Williams sees family ministry as catalyst for revival
FORT WORTH—While serving as pastor of Wilcrest Baptist Church in Houston for a decade, Jonathan Williams felt a strong burden to help families combat the significant spiritual attacks, sins and struggles today’s families face.
Realizing the great need to equip churches in family ministry, Williams transitioned from his pastoral role and launched Gospel Family Ministries in 2014. He focused on conferences and resources designed to provide practical and effective tools to help strengthen families by directing them straight to the Bible as their weapon of defense.
Growing up as the son of a Baptist pastor, Williams was raised in church, but it wasn’t until he was 18 years old that he surrendered his life to the Lord.
“My dad, David Williams, was the pastor of First Baptist Church in Flower Mound for 19 years and my mom, Donna Kay, served at the same church as the music minister for 24 years,” he said.
“Even though I grew up in church, I was living for myself and not living for the Lord. I gave my life to Christ when I was 18 years old. It was right before I went to college after graduating high school. My dad baptized me a few weeks later, and pretty early in college, God called me into ministry. Probably when I was 20 or so, I felt like God called me into ministry, and I started pursuing that.”
When Williams and his wife Jessica married, they both had a “great heart for missions and for the nations,” he said. They expected God to call them to international missions.
“In a unique way, the Lord did send us to the nations,” Williams said. “After we had been married for about five years, the Lord called me to be the pastor of Wilcrest Baptist Church in Houston, which is a really unique church, a multi-ethnic church with more than 50 nations represented. So, the Lord did use my heart for the nations to pastor a church for the nations.”
God used his experience at Wilcrest Baptist to clarify his calling to family ministry.
“Within my first year or two of pastoring all those families from all those different nations, I started to see what was going on in homes—some of the hurts and some of the sins and struggles, some of the spiritual attacks, marriages, parenting and grandparenting, prodigal children, all those things that families were facing,” he said.
“The conviction the Lord kept refining in my heart is no matter what we do on Sunday morning or how good something looks on Sunday morning, if families are drifting from the Lord and diving into sin and putting their faith on cruise control Monday through Saturday, then we are not really a healthy church, because that is the church.”
‘The Lord started opening up a lot of doors’
He began praying for a vision to reach families in a proactive way, rather than responding “once there’s an emergency and marriages are falling apart,” he said. Williams wanted to put into practice a biblical vision of family ministry and concentrate on getting the gospel into homes.
“From there, the Lord started opening up a lot of doors,” he said.
Today, in addition to his role with Gospel Family Ministries, Williams serves as an adjunct professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth and is the managing editor of the Southwestern D6 Family Ministry Journal. He and his wife Jessica are members of Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth.
While traveling around the state speaking at churches, conferences and workshops, Williams desires to provide families with tools and resources to assist in implementing family worship as part of their daily routines and rhythms.
“That’s the heart behind our ministry,” Williams said. “We want to strengthen family ministry within the church and encourage family worship in the home. The heart of our ministry is to come alongside the local church. We try to come alongside local churches and ask them, ‘How can we strengthen your family ministry?’”
Williams noted each conference and teaching session is designed to meet the needs of the specific needs of individual churches.
“A lot of times when I do Gospel Family workshops or conferences, we’ll do a Friday night and Saturday session. I’d say about two-thirds of the time, I come back to the church on Sunday morning and preach their Sunday morning services and sometimes even do a joint Sunday school class.”
Importance of family worship
During the Sunday morning sessions, Williams typically offers a public invitation for families to come pray together for their children, their grandchildren and especially their prodigal children.
“We pray for the next generation, because I think this speaks to even those who aren’t married or don’t have kids,” he said. “I would say one-fourth of the time that we do that, I’ll have a married couple come up to me and say, ‘We’ve been married 5 years or 15 years, whatever it is, and outside of mealtime, that was our first time to ever pray together as a family.’
“So, you see these little testimonies of God moving, and yet, they are small starting points that a year later families can see that was the point when God brought about radical transformation in their homes.”
As a resource to assist families, Williams has written the books, A Practical Theology of Family Worship: Richard Baxter’s Timeless Encouragement for Today’s Home and Gospel Family: Cultivating Family Discipleship, Family Worship & Family Missions.
Following the conferences and workshops, Williams often receives testimonies from families about the impact of implementing family worship. Many families have told him how transformative it is in bringing about positive changes in their homes as they spend intentional time reading the Bible, singing and praying together.
“Hearing testimonies from families after years of praying for their prodigal child or grandchild that the Lord has brought them back to faith, that continues to encourage me,” Williams said.
“I really do love partnering with local churches. I get to see anywhere between 30 to 50 local churches every year and meet with pastors and hear their hearts and vision. There are a lot of healthy and strong churches with pastors who have hearts for family worship, and that gets me fired up and encourages me.”
‘Go to prayer’
As Williams reflects on troubling statistics about the next generation and the church, he feels a deep burden and conviction to equip families.
“In our world today, there are all these discouraging things taking place culturally,” Williams noted. “It can be very disheartening and very discouraging when you see the spiritual attacks on the family and the spiritual attacks on the home. … So, you have all these heavy things that break our hearts and lead us to prayer.
“But what the Lord is teaching me is that those things should not lead us to fear, anger, depression or discouragement near as much as they should lead us to prayer. Those things should lead us to our knees and what the Lord has been reminding me is that he is still moving, and he is able, even with all these attacks on the family and all these cultural things going on.”
Williams considers the challenges his own children—ages 10, 12 and 14—will face.
“Every piece of research I’ve seen tells us that the next generation is the most depressed, isolated and loneliest generation ever and tells us that if nothing changes, we will lose the next generation here in America when it comes to our faith,” he said.
“But what the Lord has been reminding me is that he can turn the tide. God can change all that and bring revival. … God has been teaching me: Don’t go to fear. Go to prayer.”
He quoted Richard Baxter, a Puritan pastor in England in the 1600s: “If you want to see reformation in the church, first you need deep reformation in the home. You are unlikely to see it in the church unless you first see it in the home.:
“I think it’s fitting for our ministry and others like ours to pray for revival in the home and believe it will bless the church and community,” Williams said. “And eventually, it will bless our nation.”