Spiritual Leadership in the Home

Written by Mike Farris, Esq.

A father is usually expected to provide spiritual leadership by taking his wife and children to church with him, praying regularly for them, and conducting regular family devotions. Most Christian fathers attain only the first of these goals with any consistency.

There is no doubt that we should routinely discharge all three of these duties. I recently realized, though, that these tasks are simply methods of family spiritual leadership, not goals.

In fact, when we focus on these three duties rather than on attaining spiritual goals, these duties tend to become distasteful tasks to be endured – the spiritual equivalent of home maintenance projects.

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My desire to discharge these duties has been recently invigorated by a new focus on the spiritual goals I have for my own children. I now see these duties as a means to a desired end rather than a mere responsibility which must be discharged.

This shift in focus came as the result of teaching an adult Sunday School class on training families. I suddenly realized afresh that, as a father, I have a responsibility to make sure that my children are spiritually prepared for adulthood when they leave my home. The fact that I now have several adult children (and I know how quickly our children grow up) has no doubt served to crystallize my thinking as well.

The parents in this class and I began to share the spiritual goals that we had for our children. Before this none of us had ever stopped to make a list of such goals. We realized that we were likely to reap vague spiritual results as a consequence of our failure to have a clear set of spiritual goals.

We discovered that another benefit of having clearly defined spiritual goals was to make possible meaningful assessment of how we were doing. It also became possible to map out specific plans for our children's spiritual training and development.

No army general would ever try to train soldiers in the haphazard way we try to train children. The army has an organized plan and a training course of increasing rigor designed to produce soldiers capable of winning the battle. Our duty to train our children is no less important. It is equally necessary for us to develop goals and plans for the training of the spiritual soldiers whom God has entrusted to us.

Our class identified twelve spiritual goals that we want to make sure that our children attain before they leave home as adults:

1. My child will be sure of his or her salvation.
2. My child will love and understand God's Word.
3. My child will know and willingly obey God's rules of right and wrong.
4. My child will be maturely walking with God.
5. My child will know his or her individual spiritual gift(s) and call from God.
6. My child will be able to teach spiritual truths to others.
7. My child will be an effective witness.
8. My child will spend daily time with God.
9. My child will have a servant's heart.
10. My child will be self-disciplined.
11. My child will be in fellowship and under the authority of a local church.
12. My child will understand the power of prayer.

When I examined this list I realized that there were several of these goals which my older children had already attained. But I also realized that some of these important goals would slip through the cracks in the busy years of adolescence if I didn't make a planned effort to ingrain these characteristics into my children's lives.

There are other spiritual goals you could identify for your children. This list is not intended to be exhaustive. It simply illustrates the kind of goal setting that is critical to spiritual leadership.

In short, then, spiritual leadership requires a father to:

1. Set spiritual goals for his children.
2. Plan activities and training designed to inculcate these goals.
3. Periodically assess his child's progress.

Fathers who have fuzzy spiritual goals for their children will raise spiritually fuzzy children.

Excerpted from Mike's book The Home Schooling Father, published by Broadman and Holman.

Mike Farris is the president and founder of Patrick Henry College and founder and board chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. He and his wife Vickie have ten children and six grandchildren.

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