Pastoring Your Family

I tasked our new youth and discipleship pastor (Luke Tolbert) with helping me to develop some good stuff we could put into the hands of fathers in our church.  Recently, I’ve been blessed to hear, on several occasions, “I want to lead my family like you talk about, but can you help me understand just how to do that.”  We know that most men are not going to read Kostenberger’s God, Marriage, and Family, and even if they did, they would find it heavy on theory and light on application.  They are fixers and not readers.  Men want short and concise “how to” instructions.  So, basically, we are working on that “how to” guide to put into the hands of our dads.

Though this resource is still in the development stage, Luke compiled a great list of online resources that we will be synthesizing to give to our guys here.  Maybe you can use this list or you might even have something to add.  Feel free to do so.  I’ll be sure to make the finished product available to you as soon as it is to us.

• Ideas for Family Worship from The Resurgence
• Family Worship Guide.net – This is a website that has a worship guide for every day of the week. It is available in a PDF that can be downloaded; I think you can even download the entire month’s devotions. The website also has a good FAQ and resource section for families.
• The Radical Experiment – David Platt’s website has a weekly family worship guide alone with a simple “how-to-manual” that is a little wordy but is a good resource.
• Acts 29 Blog – There are two recent blog entries concerning fathers that I have enjoyed reading. One was on Six Ways Fathers Pursue Christ in their Fatherhood and the other is 10 Practical Pastor Dad Tips which is a good practical guide.
• Pastor-Dad ebook – While we are talking about Acts 29 and Mark Driscoll, he recently wrote a free ebook titled Pastor-Dad. I have not read through it so we should probably not start mass producing them for the congregation right away, but I have heard good things about it and the sections I read so far are pretty good.
• Seeds Family Worship – This is a website that Desiring God recommends as they have put Scripture to music so that kids can memorize it. They also have a list of resources and books that we could look at if we want to purchase some devotional guides to put in the hands of the fathers of our church.
• How I Pastor My Family – This is a practical guide written by an Acts 29 church planter.