Q&A with Steve Wright

While I was at the Connecting Church & Home Conference in Louisville, Ky. this past weekend, I was privileged to conduct a Q&A with Steve Wright. Steve is the Pastor of Family Discipleship at Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC. He is currently working on his PhD in philosophy of family ministry at Southern Seminary. Steve is the author of ReThink and ApParent Privilege.

He has overseen the development of Treasuring Christ Curriculum. We will begin using this resource this Sunday at Grace Church of Tallahassee during our Sunday-school hour.

Here are the highlights from or conversation (my comments are in bold);

Q. Could you define your role as the Pastor of Family Discipleship at your local church?

It is a role that began out of a conviction that parents are the primary disciplers of their children. During my role as Student Pastor, I often talked about this dynamic to the parents. We (Providence Baptist Church) began to realize that this was a message that needed to be emphasized to parents before their children were 13 years old. So my role seeks to come alongside the parents of children age birth - 18 within our congregation and equip them for their essential responsibility.

Q. Could you briefly explain what you mean when you speak of the role of parents as “primary disciplers”?

If you start in Genesis and begin to turn page by page, who in Scripture do we see God’s Word pointing to as the primary witness to the next generation? Rarely does anyone ever miss the answer: Parents. Think how the faith of Israel continued. It was clearly through the home. Throughout the New Testament and in the life of the early church, you see this obvious parental role.

Please share with us how the Treasuring Christ curriculum came about.

Looking back, there are several events that brought this project to life.

1) Four years ago I received an announcement from the publishing house,who at the time was our curriculum provider. The announcement communicated why they had chosen to remove the crucifixion from the Easter Sunday curriculum. This was a problem!

2) We also began to notice that within the curriculum we were using, the moral of the story often missed the point. The hero of the story was rarely Christ. For instance, regarding the feeding of the 5.000, rather than exalting in Christ’s Deity on display, the emphasis was on sharing.

3) The other moment happened on a mission trip to Ukraine. During my time there, I had a real burden to provide Gospel-Centered resources to the nations.

There are certainly curriculums that are out there that are biblically solid options. Our church decided to produce another gospel-centered, biblically-faithful curriculum that would encourage the parental involvement in the home, and be something that could be made available to the nations.

Q. How is this curriculum different?

Our strategy for Treasuring Christ is as follows;

In order to display God’s great glory; we will: (Isaiah 42.1-9)
• Produce a gospel-centered curriculum which allows every child, birth through high school, to study the same Scripture passage each week (Colossians 3:16; Romans 5:.6-11) We call this “unified”, we are all on the same page, same game plan.
• Produce a gospel-centered curriculum that will equip parents to thrive in their God-given roles as their child’s primary disciple, thereby, connecting the church and the home (Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Psalm 78:1-7). We provide a weekly take home resource that encourages parents to help their children prepare for the upcoming week’s lesson.
• Produce a gospel-centered curriculum to share with the nations that will help churches reach and exhort the next generation and to make Christ’s name great around the globe (Romans 1:16; Psalm 108.1-5

Q. Outside of TC curriculum, could you share with us a few ways that your church intentionally seeks to cultivate a connection between the church and the family?

In everything we do at Providence, we hold to the R.T.I. principle with our parents.
- R – Resource – books, articles, sermons, etc.
- T – Train – Instruction related to family-discipleship
- I – Involve – Encourage Parental Involvement in all our youth activities

One or more of these three components exist at everything that takes place within our family ministries.

Q. What books would you recommend for Parents? Pastors? Youth?

There are lots of good resources, I would start with Gospel-Powered Parenting – William Farley. Others would be Give them Grace – Elyse Fitzpatrick and Age of Opportunity – Paul Tripp.