A Home That Forms
"These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise." Deuteronomy 6:6-7
Years ago, in a season of college ministry, I was simply living my life. I was busy raising children, managing a household, trying to be faithful in the ordinary ways.
I did not set out to be watched.
Honestly, at that time of early motherhood, I was more thinking about survival, about the next thing, about whether I was doing enough of the right things in the right order—not modeling. And then, years later, younger women began to tell me what they had seen. How they had watched me raise my children without my realizing it. How something had been absorbed through proximity that I had never formally taught.
It was humbling. Especially because I knew how much I had missed. How many ordinary moments where I was rushing through. How the formation I had intended had sometimes given way to exhaustion, to distraction, to the gap between who I wanted to be in my home and who I actually was there on a Tuesday afternoon.
But that is exactly the point. Formation does not wait for our best days. It is always happening: through the atmosphere we create or fail to create, through what we treat as important and what we let slide, through how we handle the hard times during the week rather than the Sunday best we like to present each week. The home forms people whether we intend it to or not. The question is only whether we are being intentional about what it is forming them toward.
What Formation Requires
Formation requires two things above all others: slowness and space.
Slowness
This is why everything this series has been building toward matters here.
Beauty noticed rather than purchased slows the eye and trains it to see.
Rest protected rather than earned creates the unhurried pace in which people can actually be present to each other.
Order maintained as a gift rather than a performance removes the friction and noise that crowd out genuine connection.
Rhythm practiced as purposeful repetition rather than mere habit creates the daily containers in which formation can happen without having to be manufactured from scratch each time.
The table set as a covenant act rather than a refueling stop gathers people around something larger than their individual appetites.
All of these are in service of this: a home with enough slowness and space that the people inside it can actually be formed rather than merely managed.
Space
Formation also requires proximity.
This is something a small home actually does better with: a larger home can’t replicate it. When everyone is closer to everything—the laughter, the prayer, and yes, the conflict, the way someone handles a hard day—there is less room to escape the atmosphere. T
Now, this sounds like a vulnerability but we can also view it as a gift.* A small home forces the kind of short accounts that keep the relational air clean. It makes visible more quickly what needs to be addressed. It creates the intimacy in which formation goes deeper precisely because there is nowhere to hide from it.
*Note: this is not the place to discuss domestic abuse but I do want to say that if your home is unsafe, big or small, please do find help. I am assuming in this post your home is a safe and healthy space.
The Heart Underneath the Atmosphere
The difference between a home that forms people toward Christ and one that simply produces well-behaved or culturally Christian people is not the curriculum. It is the heart of the ones who tend it.
I know this because I have seen the gap in my own home between what I wanted to create and what I actually sustained. The formative atmosphere I envisioned required more of me than I always had: more patience, more consistency, more genuine abiding rather than relying on my performance.
On the days I was drawing from Christ, something flowed. On the days I was running on willpower, what leaked out was not what I intended to teach.
This is why John 15 is not just a personal spiritual metaphor for me. It is a domestic one. Christ must be the vine from which the ones who tend the home draw, so that what flows into the atmosphere of the home is not manufactured goodness but genuine fruit.
The most formative thing I can do for the people in my home most days is not a planned discipleship activity. It is my own visible, genuine dependence on God. I don’t need to be a perfect example but it is vital if we hope to bear fruit that reflects Christ.
But we also need not fear for the days when we fail to do this well. There are days when the atmosphere I created was tense rather than restful, when I said the wrong thing, or when I was inconsistent in ways I regret.
These are the days when God forms others in my home toward Christ as I model humble repentance or when I choose to keep short accounts. Instead of papering over the gap between who we intend to be and who we are I take these opportunities to show how to bring myself honestly to God instead. That too is formation. Perhaps it is the most important kind.
Formation In Every Home
Deuteronomy 6 is addressed to parents. But the principle extends to every household. Whether you are a woman living alone, a single woman with roommates, or an empty nester, our homes can be homes of formation—for ourselves and for others. It is one of the most important purposes of a home, regardless of its size.
It is one way we steward our homes for the kingdom. Even in the space of a small home, God can use it to minister to others as they encounter Him in my home. As we set our intention on using our home to provide space for others to connect with God, even a studio apartment can be a wonderful place. The elements we discussed so far can all help us to create this space to do so.
We’ll wrap up the rest of the series expanding these thoughts, but let’s just start here for now. What is your home currently forming people to believe—about God, about rest, about welcome, about flourishing in Christ?
Maybe that’s hard for you to answer right now. That’s okay. Formation is slow and largely invisible while it is happening. In fact, we can’t control it.
But you can tend the atmosphere. You can protect the slowness. You can keep short accounts and model genuine abiding. You can trust that your small daily faithfulness is one step toward God's greater purposes even when you cannot see the fruit.
The home that forms is not a perfect home. It is a faithful one.
From My Home to Yours
Ask yourself one honest question this week: what is my home currently forming the people inside it to believe? Not what you intend it to communicate but what does it communicate on an ordinary Tuesday, in the way things are done. Sit with the answer before you try to change anything.
