Equipping Families for Discipleship at Home

 

Bart: Alright. I am with my friend Tim Goodyear. Tim, how are you doing today?

Tim: I’m doing good, Bart, how are you?

Bart: I’m doing great, all things considered. I’m stuck at my house in Texas. You’re stuck at your house in Arizona. Glad that we could do this. Glad you’re able to spend a little bit of time with me. Tim and I had the opportunity to meet, a couple of months ago, at the HomePointe conference in Rockwall, Texas. Tim is the chief operating officer of HomePointe and was coming back to Texas. He spent a fair bit of time here with the Dallas Theological Seminary, was on staff at Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall for awhile. Is now serving the church in Arizona and works as the chief operating officer of HomePointe. And I wanted to have a conversation with Tim about HomePointe and about family discipleship and discipleship at home. Look, the reality is, and where we are today, a lot of church, well all of church is really happening in the home. And we all know that there’s a significant importance for families and parents to be discipling their children. And now we’re in a place where we can’t even rely on Sunday school or youth leaders or youth pastors and all the things that we’ve been dependent on. So, we’re kind of at this stage of pivot. And so, Tim, I was hoping that you could shed some light on some things today to help us understand better, how we, as pastors and church leaders, can equip the people in our church to do more intentional discipleship at home and how that might even change the way that we look at discipleship overall as churches. Anything about you and your background that I left out that want to add in there?

Tim: Well, let me just say hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here and be a part of your network of churches and have the option to share with you all. And, one thing you didn’t mention is HomePointe has been doing some partnership with Missional Marketing, I know, another group that you work with and looking at how we can also reach and connect with families in our community. And so there’s some overlap there as well. But I think, you know, maybe to kind of kick things off. It’s interesting to me and Bart, you kind of mentioned this when were talking a little bit earlier. That here we are, in this this time, these circumstances, this phase, all of a sudden churches have to go into what we’ve been calling kind of remote church or online church strategy. And for a lot of churches, it’s unchartered waters to even think that families are going to have to do church at home. The parents are actually going to have to be the ones discipling their children. And so it blows me away that this is sort of forced this recognition that we as churches really haven’t been doing a great job at equipping our families to do discipleship at home. And so here we are. Now we’ve got to figure this out. And that’s what HomePointe’s been doing for the last 10, over 10 years, 11 years now. Helping churches equip families to be intentional at home in discipling their kids and in the context of their marriage. And so we create, you know, resources, tools and strategies that churches can use. And so, we’re excited at this opportunity that God has now for us, to help partner with churches and maybe connect them with some of our resources

Tim: and, you know, we’re making a lot of our stuff available. We could talk about that as we go here. So, yeah, I’m excited.

Bart: Sure. Thanks. That’s a great intro. So, you know, for people that might not be familiar with HomePointe and the way that the ministry actually operates, the way that the discipleship pathway or the plan functions, give us sort of an overview of what that entails.

Tim: Yeah, definitely. You know, we talk about two very simple mantras and I’m going to kind of give you our normal mode of operating and then we can maybe talk a little bit about how this might play out in the context we’re in right now. We talk about two kind of mantras. One is, how do we make it easy for families to be intentional?

Tim: How do we make it easy for parents to be the discipling their kids, for grandparents to be engaging with their grandchildren, for couples to be intentional in their marriages? So we want to go after, how do we make it really easy? And then, how do we make it more likely that they’re actually going to do it? Right? So it doesn’t matter how easy it is if people aren’t going to engage with the tools, with the resources, with the ideas and actually do them. And so for us, our strategy is, in terms of making it easy, what we want to do is, we want to have a resource center. We talk about having a physical resource center, on your church campus. We talk about having an online resource center on your website. We talk about having it on your phone app. However you connect with your folks, have a resource center where it’s really, really easy for them to connect with the resources and oh, by the way, those resources need to be bite-size, baby step resources. They need to be very simple tools.

Tim: Very simple things that anybody can do.

Tim: You know, one of the things I often say is, the guy I want to go after here is the dad, that when you say, pray with your kids, he gets that deer-in-the-headlights look and he’s scared to death because he has never prayed with his kids before. Right? That’s the dad I want to go after and want to say, hey, I want to help you do simple prayer time with your kids or do a simple family night with your kids.

Tim: So make it really easy for him. And then the second piece of that is, OK, how do we make it more likely? And what we encourage churches to do is put some kind of a church-wide emphasis on calling your families to be intentional at least twice a year. Matter of fact, we say probably not much more than twice a year. You might want to leverage some holiday times and some special times in addition, but twice a year, do some kind of a church-wide call to action. Now, what we, at HomePointe create, is a whole suite of different campaigns. We’ve done some topics like challenging families to have meals together. By the way, it’s a great one you can do right now while they’re stuck at home. We’ve done some things around actually putting down your electronic devices and having some face-to-face conversations.

Tim: Another great one we could do, right now, while people are stuck at home.

Bart: Sorry for laughing. That would probably be one of the hardest ones to do, right now.

Tim: But, hey, when people are 24/7 on their Netflix or Hulu or whatever right now, it’s a great time to set that aside for a little bit of time each day and have a conversation with one another. So part of that, make it more likely, is as a church we’re calling our families to action. We’re giving them the tools and the resources, kind of stuff. And then the last piece for us, in terms of making it more likely is, what we call Faith Path. And Faith Path is 12 steps that we’ve identified from birth to high school graduation or launching into adulthood. Each step is connected to an age. Why? We want to make it really kind of intuitive with the parents, that hey, when your child turns 5, this is a great time to take this step. When your child turns 7, this is a great time to take this step. And then what we do is, we create a whole set of tools that go with those steps. And the idea is that churches can give the families that packet of tools for that next step. So, for example, one of the steps is having a blessing. Doing a blessing with your children at age three.

Tim: So we’ve partnered with John Trent, who wrote the book, “The Blessing”. We’ve got some videos of Dr. Trent teaching on the blessing. What is a blessing? Why do we want to do a blessing? How do you do a blessing? We give the parents some overview information, kind of walking through step-by-step how to do a blessing with your child. And then the idea is, when that child turns three to say, OK, over this next year, we want to start the habit of doing a blessing with our child. And we’ve got twelve of those steps. And the idea is we’re actually equipping the parents to be the ones passing the faith on to their kids. It’s not hey, let’s do a workshop on it. Let’s do a class on it. It’s, as a church, let’s actually give the parents the tools that they need to go home and do these things. So that’s kind of our overarching strategy is, let’s make it really easy. Let’s identify those easy tools and resources.

Tim: Let’s make them easily available to our families and then let’s make it more likely by actually putting some energy and emphasis around this a couple of times a year as a church where we’re going to call families to jump in and do some kind of intentionality at home.

Bart: So Tim, you’re obviously, I mean, you’re engaging with churches on a daily basis that are utilizing your platform and your process of home-based discipleship. You know, what are the things or one of the highlights that people who use your platform, what do they really love? What are sort of some of the key things that they come back to you over and over again and say, this is the best part or this is where we’re having the most success or this is where we really feel like we’re getting traction?

Tim: Yeah, sure. It’s interesting you asked that because one of the things that we do is, we have an assessment tool that families can take and we encourage churches, again, a couple times a year, challenge your families to take this assessment. And what that assessment tool does is it challenges. It asks a series of questions in the context of your marriage, in the context of your parenting or grandparenting or in your single life, if you’re single. At least one of those categories fits everybody in your church. Most people, two of those categories fit them. Marriage, parenting, grandparenting or single life. And the idea is, it challenges people on, what are you actually doing to be intentional in this area? And then you give yourself, kind of, a self-assessment score. It’s interesting you ask because people very quickly identify the things that they are and they aren’t doing, by taking that assessment. And then, obviously, the challenge is okay,

Tim: what are some things you can do, over the coming months, to become more intentional? Some of the most popular things that we have available are date night ideas. So, you know, couples realize, when they take that assessment, hey, we’re not doing a regular date. We need to start doing some date nights. And then we create a whole series of date night ideas for couples.

Bart: Can I share with you, the date night that my wife and I have been doing, since we’ve been stuck at home.

Bart: We go out the back door and we sit on the patio together. Because, that’s about as far as we can go. But, hey, it’s something, right?

Tim: And I think, at this time, what we’ve challenged people to do, matter of fact, we’ve said, in one of them, we said, hey, pack up a picnic basket, round up the kids, get in the car, go out and drive around the block, pull back into your own garage and then come into the living room and spread out the picnic. And do the picnic as a family night idea kind of a thing. And so you certainly can adapt the ideas to be done at home or close to home. And the other piece is the family night. So we create a whole series of family night ideas where whether you have young children or teenage children, you can have some kind of an activity and faith based conversation. For the older kids are movie nights. Another great one that the churches can be doing right now while folks are stuck at home, do a movie night with your teens and then have a faith-based conversation about those movies. We give you the script to have those conversations. The family night ideas are all things you’ve got around the house that you can do in terms of, a really fun one is talking about the words that we use and once they come out of our mouth, we can’t put them back in. And the way we do that as we take a tube of toothpaste and have the kids squeeze all the toothpaste out and then tell them, okay, now try and put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can’t do it. Well, that’s just like our words. When we say harsh words to somebody, there’s no way to put those words back in our mouth. So it’s that kind of stuff. It’s fun, easy stuff. Those are some of the most popular things that we have that we’ve created for churches.

Bart: That’s that’s very helpful. Now, let’s think about the situation that a lot of pastors find themselves in right now. We don’t know how long we’re going to be in this shelter at home state where we’re not gonna be able to have engagement face to face and in-person with our church family. Let’s assume that maybe it’s going to last a couple of months or a few months. We’re assuming that it will end at some point. If I’m a pastor and I’m trying to provide tools and resources, guidance for the families in my church and help them continue to grow in their faith at this particular stage and assuming that it’s going to be short term, that it’s not going to be long term, what are some very practical things that you might suggest that pastors do like right now to get the wheels turning on some home based discipleship stuff?

Tim: Yeah, sure, sure. We’ve actually made a lot of our resources available for free through this time. And so, you know, folks watching this webinar right now can go to DriveFaithHome.com/free-access. DriveFaithHome.com/free-access

Tim: And we’ve made some of our Easter stuff available with Easter coming up. That’s something that’s very timely. We’ve got a whole series of ideas that families can do for Holy week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. That can all be accessed. We’ve made a lot of the parenting ideas, a lot of the marriage ideas and even the grandparenting ideas available for free.

Tim: So you can access those all for free and use them right now. In addition to that, some of the things that I would suggest is perhaps you’ve got some resources, whether it’s books or websites or ideas that you want to make available on your church’s website. I’ve noticed a lot of churches have already started compiling kind of family resource Webpages on their website and then inviting their families to say, hey, you can come here on our website. You can access these resources. Everything that we’re giving you, you can you can link to your website and use. We ant to make that all available. But certainly you can find other things through your children’s ministry or student ministry areas. And I would say, you know, collect those, put them on your website and then communicated to your folks. Challenge them to to put some rhythms in their day, whether it’s a family devo kind of time. And maybe you’re going to provide them, you know, what that family devotion looks like. Whether it’s going to be something that you’re going to lead through a video kind of devotional thing with your church. I think right now a big part of it is developing those rhythms and giving people resources. Again, if that, how do we make it easy forum and then how do we make it more likely that they’re actually going to do it?

Bart: Yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of breaking things down into  bite sized chunks. I’ve had several conversations with the church leaders who are experts in the digital church space. And one of the things that they always say is that you have to make it grandma proof, right. You have to make an easily accessible if you’re going to do it online. And of course, I don’t know what you would call making discipleship at home. It’s not grandma proof. I guess it’s kind of dad proof because dads, we struggle with this kind of stuff. It’s hard. As a dad it’s hard to disciple your kids. So you have to make it dadproof.

Bart: You have to make it accessible and simple and manageable for us in the context of what we’re doing. Especially given the fact that parents are under a lot of pressure right now. There’s the whole homeschooling piece which we’re doing, you know, which many of us have never done before. I’m fortunate that my my sons are teenagers. We’ve had a little bit of homeschool experience in the past, so it’s not been too terrible for us. But I’m talking to other families and other parents and they’re spending so much time engaged with their kids just trying to get schoolwork done that their stress level is high. For many of these parents, they’re dealing with financial situations or employment situations that are adding to that stress. And so it is super important, and church leaders know this as well as anyone, that families stay engaged in their connection with the Lord and that they’re bringing their whole family along in that and leaning into Him at this particular season.

Bart: So I think these are this is a very, very helpful and very timely things that you’re sharing with us here, Tim. The Homepointe ministry as a whole, the pathway and the process, you know, does this cater better towards small churches or are larger churches? Are there different things that big churches do that small churches don’t? How does that play out in that context?

Tim: Yeah. Yeah. You know, kind of the great equalizer in this whole thing is because it’s all about what happens at home, it really doesn’t matter what size church, what tradition and denomination, church, even what curriculum or programming you’re using. It’s interesting. It’s kind of a paradigm shift for church leaders because we are so well trained at leading, teaching, doing things on the church campus. That when you start talking about doing things at home, that becomes kind of a foreign language to churches. And everything that we create is really about equipping families to do these things at home. And so it doesn’t matter, you know, whether you’re large or small. Everything we do is scalable based on your size of your church. Doesn’t matter what you know, children, student ministries, small group, ministry, program or curriculum you use because we’re not talking about what happens in your small group or what happens in your children’s ministry. We’re talking about at home. So, yeah, everything that we create is fully customizable. It’s all digital electronic. You can you can download it, customize it, you know, use it on your website, your phone app. You can you can print it and put in your resource center. I think that’s one of the great strengths with this time that we’re in right now, is because it is all digital, it’s easily accessible to your families. You can make it easily accessible to your families. Yeah. Does it matter what the sized church does, matter what tradition church we work with the whole spectrum from true fiscal and Catholic to Baptist and Lutheran, Methodist, Church of Christ, you know, it doesn’t matter. Everybody, everybody when it comes to family, it’s interesting. That seems to be another one of those kind of common threads across the church. We all realize we’re struggling in terms of marriage and parenting and family discipleship. And that’s kind of a commonality across the board.

Bart: Yeah, that all stems from that little thing called sin that we all have in us, regardless of what denomination we’re her part of or how big our church is. Okay. Speaking of keeping things in bite sized chunks, I don’t want you to get too long, but you have shared a resource with me, a PDF that I’m going to share with with my friends and my connections. Can you just explain real quickly what we’ll find in this in this PDF that you’ve shared with me?

Tim: Yeah, definitely. So, you know, we’ve identified 10 key steps in terms of what we call creating a culture of intentional families. And and so typically I’d spend a whole hour kind of unpacking these, but we’ve put those 10 key steps into an assessment tool. The church leaders can walk through and assess how are we doing in our church on these 10 areas. And then we’ve added a section about how well are we doing in terms of reaching families in our community. And so it’s a simple assessment tool that you or you and your team can all walk through and do an assessment of how are we doing as a church in terms of reaching families in our community and in terms of providing discipleship strategies and tools for families in our church. And so in that PDF, you’re going to find that assessment tool. And it gives you kind of a score at the end. You’re also going to find an article that we wrote that kind of overviews our whole HomePointe strategy in unpacks elaborate tools that we have. And so that’s in there as well for you. And then I threw in there a couple of pages just for this group. One is just some next steps you can take if you’d like to connect with us or learn more. There’s some information about our website.

Tim: There’s some information in there about those free resources that I mentioned. There’s my contact information. And I really recommend checking out those free resources. That’s stuff that’s normally only available to churches that pay for the subscription with us. But because of the COVID-19 and the shelter in place and everybody trying to figure out how to do remote church. We said, you know what? We’re going to take some of our most popular tools and some of our Easter tools because it is Easter season, and just make those available to anybody that wants to use them right now. They’re all digital. Easy to access, easy to make available to your families.

Bart: That’s great. That’s very generous of you guys. To quote Dave Ramsey or paraquote, and that’s exactly what he says, if we take care of people, the money will take care of itself. So, you know those things. I appreciate that. Thanks so much for making those available. I was gonna ask you how people can connect with you, but that information is right here in the PDF. So if you’re watching this video and you’ve gotten this far and you want to connect with Tim, just click the button below the video on our webpage and download the PDF and you’ll have access to all of this stuff. I’ll link, obviously, to the to the free access content that’s on the website. And that is just going to be super, super helpful for people. Tim, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you spending this little bit of time with me. Praying that everything in Arizona goes OK. You guys just got your official lockdown call today. You need make a last minute run to the grocery store or something today before you get home. But hopefully, hopefully we’re through this season quickly. But we’re not ever going to be finished with discipleship and we’re never done to discipling at home. So, I appreciate you and what you do. Thanks for taking the time with me.

Tim: Hey, thank you, Bart. Appreciate it very much.