Adapted from the book Perspectives on Family Ministry

In late 2007 and early 2008, Dr. Randy Stinson and I worked together to develop a specific approach to family ministry. We studied dozens of approaches to family ministry, and we identified a handful of churches that were doing what we felt that God was leading us to promote. Then, we worked to develop these approaches into a full-fledged ministry model.

What we still lacked at that time was a name to describe what we were envisioning. It was not a program that someone could launch in one ministry; it was an ethos that should affect every ministry in the church. It retained age-focused ministers, but it would require these ministers to approach their calling in radically different ways. Most important, it required the congregation to recognize and to train parents to become the primary disciple-makers in their children’s lives. In such congregations, youth and children’s ministers did not function as “professional disciple-makers”; instead, they served as coaches and trainers, partnering with parents so that each household in the church became not only a conduit for getting children into church but also a unit of discipleship and evangelism.

But what to call this approach?

In January 2008, I ran across this clause in an article by Dennis Rainey in the book Pastoral Leadership for Manhood and Womanhood (Crossway, 2002): “Churches need to become marriage- and family-equipping centers in their communities.” Family-equipping centers-that’s precisely what Dr. Stinson and I had been trying to describe in the model that we were developing! And so, we coined the term “Family-Equipping Ministry Model,” a term that has now taken off in churches throughout the world.

In the Family-Equipping Ministry Model, many semblances of age-organized ministry remain intact. In some cases, the family-equipping church might even retain a youth minister or a children’s minister. Yet church leaders plan every ministry to champion the place of parents as primary disciple-makers in their children’s lives, asking at every level of the church’s ministry, “How can we best equip families to become fundamental units of discipleship and evangelism?” At the same time, parents recognize the church as a community that’s been called to participate actively in the discipleship of all believers, including children. The church equips parents to disciple their children, and the parents recognize the church as an active partner in this process. Whereas family-based churches develop intergenerational events and activities within current structures, family-equipping ministry reworks the church’s entire structure to call parents to disciple their children at every level of the church’s ministry. Every aspect of the congregation’s life consciously “co-champions” the church’s ministry and parental responsibility.