Ministry Begins at Home
"Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior...and so train the young women."—Titus 2:3-4 (ESV)
A few posts ago, I shared how home is where formation happens. Formation may be the end goal, but how it often happens is through training. And home is a great place for that! The routines of daily life are not just to get things done—they are ways God trains our character.
When I was working in campus ministry, I was a young mom with a preschooler and a baby. So often times, during my times with these women, I would be nursing, diapering, or supervising children at play. Along with their spiritual formation, I brought them into my life with me as a way to train them with some of the skills and heart they might one day need as they ran their own homes.
Sometimes, they joined me in the work of the home, helping me clean the fridge, box up baby clothes, or cooking dinner. There is something special about working side-by-side. It’s where we would talk along the way: about life, about God, what they hoped for. They would share the concerns they were carrying.
Very rarely was it scripted. I didn’t come in with a lesson plan or agenda. It also usually was one-on-one. Most of the best times I had could not have happened in a group setting. It was important that it was custom-designed for the moment and for the person.
Years later some of those women told me what those moments had given them. Back then, I had not known I was giving anything. I was simply living my life and letting them be in it.
This is what formation through training looks like. Not a curriculum. Not a program. Not a classroom with a teacher at the front. It describes older women—women who have lived enough to have something real to offer—training younger women in the context of lived life, sharing wisdom along the way.
This was life on life, individualized and not generic. The counsel that was shared was particular to them and tailored to their need of the moment. Our home became the place where that formation happened in these young women’s lives—at the kitchen, on the couch and sometimes in the midst of drooly babies banging blocks together.
And this is one of the beautiful ministries of home.
Ministry At Home
As my children began to grow, I realized that I wanted them to have these same benefits as well. I didn’t want ministry to just be for others, but for them too.
The challenge is that home ministry, unlike ministry outside the home, is ongoing. Ministry outside the home has a particular mercy built into it: you can leave. When you are depleted, when the conversation is hard, when you need to recover—you can go home and get some rest.
That’s not how it works within the home, however. The people God has placed in your home are there when you arrive and there when you wake up and there in every ordinary moment in between.
There was a point in my college ministry days that I realized I had segmented my life between “real” ministry and the ministry of home. I didn’t count my tasks as a mom as ministry because it felt mundane and ordinary. I wanted something more meaningful.
However, this is also, I am learning, precisely its gift.
The formation that happens in the unavoidable is different from the formation that happens in the chosen. When college women came to my home, I could prepare. I could bring my better self to the table.
On the other hand, the people who live inside these walls see the version I cannot manage. My family see the midweek version, the depleted version, the in-process version of me that is still learning everything I hope to teach.
And yet, that version can also be ministerial. Perhaps more so.
Because what people absorb from living alongside us is not our polished teaching but our actual dependence on God. They’re watching to see whether we turn to him when things are hard, whether we apologize when we should, whether our rest in Christ is visible in how we move through an ordinary day. My prayer is that I might be faithful to live at home what I hope to teach—and that my family can witness that firsthand.
Titus 2 Ministry in Your Home
Titus 2 begins with older women (notice Paul does not say “perfect” women!). These are not women who have arrived, but women who have lived enough to have something to give from.
I have been a college student and a newlywed and a young mother. I have homeschooled for over two decades. I have adopted a child with disabilities and started a ministry and gone back to school for a graduate degree and learned most of what I know not by mastering things but by walking through them—sometimes barely.
From those seasons I can speak about suffering and discipleship, about marriage and family, about vision and sacrifice and the long faithfulness required. I can speak about the gap between who I intended to be in my home and who I actually was on the difficult days. I can speak about the grace that meets you in that gap and the slow formation that happens when you keep showing up anyway.
Sometimes it is these imperfect moments that others need to hear about. Not my polished version but the real one, the one who still is learning what she hopes to teach, who has regrets and hard relationships and a home that is not always what she envisioned, yet has found that God is faithful in all of it.
Along the Way
This is one of the things I am learning about discipleship: it is very much “along the way.” It is how Jesus, even without a home, discipled his followers. He did life with them.
Deuteronomy 6 describes this too. We are to talk with our children, whether literal or people who look to us for guidance, along the way of life—from the time the day starts to when it ends, when we go out and when are stay in.
And home can be the starting point of that ministry.
From My Home to Yours
Think of one person God has placed in your ordinary life, perhaps someone you see each day. What might your presence offer? How might you welcome her into your real life this week, even with its imperfections?
