the other’s back the most. We need these because the big story isn’t about churches, families, pastors or parents.
It’s about God!
When we do the math, we realize that the family and the church are the only two true cradle-to-the-grave entities that God created to carry out his primary kingdom agenda. The most effective way to evangelize anyone is to have them raised in a family where the mother and father deeply love, trust and serve God. And likewise, the most effective way to disciple anyone is to have him or her raised by parents who love, trust and serve God. When we in ministry embrace this reality, the spiritual stock value of both the church and its families goes up.
Parents are trying to raise their kids in a culture that’s antagonistic to just about every biblical principle and spiritual value they embrace. It’s an overly sexualized culture that is high on the cocaine of competition and comparison, dominated by emotional thinking and snookered by the success illusion. On top of that, many parents naturally assume that the spiritual heavy-lifting required to raise effective Christian kids can only be done by evangelical professionals. So, when it comes to raising kids who have a passionate love for Christ, too many parents simply feel unqualified and out-gunned.
Unfortunately, churches falsely think they are ready to meet this challenge with their state-of-the-art facilities and second-to-none programs. After a while the “professionals” realize that all this subcontracting of the parent’s responsibilities has left them feeling like they’re little more than program directors on evangelical cruise ships.

Two Kids, Two Families, One Church

There are two sets of parents in our church who had sons around the same time. The one set of parents felt ill-equipped to transfer a passionate heart for God to their son but assumed that the church could/should cover that need on their behalf. The other set of parents felt ill-equipped to transfer a passionate heart for God to their son, but assumed that God would empower them to do so as they leaned on him. They appreciated any coaching our church would give them on this.
Our church spent the same money, provided the same facilities, sent these boys to the same camps, assigned them the same small group mentors, provided them with the same children’s and student’s pastors, and took them on the same mission trips. Yet the boys turned out very differently. The son of the first set of parents accepted Christ’s offer of salvation from his sins, but never seemed to move beyond a remedial spiritual level. The son of the second set of parents ultimately headed into adulthood with a passionate heart for Jesus.
There will always be exceptions to this phenomenon, but for the most part the outcome tends to follow the same course. Committed Christian parents tend to produce a more committed offspring. Parents who expect the church to imbed that commitment into their children on their behalf tend to send kids into adulthood struggling to put their full faith in God.
I would be quick to admit that strong families tend to be the exception rather than the rule in our churches. Churches are primarily spiritual hospitals for the broken, battered and bewildered. All of us find ourselves in that category to some degree.
Churches must always provide a spiritual emergency room for the hurting and discouraged people who show up, as well as high quality children and youth ministry for every type of child. The problem is that these standard features will always struggle to see the kinds of results we’re praying for and working towards. The most effective church ministry is ministry whose root system is imbedded in the home. We need to be deliberate about coaching parents on how to take Jesus home so that they’re more likely to be bringing their family to church each Sunday on “full” rather than “empty.”
Our tactical and strategic mindsets could easily assume that what I’m talking about here is training parents on subjects like:
• How to pray with their kids and do family devotions from the Bible.
• Teaching them how to protect their kids from the sinful culture around them.
• Giving parents a checklist of acceptable Christian practices and showing them how to get their kids to walk accordingly …
You know, the standard image-control and sin-management programs that are so easy to get sucked into. My observation is that if that’s the direction a church goes, its leaders (as well as its parents) are going to be extremely disappointed in the outcome. Fear-based parenting, spiritual performance-based parenting, and emotional reaction-based parenting are bankrupt hands. These all might be very well-intended, but are ultimately misguided. Why? Simple: they don’t launch from the heart of the gospel.

A Grace-Based Church

John 1:24 reminds us that Jesus was filled with grace and truth. This wasn’t a 50/50 split. It was 100 percent truth and a 100 percent grace. In Christian work, we tend to camp on the truth side. For one thing, it’s the easiest one to teach. It’s also the easiest one to quantify. But I think the bigger reason we camp on the truth side of the equation is because it is the one we, as church leaders and parents, can effectively do without having to surrender the steering wheel of our lives completely to Jesus.
Grace is different. It is giving a person something they desperately need but don’t deserve. That’s hard to do in our own power. Actually, what I just said is a misstatement. I should have said, “That’s impossible to do in our own power.” Like the song says, we’ve got to let “Jesus take the wheel.”
I’ve spent my adult life studying what God’s grace looks like coming through us in relationships. I wrote the book Grace Based Parenting to show moms and dads how to create an atmosphere of God’s grace in their home and still have clear boundaries and consequences. I wrote the book Grace Filled Marriage to show couples how to turn God’s heart into the defining feature of their love story. That’s because for most marriages, the missing ingredient isn’t love; it’s grace.
I can define grace-based parenting in one sentence: it’s treating your kids the same way God treats you … with grace. A grace-filled marriage is simply treating your spouse the same way God treats his spouse (the church) … graciously.
Churches play a strategic role in this. We all recognize that some kids show up at our churches without their parents. They may come from homes where their parents are indifferent or even hostile to spiritual things. Obviously, we want to meet these kids’ spiritual needs as much as we possibly can.
But we must not forget that Deuteronomy 6:4-9 makes it clear that it is the parents who have the primary job of discipling their children. We need to be careful that we don’t make it easy for the parents who are bringing their children to church to abdicate their spiritual role to us. They need to know what their biblical responsibilities are, and that we’re there to coach them along the way. The family pastor at our church borrowed the tagline from Home Depot. He says, “You can do it. We can help.”

A Grace-Based Home

The most important way that a church can help parents create homes that are havens of God’s grace for their children is to model what that looks like. This modeling cannot be occasional or accidental. It has to represent the heart of everything we do as a church. Ministries, as well as our homes, need to be entities that are consistently guided by God’s truth while at the same time tempered by his grace.
The second way we can help parents understand their role is to provide specific training in grace-based parenting. When we create an atmosphere of grace in our church, and provide on-going training on grace-based parenting, it makes it so much easier for parents to know to how to take it all home. Within this atmosphere of grace, the church can then come alongside the parents to coach them on specific areas where they need to bring spiritual leadership and insight into their children’s daily lives. Some examples of what I’m talking about are:
• Raising them in concert with the unique personality style God has assigned to them (a good tool for this is The Kids Flag Page).
• Teaching them about sex as well as walking with them through their childhood and teenage years as they make their way across the sexual minefield of their culture.
• Teaching them how to handle money.
• Teaching them how to handle relationships effectively.
• Taking advantage of their transition into their teenage years by creating certain rite of passage privileges and responsibilities.
• Helping them leverage their unique spiritual gifts.
• Equipping them to thrive in a hostile culture.
• Preparing them to be grace-filled husbands and wives in the future.
• Preparing them to launch into adulthood.
If you would like to go deeper into this discussion on how to create a more deliberate give-and-take between your church and the families that show up each Sunday, I think you’d enjoy the quick-read book I put together on the subject entitled: Connecting Church and Home: A Grace Based Partnership.
Connecting Church and Home is about a grace-based partnership that raises the spiritual stock value of both entities for the kid’s benefit and God’s glory. Church professionals, executives and lay leaders that read it in concert will gain a common language and clearer big-picture and for what they’re trying to do to equip their families. Moms and dads will gain practical (for some, brand-new) handles to use as they exercise their spiritual influence to send truly great Jesus-followers from their back rooms and bedrooms into the future.
There have been lots of churches that have used this book to frame the vital dialogue they need to have on this subject. They have each member of their staff read a chapter and then they add on a discussion about it at their staff meeting. It’s not uncommon for some members of the staff to push back on what they’re reading in the first few chapters because so many people in ministry get nervous when it comes to a discussion on applied grace (they unwittingly think it’s about no boundaries, no consequences, letting people get away with murder, kindness on crack, etc.).
Once they get a few chapters under their belt, they will start to see how truth and grace should always be simultaneous features of everything we do in ministry.
Churches are going to spend a lot of time, effort and money doing the work of the ministry. When we factor in the strategic role marriages and parent/child relationships play—and prioritize our efforts accordingly—not only do we ramp up the spiritual health of our congregation, but we raise the chances many times over that there will be a passionate generation of Jesus-followers to hold up the banner of the gospel long after we’re gone.
The reason this is so important is because strong churches don’t make strong families; strong families make strong churches.
Dr. Tim Kimmel is the founder and executive director of Family Matters, whose goal is to see families transformed by God’s grace into instruments of reformation and restoration. For inquiries regarding speaking, interviews and other appearances for Dr. Tim Kimmel, please contact Family Matters at 1-800-467-4596 or Family@familymatters.net.