Parenting as a Church Leader: Helping your family thrive

Parenting as a Church Leader: Helping your family thrive

Author : Rachel Turner
£9.99

Delivers essential parenting and family life skills for church leaders

When spiritual leadership is the day job, how does it affect family dynamics?

How do we spiritually parent our children while also needing to lead the church? How do we balance the many hats we wear? How do we live in a goldfish bowl and yet enable our children to flourish? How do we parent for faith without giving in to the pressure to perform for our congregations?

Drawing on extensive research, this book explores the issues and builds a set of simple tools and approaches to help leaders and their families to flourish together.



Also available on Kindle

Buy on Kindle
Title Parenting as a Church Leader: Helping your family thrive
Author Rachel Turner
Description

When spiritual leadership is the day job, how does it affect family dynamics?

How do we spiritually parent our children while also needing to lead the church? How do we balance the many hats we wear? How do we live in a goldfish bowl and yet enable our children to flourish? How do we parent for faith without giving in to the pressure to perform for our congregations?

Drawing on extensive research, this book explores the issues and builds a set of simple tools and approaches to help leaders and their families to flourish together.

Details
  • Product code: 9780857469373
  • Published: 20 March 2020
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • Dimensions: 130mm wide and 198mm high

When spiritual leadership is the day job, how does it affect family dynamics?

How do we spiritually parent our children while also needing to lead the church? How do we balance the many hats we wear? How do we live in a goldfish bowl and yet enable our children to flourish? How do we parent for faith without giving in to the pressure to perform for our congregations?

Drawing on extensive research, this book explores the issues and builds a set of simple tools and approaches to help leaders and their families to flourish together.

Rachel Turner is an author, speaker and the Parenting for Faith Pioneer for The Bible Reading Fellowship. She presents the Parenting for Faith course, a free video-based resource for church groups and individuals.

Cathy Madavan

How I wish this book had been out a decade ago when our children were younger. Packed with wisdom, common sense and a good dose of humour, this book encourages us that God is with us in the journey as parents as well as leaders. It’s great. Highly recommended would be an understatement. 

 

 

Lucy Rycroft: The Hope Filled Family

As the wife of a pastor, I found this book spot-on. It is suitable for ALL those who work in church leadership – regardless of denomination or role – and their spouses. It’s empowering and encouraging, from an author who – after a lifetime in Christian work – understands the unique challenges faced by families who have an upfront ministry. The book contains practical tips, as well as advice for liaising graciously with your church children’s/youth teams, and the whole thing remains optimistic about the benefits our children gain from this life, rather than focusing on the negatives of the ‘goldfish bowl’ experience.

 

CPAS Leadon monthly e-news, December 2021 www.cpas.org.uk/leadon
Review by Pam Macnaughton  

This book should be required reading for all those in full-time church leadership. It is realistic, sensible and Godly. Until you have lived the life of church leadership as a family, it is hard to understand the pressures and challenges it presents to both the adults and their children in that family.

Rachel Turner tackles the issues head on with compassion and understanding, and after full and careful research. She is also a natural story-teller, and so there are great stories throughout to illustrate her points.

What emerges from the book is an understanding that it is possible to do the two things well – to lead a church well and bring up family well. The two do not have to be mutually exclusive. However, it does take careful thought, generous hearts and willingness to learn and change. The pressures of church leadership are such that it's too easy to put the needs of those we lead first over and over again, until our families believe that they will always come second. It doesn't have to be like that, but we do sometimes need help, and great examples, to make wise decisions. And then to explain those decisions well to our families.

Parenting as a Church Leader takes us on a journey of discovery as we consider our way through these potential minefields.

If, as would only be natural, we are keen to do our best so that our children grow up to be not just as rounded adults but also faithful followers of Christ in their own right, we need to examine ourselves, our actions and our words carefully, again and again. This book can help us do that. It's not one to just read and shelve, but to read, discuss and return to through the precious child-rearing years.

 Reviewed by Pam Macnaughton