Building Godly Families
Over this next year, we will be focusing our attention as an entire church on “Building Godly Families.” We will be kicking this effort off with a Family Conference here at CCFW in just two weeks on August 23rd and 24th. The purpose of this conference is to help strengthen families by equipping parents, grandparents (as well as future parents and grandparents), and anyone that is involved in teaching, training, and raising up the next generation. That means you!
Dr. Brent Aucoin and his wife, Janet, will be leading the conference. Dr. Brent Aucoin joined the staff of Faith Church in Lafayette, Indiana, in July of 1998. Brent is the President of Faith Bible Seminary, the Chair of the Seminary’s M.Div. Program, and Pastor of Seminary and Soul Care at Faith Church. He is an ACBC certified instructor and counselor at Faith Biblical Counseling Ministries. He and his wife, Janet, have two adult children.
Janet Aucoin is the Director of Women's Ministry at Faith Church. Janet also hosts a podcast, along with Jocelyn Wallace, called Joyful Journey that is designed to equip women to passionately pursue beautiful biblical truth on their journeys as women of God. She is an ACBC certified counselor and teacher at Faith Community Institute.
The Aucoins consider it a privilege to be able to share God’s truth with God’s people. Brent and Janet will discuss the essential heart and practice of parents that results in pointing our children to their incomparable Creator and redeemer God so that they might choose Him over any other “god.” Remember God only has prodigal children—except for one—and God is still parenting you!
Let’s face it; raising children is hard work! The good news is that God has provided valuable resources in His Word to help us raise up children with the proper goals and outcomes in mind. This conference will help parents and grandparents intentionally begin with the end in mind by learning how today’s parenting choices might impact the adult your child is becoming.
You are to be God’s visible representative to the children in your life. Knowing and living out your God-given purpose is the foundation needed to help children understand and live out their purpose. As parents, grandparents, and teachers, we must be growing in understanding and living out God’s priorities for life (manhood, womanhood, marriage, emotions, relationships, sex, finances, work, church, service, etc.). In God’s value system, life is about relationships. We’ll learn how to navigate our own priorities to honor God, parent well, and help our children do the same. The primary issue, for parents and for children, is a deceived heart. Knowing how your own deceived heart takes you away from God will enable you to understand and have compassion on your children. This will also equip you to help your child see beyond deception to the beauty of the truth.
God has designed the world so that all our decisions take us down either a path toward Him and life, or away from Him toward our own destruction. Learning how to live a contagious “better way” personally will help you encourage that in your children. This is where we see the biblical value of discipline—an opportunity to taste the end of the path without traveling all the way to destruction. Discipline is an act of love to encourage the right path.
So, I hope you’ll plan to attend this important conference on the family. And consider inviting and coming with people in your life that would benefit from hearing God’s truth about raising up the next generation.
Dan Brewer, Director of Biblical Counseling & Pastoral Care
“Christianity will go. It will vanish. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and will be proved right.”
“Christianity has been ‘buried’ many times. But the corpse has a habit of coming to life and outliving all its pallbearers.”