Family Discipleship: Free Resources to Disciple Your Kids

Discipleship can happen anywhere God has placed you, and this includes your family! This page is your guide to family discipleship through answers to common questions about how to disciple your kids and free resources to equip you as a disciplemaker in your family.

If you’re new to it, discipleship is a widely-used word to describe a journey of spiritual growth. This growth happens as a person comes alongside another to share the gospel with them, pray with them, study the Bible with them, and fellowship with them.

In your family, this may look different from how you disciple a friend, neighbor, or even coworker. Many times, your family is who you spend the most time with depending on your season of life. If you’re new to the concept, check out our Basics of Discipleship page to explore the foundations of what it means to make disciples.

What is Family Discipleship?

Family discipleship is the intentional and ongoing process of leading your family — especially your children — toward a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. It involves teaching, modeling, and living out the Christian faith together at home. It’s about partnering with the Holy Spirit’s work of shaping hearts, habits, and values around God’s Word through ordinary and everyday life.

Intentional discipleship in your family is important because your voice and influence in your child’s spiritual formation is valuable and biblical. The question isn’t whether your child will be formed spiritually; it’s who will be the influential voice of their spiritual formation.

Scriptures about Family Discipleship

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates” Deuteronomy 6:5-9 (NIV).

“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it”  Proverbs 22:6 (NIV).

“Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” Ephesians 6:4 (NIV).

“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” 2 Timothy 3:14-15 (NIV).

5 Ideas for Family Discipleship

Here are five easy ways to begin intentional family discipleship today!

1. Spending Time with God in the Mornings

Create a calming environment for breakfast, by playing a favorite worship album and encourage your family to leave their electronic devices in another room.

2. Being Intentional About In-Between Moments

When you’re commuting to the next thing on the schedule or waiting in line, offer the question, “Imagine Jesus with us now. What would you like to ask Him today?” The answers could lead to deeper conversation, to certain Bible stories where Jesus answered that question, or even expressing these questions to Him through prayer.

3. Meal-Time Prayers

Use a portion of your meal time to pray for others. You could even pick a specific day for those you pray for. For example:

• Monday – family
• Tuesday – friends
• Wednesday – neighbors
• Thursday – city/town
• Friday – country
• Saturday – world/missions
• Sunday – those who don’t yet know Jesus

4. Noticing God During Outdoor Activities

If your outdoor activity moves slowly, then use that time and journey to invite your family to notice their surroundings and where they see God’s handiwork. Consider making it into a game for younger kids, like “I Spy.”

5. Ending the Day Together with God

Select a Bible verse for the week and read it each night before bed. Give each family member who is able to read an opportunity to read it. See who has memorized this verse by the end of the week. The Topical Memory System (TMS) and TMS for Kids are great options for finding verses to memorize.

Stories about Family Discipleship

Learn how family discipleship happens across the world with these everyday disciplemaker stories. 

How a Village in Uganda was Transformed

The spiritual revival in Muyembe has not only shaped individuals’ hearts for the Lord, but it has also transformed their hearts for their families. Back when Navigators Discipling for Development (D4D) first came to Muyembe, there was a lot of confusion — fighting between husbands and wives and stealing between members in the community. Now, Aidah says there is no fighting in families, and the amount of theft has reduced significantly.

Missionaries in Thailand Seek the Unreached

Malai had a dream of Jesus where He encouraged her to share her faith discoveries with her estranged sister, Lin*. Though Lin initially refused, Malai relentlessly pursued her, and now they have made the first steps towards reconciliation — even bringing God into their new relationship. Malai recounted that at one point in the conversation, she declared that “the old Malai is dead; a new Malai has been born!”

The Bartels’ Ministry to Youth in Grand Rapids

While spiritual generations are often thought of as older generations pouring into younger generations, the Bartels are seeing what could be called reverse generational impact as they make connections to families through the kids in their community.

How to Disciple Your Kids

Discipling your kids to be followers of Jesus may sound daunting, especially if this is something new to your experience. But the great news is that the Holy Spirit uses our little steps of faith and even our missteps to spiritually form our kids’ hearts.

One helpful way to think about discipling your kids is to imagine your home as an ecosystem rather than as a formula. In nature, an ecosystem is a dynamic, interconnected system where each element supports and affects the others. Ecosystems regularly have imperfections, imbalances, and unpredictable events, but under normal and healthy circumstances, they continue to function while correcting these issues. Formulas, however, require strict adherence to rules in order to get the correct outcomes.

Family discipleship is not a rigid formula but a living, breathing environment where faith is cultivated, nurtured, and passed on. You can make little steps to cultivate an ecosystem of grace rather than rules, confession and forgiveness rather than grudges and resentment, a mutual openness to learning and growing rather than trying to always be right, and lovingly encouraging healthy habits rather than using fear to get outward obedience.

And you, as a parent or guardian, get to bring the gospel down to the level that your children are able and ready to understand. That might mean starting a habit of Bible reading with a children’s Bible with pictures, starting a practice of prayer with reading written prayers to learn how to talk to God, or learning how to confess sin through you modeling it for them. No matter where you start, Jesus will use it and bless it!

Family Discipleship Q&A

Teresa Roberts, author of Raising Disciples: Guiding Your Kids into a Faith of Their Own answers some common questions about family discipleship and how to get started.

How would you encourage parents today who are seeking to disciple their kids?

Your discipleship of your children should flow naturally out of the overflow of your own continued growth as a disciple of Jesus. But also, choose something to be intentional about with your kids and their spiritual development – whether that be nighttime prayers or praying on the way to school, or perhaps a specific focus of Bible reading for a period of time. Choose something for this season and dedicate yourself and your family to it.

What is one simple next step parents could take to encourage their kids in their journey with God? Something helpful is asking your kids open-ended questions — those that require more than a “yes” or “no” answer. Then find which of those questions your kids really respond to. Here are a couple examples: What did you feel like God encouraged you to do today? What was something that was really good about your day? I’ve found that when you cultivate these types of conversations with your kids with simple questions, it creates a seed bed for when the harder questions come along.

Learn more about family discipleship from the full interview here!

Tips for Discipling the Next Generation

If we want to see disciples who are able to pass on what they’ve learned to future generations, we need to focus on these seven tips from Paul’s letter to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:10-11:

1. Teaching. Your outward life is a reflection of our inward conviction. You’re teaching the Word of God by investing in your children through Life-to-Life^® discipleship.

2. Way of life. Jesus didn’t change lives just by what He taught — but also by the way He lived. Are you a parent who is approachable?

3. Purpose. Your long-term goals determine your short-term goals and this is especially true for family discipleship. How will you invest your life in your family? If you have something worth giving your life to, maybe it’s worth those in your family giving his or her life to it as well.

4. Faith. A little bit of faith in the promises of God will carry you a lot further in discipling your kids than a lot of faith in anything else (see Hebrews 11).

5. Patience. Your patience — your inner quietness of spirit — with yourself, with your family, with God, and with your circumstances, is a reflection of what you believe. How is God growing your inner quietness of spirit even in the middle of days when family life is chaotic?

6. Love. People will not care what you believe until they believe that you care. Read 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 and substitute the name of each person in your family each time you come across the word love. Try it for seven days.

7. Endurance. How do you handle failure, weakness, or enduring something difficult? These times are just as important for discipling your family as your successes, teaching, way of life, purpose, faith, patience, and love.

Download the full resource, 7 Tips for Discipling the Next Generation, here!

Family Discipleship Resources

• 5 Ideas for Making Time to Pray for Your Children: Use these five prayer ideas to intentionally pray for your children throughout the day. Whether you’re driving kids to activities, running errands, or even taking a walk, prayer is your most powerful parenting tool.
• Topical Memory System for Kids: Begin a lifetime of Scripture memory and love for God’s Word with your family through this interactive memory game! The Topical Memory System (TMS) has been helping people memorize Scripture for decades, and it will help you and your kids too! The tried-and-true methods of the TMS are the foundation of this fun game.
• 10 Prayers for Public Schools: Prayers are needed for everything from the school administration to the student who is struggling. Use these 10 prayers and the relevant Scriptures to ignite your prayer life for those schools your family is connected to as well as the ones in your community.
• Travel Hacks for Traveling with God: Planning a family vacation? Here are seven travel hacks for spending time with God when you travel. Use these travel hacks to remember that God is with you and your family all the time. Instead of maintaining what you always do at home, be available for whatever God may want to do during this time away.