The fifth and last session was led by Dr. Randy Stinson. Dr. Stinson has served in numerous church staff positions over the years. He is the President of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and the Dean of the School of Leadership and Church Ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife Danna have six children, three of whom are adopted.
Dr. Stinson noted that he fellowshipped at Providence Baptist Church when he was an M. Div. student at Southeastern Baptist Seminary. And it was at Providence that Dr. Stinson first developed a burden for men’s ministry.
INTRODUCTION
We have grown accustomed to doing things a certain way in our churches that are just not as effective as they are supposed to be. However, there is now a genuine movement of youth pastors asking themselves: Is what we are doing effective? It applies not just to student ministry, but to the entire discipleship process of children and youth.
There seems to be broad agreement that we have a problem. The way we structure our churches to impact children needs to be re-tooled. “Family ministry” is a hot topic. Pastors in churches of all sizes are experimenting with new ideas. In many ways, we are at the early stages of what could be a gargantuan movement.
THE CHURCH IS A FAMILY
The church is supposed to act like a family in the way members interact with one another. The family is the paradigm for how the church is to operate. Family language is frequently used in the Bible. God is our father. An evidence that we are in God’s family is that He disciplines us (Heb. 12:7).
Relationships within the household of faith are family-like. We’re to deal with older men as fathers, older women as mothers (I Tim. 5:1). We also see an abundance of “brother” and “sister” language in the New Testament. This is how we are to relate with each other because we are family.
An implication is that if a Christian (particularly a father) cannot do this in his home, he won’t be able to do it outside the home.
THE CHURCH – OUR TRUE FAMILY
Some are defining the church as made up of a “family of families”. But this definition leads to certain expressions of ministry that can be exclusive or isolationist. It leads to an artificial “sameness” or homogenization of the church. The church is not, in fact, a family of families. It is our true family.
Dr. Stinson noted that three of his six children are adopted. However, all six are his real children. All their last names are “Stinson”. In God’s family, there are husbands whose wives have rejected the gospel. And vice versa. Christ said, “Unless you love me more than sister or mother, you cannot be my disciple.” Some have to endure painful rejection from their biological families because of their allegiance to Christ. But they (like all God’s children) find their true family in God’s family.
Every time someone gets into God’s family by adoption, it is our job to love them. They may not look like us or talk like us. The gospel is one family from every tribe and nation and kindred. It is not just a bunch of people who look like us.
APPLICATIONS
We have to promote this vision of the church. We need to make a shift, but it is really not a very radical one. Seeing parents as the primary disciple makers of their children is not radical. And the concern is not, broadly speaking, that we have a youth Bible study (for example). The problem is that many churches have developed a “silo mentality” – the ministries are not related to each other, so inadvertently (and no doubt unintentionally) families are pulled apart. You’ve got women doing several mid-week studies, the men have their own activities, and the kids have their programs. We’re telling families to eat together but if we participated in all the church activities we’d never actually be together.
If the men are going to serve the widows in the church, why can’t they do that with their sons? If the men’s ministry is more aware of the youth ministry, then they’ll be aware of the boys who don’t have dads. And there are lots of them. We have to cultivate an ethos in our churches that embraces the fatherless boys and says “It’s OK. We’ve got you covered.” Likewise, single moms need to be intentionally included.
Stinson envisions more families doing mission trips together. Young Christians growing up have a right to see families interacting in a healthy manner.
Stinson calls this a “ministry-integrated” model. It is the integration of all the ministries so that whenever we launch something new, we’re asking: How can families do this together? And then we’re insisting that they can be done that way.
More than a programmatic shift, it is a shift in ethos. If you are taking your 11-year old boy to a baseball game, there probably is another 11-year old who has never been to a game in his whole life. Bring him along.
CONCLUSION
Malachi 4:4-6 suggests we should consider the effect of God’s word on the relationship between fathers and their children. God desires there to be relational harmony between fathers and children. We cannot support an atmosphere that fragments the family in the church – an atmosphere that turns the hearts of children away from their fathers and vice versa. But we also do not want to isolate the sorts of people that have left “father and mother” to be joined to God’s family (fatherless boys, motherless girls, single mothers, etc.).
Update: Message Audio in MP3 Format