On this episode of The Disciple-Making Parent Podcast, we continue our look at my newest book, Managing Your Households Well. We’ll explore the vital connection between family and church leadership through Paul’s teaching in 1 Timothy 3:5. We discover how leading a family well directly impacts church leadership, examining four key areas: leading effectively, communicating with purpose, handling conflict, and building character. We also discuss how true leadership involves both serving others and maintaining forward momentum in our God-given responsibilities.
Resources Mentioned:
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Managing Your Households Well – Amazon
Managing Your Households Well bonuses
Topics Covered in This Week’s Podcast
00:17 The importance of family leadership for church leadership
03:00Learning to lead
12:30 Learning to be a better communicator
15:33 Learning to handle conflict
17:20 Learning character lessons
Episode Transcript
I’m Chap Bettis and you’re listening to The Disciple-Making Parent, where we seek to equip parents and churches to pass the gospel to their children. We all know good leaders and some not so good ones. What’s the difference? And to bring it home, am I leading my home well?
Hi, my name is Chap Bettis and I’m the author of The Disciple-Making Parent, and we’re continuing to work our way through my new book, Managing Your Households Well: How Family Leadership Trains You for Church Leadership. 1 Timothy 3:5 makes clear that Paul asks a rhetorical question. He says, “If a man can’t manage his own household well, how will he care for God’s church?” What Paul is doing is making a direct connection, or pipeline, between leadership in the home and leadership in the church.
And even though in that clause the family household is paralleled with the church, all we need to do is look down at verse 15 and see that the reason Paul is making the comparison is because he tells us in verse 15 that the church is the household of God. So there’s the smaller household in the larger household, and the way one is to lead the larger household is to have the fatherly characteristics that leads well in the smaller one.
So while there may be a few lessons on leadership that that can be transferred from, say, the business world to the church, Paul is saying that how one leads at the home will reflect and should reflect how one leads in the church.
And so now we begin part two of the overview of Managing Your Households Well. And we’re going to think about specific leadership lessons that we can learn in the home and that apply to the church.
Well, before we start though, I want to remind you that we give away the audiobook of The Disciple-Making Parent for free. We’re in a mission to equip parents and grandparents to pass the gospel to their children and grandchildren. I’m regularly surprised by how many of my podcast listeners don’t know about the newsletter. It comes out once a week on Saturday morning, and it’s the primary means of staying in touch with us and equipping you. So just visit our website and sign up for our newsletter and we’ll give you the audio book for free.
Well, let’s go back to the book Managing Your Households Well, and we’ll talk about the last four chapters on lessons that we can learn at home that we can apply at church, and those big headings we’re learning to lead. We can learn to communicate better, we can learn to lead in conflict, and we can learn character lessons. So those are the four areas that we’re going to cover.
Let’s just take those one at a time. Let’s think about leading in our home. And I would suggest that learning to lead in our home can teach us to learn to lead well in the church. But what actually is leadership? That’s where we need to start.
I had one young man, newly married, ask me, “How can I lead when I don’t know where I’m going?” And that’s understandable. I get that for the new husband. And yet what he was thinking about was, “I don’t know where we’re going to live in five years. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing for work.” What I said back to him was this, “I think you do know, or you should know where you’re going in the conviction of where God wants your family to be. He wants you and your wife to have a close relationship. If God gives you children, he wants you to bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. You need a plan. He wants you and your spouse to love and serve others in the church. He wants you to build her up in the Lord. All those are things you do know you want to accomplish, whether or not you know whether where you’re going to be living in five years.”
You see, that actually gets to the issue of leadership for something that we talk about so much. I don’t think we actually understand what leadership is, and especially spiritual leadership. Well, that brings us to talk about the appendix in the book, which is actually really important.
And here’s some inside insider baseball about the way the book came together. I’d originally placed this appendix at the beginning of the book because it’s so foundational, but it ended up hurting the flow of the argument. So we put it in the back as an appendix, but it is so vitally important. I think that it could be studied in and of itself because in there, what I tried to do is boil down the essence of spiritual leadership.
So we can actually know what leadership is. A man is being told, Be the spiritual leader in your home, but what does that mean? Well, in that appendix, I look closely at John Piper’s definition, which has been so helpful to me, where he says, “Spiritual leadership is knowing where God wants his people to be, and taking the initiative to use God’s methods to get them there in reliance on God’s power.” Then he adds the answer to where God wants his people to be is the spiritual condition and in a lifestyle that displays his glory and honors his name. So spiritual leadership has an awareness of where people are, but it also has a conviction of where God wants them to be. And it has a conviction of God’s methods to use in reliance on his power to get them there, to move them there.
So a leader takes the initiative to move God’s people where God wants them. A spiritual leader has to have strong convictions about what makes a strong family or a strong church, a healthy family or healthy church. And in communion with the Holy Spirit, he believes he’s called to move them towards that goal using God’s power and methods.
The only thing I’d add to that definition would be the word wisely. Because we have young leaders that have convictions about how a church should change. Or I think of me as a young man, and I had strong convictions about what I wanted my family to look like, but I was very unwise in the way that I sought it to bring about that change.
Well, I’m not going to go into all the contents of the chapter, but just know, man, oh man, I wrestled over writing it. I wrote and rewrote that chapter, crying out for insight. And I’ve had people tell me that it’s been really helpful to have the essence of leadership boil down just in one chapter. And good leaders do these things instinctively. They realize where a group of people is. So it could be the church, it could be a small group that’s not flourishing. It could be a ministry team that’s not running well. And they also have conviction about what makes a healthy church or a healthy small group or a healthy ministry team. In other words, where should we be? And then they take the initiative in God’s power and using God’s methods to make changes to point any of those things to health. So make sure when you buy the book, you don’t forget to check out the appendix.
Well, and as long as we’re talking about the appendices, there are two others in the back that I want to encourage you not to miss. They’re an evaluation for you to fill out and for your spouse to fill out. Now, I know none of us is perfect. I know that. None of us has all the strengths, but it is good in consultation with others to look at our strengths and look at our weaknesses so that we can make plans to grow in those areas.
Again, that is leadership. It’s just self-leadership, realizing where we are and realizing how we need to grow, where God wants us to be, and then figuring out a way to get there. And as long as we’re on this sidebar talking about appendices, don’t miss the offer of bonuses that are in the book, or you can go to the website, thedisciplemakingparent.com/MYHWbonuses And there, if you put in your email address, you can download the evaluations that are in the back of the book in an eight and a half by 11 form so that they’re a little bit easier to handle. And you’ll also find some suggested questions to ask prospective elder or deacon candidates. You’ll find a letter to a fictional pastor who doesn’t have children yet about this issue that I wrote. I also have a download that I wrote to the ladies who may or may not be married to a ministry leader on how you, too, are called to manage your household. Well see, this is a calling for all of us because we’re all made in the image of God, and I have some suggestions that might be helpful to you.
Okay. Enough of the sidebar. Let’s get back to that chapter on learning to lead well. So we’ve talked about taking the initiative to lead our family. Another characteristic under leadership is learning to manage or oversee, and that’s getting the right people in the right position and moving them towards a goal.
And a pastor should not get bogged down in overseeing. The primary calling is in the word. And yet it is still part of our duty. See, Jesus not only led the overall training of the disciples, he stepped in when they were going off track. Nehemiah completed the wall. How did he do that? He cast vision, he led, but then he also had to manage obstacles that that came up.
And so in the book, I give the example: As a dad, I had a goal that my four children would be connected to my parents who lived in the South. We were planting a church in New England, so it was a 22-hour, two-day car ride before video games, if you can imagine that. So, 22 hours? Two days? Uh, no. So it involved on our part, my part A leadership decision and value, which Sharon supported. But guess what? It had also involved managing the group along the way with activities and encouragement and knowing when we had had enough and needed to stop.
So to accomplish that goal, leadership and management was needed. In this chapter, I also talk about that we can learn to delegate. There are many tasks that need to be done in our home or church, but we shouldn’t be doing them. We need to learn the skills of others and to delegate to others. Dads, as you lead your family, you should be delegating appropriately to everyone in the family. It’s really a high form of leadership to recognize strengths in others and give them work to do. You see, everyone wants to feel useful. Not everyone knows what needs to be done or what their strengths are, so we can learn and we need to learn to delegate.
And finally, in this chapter on leadership, I talk about patience and persistence, which is a quality every parent and every leader needs to have. What do I mean by that? Patience is realizing I am not going to achieve everything all at once. Persistence is also saying, “Well, but I am going to keep going in that direction for the long haul.” See, the problem often of young leaders is they don’t have patience. They have convictions. They where they think they should go, but they don’t have the patience. Often things take time to change, but we also need that persistence to continue to aim towards the goal. So that’s really the first chapter. It’s on becoming a more skilled leader, the leadership skill per se. But part of that is communication.
Most of us don’t realize we’re actually not very good communicators. We either over talk or maybe we under talk. And yet to be a leader is to communicate intentionally. I remember one time that our new church plant was having some struggles and I got away to spend an extended time in prayer. And then I came back with a plan which would help us move forward as a church. And the elders that I was with at the time, they agreed to it. But when I presented it to the congregation, they resisted. I felt defeated. And I asked Sharon, “What just happened?” And she insightfully remarked, “You did not bring us along in your thinking. You just announced change. That is not the way people work.”
Man, was that a life lesson for me as a result! That phrase, “bring us along in your thinking,” became a regular feature in our home. That was a leadership lesson that I had learned about communication, and I needed to grow in communication. So as a dad, I communicate to the whole. I want to be casting a positive vision for our family. Kids don’t know what you want for them. We’ve got to cast a positive vision. So whether we’re in the car around the table, we want to cast a vision, all for one, one for all. What are the positive things that we want as a family? That’s what we’re trying to communicate. Not only can I grow in learning to communicate to the whole, I can grow in learning to communicate to individuals, asking questions or learning to listen better.
Anyone with a teenager knows that you need to grow in that skill, right? You need to grow in learning, to listen to learning, ask questions. In addition, part of the other ways we learned to communicate is teaching and shepherding. I remember, and I’m telling you all my embarrassing stories on this podcast, but I remember when I was beginning my ministry, I led a home Bible study and afterwards an older woman came up to me and said, “Hon, I have no idea what you were saying tonight.” I needed to grow as a teacher and fast.
Well, part of the teaching is making sure you know the main point of what you’re trying to get across. You’re teaching to the comprehension of your listeners, what can they grasp? And you’re using all sorts of tools like Jesus did, whether questions or stories or analogies. Guess where you can sharpen those skills? With your children. They will tell us quickly if they don’t understand or we are boring. So as I’m trying to teach my children, I’m also learning to be a better student myself.
Well, those are a number of the things that we talk about in that chapter on learning to communicate, and that brings us to the next chapter and the next large objective that I would suggest really all pastors need to grow in, and that is how to handle conflict. I heard someone say that a pastor is either coming out of a conflict, in the middle of a conflict, or about to go into a conflict, and I can tell you as a pastor, there’s a lot of truth in that statement. It took me many years to master the wisdom to handle conflict. In part one of the podcast, I use that example. All the wisdom is needed. So if there’s a conflict with a church member, there’s so many questions to ask. Should I overlook it? Will it go away? Am I being too sensitive? Or am I being cowardly and too passive to not bring it up? Well, let’s say then I think I should bring it up. Then the question is, How do I bring it up? In person? Do I call? Do I do send an email or text? And then when do I bring it up and what do I say? And so on and so on. So leading well in the church and home needs so much wisdom.
Well, what are some lessons that we can learn underneath this category of conflict? Well, one is just to encourage unity before there actually is a conflict. So just talking about how much God values unity and what is true unity and not uniformity. We also want to teach the biblical principles of handling a conflict. We we’re sinners and we should expect that conflict is a part of everyday life. So that’s church life, family life. We’re going to have times of conflict and we need to learn how to please the Lord in those.
And then of course, a large part of the Christian life is actually learning to either forgive actual offenses against us or to bear with others. And depending on the circumstances the Bible calls us to both. But guess what? All these are good skills to teach our children. We want to have a unified family. We want to have one that knows how to handle conflict biblically, and we want to have brothers and sisters that overlook and forebear with one another.
And finally, in this chapter on conflict, one of the lessons we can learn is to have what I call backbone. It’s not to be passive when it comes to conflict and avoid it, but to prayerfully and gently move toward it. Man, there are some hard lessons that I had to learn in the church. My nature was to put off bringing up conflict, and it always got worse until I learned, yes, I need to move towards conflict and I need to have the backbone to do it.
Well, the last chapter really talks about character lessons and there are a lot I could have highlighted, but I highlight two. One is we need to lead with a continual desire to learn and to grow. I’ve seen pastors who I feel like that once they’re put in the position, they’re like, Okay, I’ve learned all I need to. But Paul said to Timothy, Practice these things. Immerse yourself in them so that all may see your progress. That’s found in 1 Timothy 4:15. Paul expected Timothy to continue to progress, and 2 Timothy, when he is in jail, he says, Bring the parchments. He was growing up until the very end of his life, and so I want to keep growing so that I’m a better dad this year than I was last year and a better pastor than I was last year, all the while knowing God has called me to lead.
Now, I’m not a perfect leader. I’m not a perfect dad. God’s put me in that position, and yet I want to keep growing, and that’s why listening to our wife can be so helpful. I really, really appreciate the phrase that the late Timothy Keller had in his book on marriage where he says a wife should be an encourager and a truth-teller. We need both. We need the encouragement of those closest to us, and we also need them to tell the truth.
And then another character lesson that I covered in covered in the book is that I need to learn to die to myself even while I lead. Jesus said the greatest in the kingdom would be a servant of all. So I need to learn, how do I lead, and how am I a servant? Those two do go together. There are many ways to be sacrificial and to put my family first, even as I still am initiating and leading to where God wants us to be.
Well, that’s about it for this podcast. I hope that in our times together, both part one and part two is giving you a foretaste for what’s in the book. In this particular podcast, we’ve talked about what leadership is per se. We’ve seen a number of lessons that we can learn in the home. We’ve also talked about learning to communicate and learning to handle conflict well. And finally we talked about some character lessons that we need to, to learn. Well, I wanna encourage you to check out the book Managing Your Households Well: How Family Leadership Trains You for Church Leadership.
And I really believe it can and it does. That book’s available wherever Christian books are sold or on Amazon. Also, just as a reminder, check out the bonuses and the appendices as well. I think the book is going to be perfect for pastor teams, elder teams, ministry leadership teams, deacons, and yes, as I said, even ladies to study and be encouraged and challenged. I long to see a reformation of leaders who realize that they need to live out the gospel first in their home, and then that spills over to bless others.
Before I sign off, I want let you know that I’d love to hear from you. So simply visit our website and use the contact form to give me feedback on how your church has used the book and how it’s helped you.
Again, thanks for listening.
