Teach them to ski…

Why is developing a discipleship ministry integrating church and home so important?  If you do any amount of counseling in your ministry role or work with families in any way, you probably have a good idea as to why.

Just this week I spent several hours picking up the pieces of broken marriage relationships and shattered families.  Some days it feels as if we take one step forward and three steps backwards.  Several years ago my pastor and I were talking about these issues.  What if we spent more of our time proactively building into people so that families stop the crash and burn cycle.  Instead of spending all of our time reacting to family crisis, why not equip families to be healthy and avoid crisis.

Do you remember the first time you ever went snow skiing?  This first time I went I was actually a Student Pastor, too prideful to take a lesson on the bunny slopes.  It only took one run before I realized I needed some help.  I crashed at least 10 times on the way down the hill.  Family life is the same way.  Often we thrust families onto the ski slope of life without ever teaching them to ski.  All we can do is pick up the pieces at the bottom of the hill.

Legacy milestones is a plan to teach people to ski before they ever think about ascending the slope called family and the mountain called life.  Building a biblical worldview into a person from one generation to the next is really what teaching them to ski is all about.  As the church, we need to integrate church and family to equip the generations.  One obvious benefit is a smaller pile of wrecked families at the bottom of the slope.

Consider legacy milestones.  Teach them to ski by linking church and home for the best spiritual formation experience possible.  Maybe, in a generation, we will have thousands of young marrieds and parents that learned to ski at an early age.  Certainly we will always have crisis, but it can’t hurt to teach them to ski so they can enjoy the journey.