The transformational weight of the world is not on your shoulders. God is building His church. God lovingly makes Himself known to us and invites us to play a part in the building within our own home. God, who could do everything by Himself better than we can do it with Him, is graciously inviting you to lead your children to know Him as you create environments that give Him space to move.

If you want to partake with God in this glorious mission to a young generation, your foremost move should not be leadership but “followership.” You can learn a lot about a leader by looking at whom he or she follows.

Sometimes we think that spiritually healthy leadership is about being perfect or dynamic or even
clever. But it’s actually about allowing God to be in His rightful position of leadership and then helping your children follow and depend on the One who is ultimately equipped to lead. Following and depending requires intimately knowing the Leader. As we model our dependency on the Leader, we show our children what it looks like to follow. We must follow so that people entrusted into our care can follow too. So let me ask you this: Are you dependent upon the Holy Spirit to move in your home, or have we figured out how to simply get by?

As we learn to (quite literally) depend on God’s leading instead of our own skills, we will learn how to lead our children to the very Person we all need—the One who restores brokenness and brings dead things to life. It’s not always easy. Letting God lead takes discipline to recognize where He’s moving and courage to follow Him wherever He goes.

Spiritually healthy leaders are followers first and leaders second.

When Jesus called some of His first followers to join Him in redeeming the world back to Himself in Matthew 4, He initiated. Jesus invited the fishermen to follow Him and become part of the miraculous movement He was about to begin.

These fishermen chose to say yes to following Him first and then began leading others second. Following Jesus and fishing for others to experience Him is the call, and this call requires spiritually healthy leaders who know that the movement is much larger than they are.

Spiritually healthy leadership is a call to follow the Leader. Jesus didn’t ask His followers to lead the first-century churches because of their credentials (backwater fishermen in their twenties didn’t have many of those); He called them to lead because He trusted them to follow.

And He brought you in to lead your children because He trusts you to know Him and to follow.

Adapted from 7 Family Ministry Essentials by Michelle Anthony and Megan Marshman