• Most Christians attend church on average once or twice a month.  What does your church attendance communicate to your kids?
• How do we handle stress and adversity?  Imagine if we modeled, as parents, a prayerful life when it comes to life’s challenges.
• So many young couples getting married today have never developed the life skill of managing money.  If we are not good financial stewards as parents, how will our children ever learn good stewardship themselves?

The point is not to get you discouraged as a parent, but simply to challenge you to always be thinking of the teaching moments you have every day with your children.  Once you think through your parenting through your kid’s perspective, you begin to realize all of the messages you are sending to your kids.

Now, your turn.  Take a moment and share a recent teaching moment you have had with your kids watching.

So, how do you get started? Find a family devotional and begin having family devotional times.  For example, currently, I am using, Ruth Graham’s book called, Step in the Bible:  100 Bible Stories for Family Devotions. It gives you a Bible story, discussion questions and a key verse to memorize(optional).  It takes me about 5 minutes of prep time.  We have family devotions every Monday through Friday before school.  Not only is it a great way to begin your day, but it also provides a spiritual context for teaching moments throughout the day.  Try it for a week and I guarantee you will see your flock respond with joy.  That is what being a spiritual leader is all about.

What resources are you using to help you teach God’s Word?

During the next few weeks, I want to talk about the facets of spiritual leadership in the home.  As in introduction, let me say this.  The beginning point of spiritual leadership is the Holy Spirit.  Spiritual leadership requires spiritual power which can never be generated by the self.  There is no such thing as a self-made spiritual leader.  A true leader influences others(influences his family) spiritually only because the Spirit works in and through him.  Spiritual leadership starts here.  I like what Oswald Sanders says when he writes, “We can lead others only as far along the road as we ourselves have traveled.  Merely pointing the way is not enough.  If we are not walking, then no one can be following, and we are not leading anyone.”  Men, what is keeping you from walking in the power of the Holy Spirit?

By Leonard Sweet
Special Contributor

I have been on Twitter for less than a year, but it has already changed my life.

Less than two years old, with fewer than 50 employees—and as far as anyone can tell, no business plan—Twitter has grown so fast that the site is rickety and unreliable. You get same feeling our ancestors must have had when they turned the crank of the model-T.

But I can’t imagine life without Twitter.

While a case can be made for Twitter on the basis of its role in the communications revolution (which would lead me to defend “tweets” during worship) or in political revolutions taking place around the world (Iran, for example), I want to make a more personal case.

Twitter makes me a better Jesus disciple, partly because Twitter is my laboratory for future ministry. Here’s why.

Followership. Twitter only knows two categories: who are you following and who are your followers. Twitter’s categorical imperative is one of followership, not leadership.

Jesus’ category is “leader;” my fundamental category is “follower.” Even when Jesus calls me up to the front of the line, I still lead “from behind.”

For the last 50 years, the church has made a fetish of a word that is hard to find even once in the New Testament (“leader”) and has ignored a word that is found hundreds of times (“mathetes” or “follower,” “disciple”).

Twitter is a daily reminder that everything doesn’t rise and fall on leadership but on followership—-who am I following, and who is following me.

The name “Christian” (“little Christ”) was given to believers in Antioch (Acts 11:26) because people saw in them the Christ they followed. Paul said, “Follow me as I follow Christ.”

In Twitter’s ethic of followership, I am constantly reframing reality in ways that are more Jesus—more grace-full, more forgiving, more loving, more humorous—and helping my “followers” to better follow Christ. I am constantly on the prowl for things that could encourage, enrich, inspire.

I want my tweeps either to smile after reading one of my tweets, or to shake their head and sing, “What a Tweep We Have in Jesus.” In my ongoing battle with self-transcendence over self-absorption, Twitter has helped me become more others-focused.

For the One who taught us to be “in” the world but not “of” the world (or “out of it” either), the question is not “Would Jesus Tweet?” but “What Would Jesus Tweet?” The twitter question of “What are you doing?” has been replaced in my mind with “What is God doing?” and “Where do I see Jesus?” and “What am I paying attention to?”

With a new list of followers every day, and an unlimited number of potential followers, I am also reminded daily that the most important people in my life I haven’t met yet.

Sound bites that bite. If you can’t say it in everyday words, you probably don’t understand it yourself. And if you can’t say it in less than 140 characters, you can’t say it in a way that can connect with a Google world.

The first task of a missionary is to learn the language. Most of history’s greatest books and thinkers have distilled their thoughts into a 140-character tweet. In fact, the single killer sentence is what has changed the world.

No one was better at tweets than Jesus. Jesus was a master at sound bites that bite with terseness and immediacy. In fact, he was always twittering the gospel in pithy, memorable phrases, and even expressed his gospel in The Great Tweet: “Love one another as I have loved you.”

I suspect his followers would be well advised to RT (ReTweet) everything he said.

Surface. To say that someone is bubbling in or around the surface of a subject is not to say something nice. This is the greatest critique of Twitter: its numbing, crushing banality. Do I really need to know when you finished brushing your teeth this morning? Or what toothpaste you used?

But life is not just about the depths. Life is also about the surfaces. I spend large parts of my life with academics who spend their careers exploring the depths; many seldom come up.

People with highly sensitive seismographs for souls, like writers and artists, often rail against the shallowness of living and refuse to compromise and play in the spray. That’s my theory for the high incidence of suicidal behavior among artists and poets.

We need a theology of the surface in tandem with our theology of the depths. As Alice in Wonderland reminds us: “All this digging deep I dislike because if you dig deep all you dig is a pit into which you may fall yourself, or a well at the bottom of which there is nothing but treacle.”

In looking for something to tweet about, I find myself paying attention to life in heightened ways. With Twitter, every day is an awakening to things that never would have registered before.

Life is a bunch of little things. These little things add up, and Twitter reminds me to be grateful for the little things and to celebrate the little and the simple.

In my list of “50 Reasons Why I Love Twitter,” Reason No. 33 is “A place where serious people can think serious thoughts about trivial things.” A good beer is a subtle symmetry between froth and substance. A good life is a dance of depth and surface.

One of the highest compliments you can pay me? “Sweet, you do shallow well.”

Global Commons. This is what initially convinced me to enter the twitterverse. Social media guru Aaron Linne challenged me to think of Twitter as a medieval village green. If we were living a millennium ago, our lives would revolve around a village commons. In the course of a day, we would physically pass each other many times and exchange greetings: “How was your lunch?” “Who you working for now?” “What is in your hands?”

Wireless technology enables those multiplicity of personal exchanges to take place with people from around the world. Twitter is the new global commons.

Like soothsayers reading entrails, I conduct twea-leaf readings. Twitter both connects me to others and to what’s hot, what’s current, what’s the reigning gossip and styles of this new global village.

I like to think of myself as the “pastor” of this Twitter parish. In the course of a day’s passings (“postings”) on the village commons, I try to find ways to encourage my “parishioners” (Barnabas blasts, I call them), and be a positive, healing energy in their lives.

The question all social media pose is one easily answered: Are the residents of your global commons reflective of our global community or are they only mirrors of yourself? How many people of different races, classes, continents and religions are part of your social universe?

Social Solitude. I’m a hermit at heart. Twitter is made for hermits. It enables me to shut myself off without shutting anything or anybody out. It enables me to simultaneously give myself away and never stop hiding. You might call the twitterscape one of social solitude.

My life is like a barbell: lots of weight on the social end and lots of weight on solitude end—with not much in between other than the handle (read: long lines at airports) that connects the socialness with the solitude. Twitter now lets me do my solitude in society; it lets me be anonymous in groups.

For all of these reasons, Twitter has changed my life and made me into a better follower of Jesus.

Dr. Sweet is the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew University, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Fox University.