This course is a 7-part video lecture series provided freely by The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as an excerpt of their “Discipleship and Family Ministry” course. In this course, Timothy Paul Jones introduces the idea of discipleship and connects it with family ministry. Each lecture is an average duration of 22 minutes.

Timothy Paul Jones (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is associate vice president and C. Edwin Gheens professor of Christian family ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books and serves as one of the teaching pastors at the Midtown congregation of Sojourn Community Church. He lives in St. Matthews, Kentucky, with his wife, Rayann, and daughters Hannah, Skylar, Kylinn, and Katrisha. Timothy blogs at his website.

• How was discipleship viewed in your past church experience?
• What is the relationship between belief and discipleship?
• What do we learn about what it means to be a disciple from the book of John?
• Which examples of a disciple does Jones point out in Jewish and Gentile contexts?
• How does Jones define the word “disciple”?

Read Family Ministry Field Guide, chapters 1–2.

• What do we learn about God from the Great Commission?
• What do we learn about community from the Great Commission?
• What kind of instruction is included in the Great Commission?
• How does Jones define “discipleship”?
• Why does Jones distinguish between discipleship as a gift and discipleship as a goal?
• What is “monergism”?
• How does discipleship relate to the spiritual discipline of humility?

Read Family Ministry Field Guide, chapters 3–4.

• What is wrong with a missionary who sees evangelism as their only job?
• How does the gospel relate to our life after conversion?
• What is the most important doctrine “that you never knew you needed to know”?
• How does union with Christ connect with the definition of discipleship from the previous lesson?
• What is a better question than “What would Jesus do”?

Read Family Ministry Field Guide, chapters 5–6.

• What is the “where”/”who” and the “how” of discipleship?
• What was the first instance of community in the Bible?
• How is the call to discipleship a call to community?
• What was C. S. Lewis’s discovery concerning community?
• How is discipleship connected to church discipline?
• What was the moment that saved Jones’s ministry? Have you ever experienced something similar?
• What are the three aspects of discipleship that Jones lists?

Read Family Ministry Field Guide, chapters 7–9.

• How is the book of Ephesians as “The Tale of Two Temples”? What implications does this have for how we understand the doctrine of adoption?
• What does Jones mean by “the church as family”? How does this affect your view of your church?
• What does Jones mean by “families of faith”? How might you be able to implement something similar in your church?
• Should the youth pastor be the spiritual parent to all the teenagers? Why or why not?
• What does Jones mean by “the family as church”? How does this affect your view of the family unit?
• What does it look like when we are only “church as family” and not “family as church”? What does the reverse look like? What dynamic does your church tend toward?

Read Family Ministry Field Guide, chapters 10–12.

• What principles does Kennedy offer for recruiting volunteers in family ministry?
• What principles does Kennedy offer for caring for families with special needs?
• Do you have “success stories” in your church’s family ministry?
• What principles does Kennedy offer for understanding the relationship between the covenant and family ministry?
• What principles does Kennedy offer for managing behavior without drifting into behaviorism?

Read Family Ministry Field Guide, chapters 13–15, afterward, and “Twelve Tools to Equip Families.”

• Have you had an experience in family ministry that parallels the story that Jones shares? How is your experience similar or different?
• What are the four ministry models that Jones identifies? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?
• How is our era different in regard to family ministry versus the approaches throughout church history?
• Which model do you find most compelling? Why?

Read Perspectives on Family Ministry: 3 Views