When I was 22 Sally and I were preparing to get married, spending time thinking about our life together. We had gone through the various mental gymnastics that people seem to go through as we were exploring our missional context and how best to serve. Teachers? Businesspeople? Ordained minister in the Church of England? (At the time, that was probably one of the least effective ways of missional engagement at the time!) It was clear, however, that serving in the Church of England was God’s way of opening doors for missional engagement for us.

FAMILY OR MISSION

But we had noticed a certain way that ministers and their families tended to function. We saw many people putting their ministry before their family. They were laying their families and marriages on the altar, sacrificing them to the demands of the ministry.

You could literally see it. Constant difficulty at home, the children looked depressed and wounded, and usually ended up in rebellion. Who would ever want to be a pastor’s kid? The reality seemed to be that you could have one or the other, family or mission, but not both.

Actually many of the great revival ministries were awful examples. There are lots of stories of revival leaders who left their children behind so they could go to the mission field. It perhaps seemed heroic at the time, but generally speaking it was a disaster.

No one had ever trained these leaders to lead a ministry AND lead a family. It was assumed you could just figure the family part out, but clearly it wasn’t working. The choice was clear: you can have a great ministry or you can have a great family, but you can’t have both.

FAMILY AND MISSION

Because of all of this, we were trying to figure out if it was destiny or if we could learn to function in a different way. I can remember Sally saying something to me that I recognized as the Lord speaking to me. She said, “We are going to be normal though, aren’t we? We’ve got to be normal.”

What she meant was that we are going to function in a natural way. Not weird, religious, fake, or hyper-spiritual. We’d seen too many times that way of functioning lead to ineffective ministry, broken relationships, and ruined families. We were going to be normal. We were going to do family and mission.

Family and Mission meant that somehow we were going to find a way to build the two realities at the same time. We worked on this for perhaps the first ten years of our ministry. We worked out ways of building out our life so that it had margin and boundaries, so we could have a great ministry and a great family.

We had clear boundaries between ministerial life and family life. We needed to manage those boundaries and make sure we had margin within those boundaries when things get difficult. Because we know there will be times when things won’t function perfectly and ministry life can extend over into family life, so we need to build margin in. That way, even in times of stress, it’s not going to threaten our life or ministry.

This is the general prevailing wisdom, and it’s probably saved a lot of families from disaster. But honestly? It was utterly exhausting to function this way.

We’d gotten to our mid-thirties, we’d just finished our first call in the inner city of the poorest community in Britain at the time (a place called Brixton Hill) and we were absolutely done. The family was exhausted, Sally was fried, and I was completely out of gas. Exhausted by managing the boundaries and margins all the time.

The thing is I was actually pretty good at managing the boundaries! You get good at it after ten years, but it was so tiring. I was expending so much energy managing boundaries I wasn’t able to do other important things. Like making disciples.

We’d done a lot of great, innovative ministry there, but today, there’s hardly anything left. The reason is that we were managing our ministry well, but we weren’t making disciples who were making disciples. We were beginning to realize that you can’t make disciples if you’re constantly managing boundaries.

We looked at all of it and we thought, “There has to be a better way to do this.”

FAMILY ON MISSION

So again Sally said something to me that proved to be the Lord speaking. She has this ability to come up with these phrases that just stick and manage to convey deep theological undercurrents and this was one of those times. What she was was this, “From now on, we move as a pack.”

If we’re going to do anything, we’re all going to do it together, if at all possible. We’re going to involve each other and our kids in anything and everything involving our life and mission. We had a period of rest and re-creation in the United States between our time in Brixton Hill and our return to England to work in Sheffield, and what emerged in that time was this “moving as a pack” mentality that we now call being a family on mission.

It’s not Family OR Mission (sacrificing one or the other)
It’s not Family AND Mission (managing boundaries)
It’s Family ON Mission (moving as a pack, integrating both into the same fabric)

If we’re going to make disciples, the task needs to move from managing boundaries to integration of family and mission into a cohesive framework and fabric that empowers a culture of discipleship and mission.

(By the way, if you’re interested in pursuing this theme, we are hosting a Family on Mission Workshop in Pawleys Island, SC January 28-30, 2014. Watch our events page for more info, or sign up for our weekly email newsletter to make sure you get the most up-to-date info!)