After serving as senior pastor of Wilcrest Baptist Church Houston, Texas, for a decade, Jonathan Williams began to feel a strong conviction to help combat the significant spiritual attacks, sins and struggles today’s families face.
Realizing the great need to equip local churches for family ministry, Williams launched Gospel Family Ministries in 2014, focusing on conferences and resources to provide practical and effective guidance to strengthening families by directing them straight to God’s Word.
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“It’s interesting the things the Lord uses to lead us to certain places,” Williams noted. “Before I was married, a lot of my ministry was focused on missions leading worship and missions at MFUGE Camps. I served as a missionary in Bolivia and Mexico, did an International Mission Board journeyman term for two years and was a missionary in the Amazon jungle working with an unreached, indigenous tribe there.
“When my wife and I got married, we both had this great heart for missions and for the nations, and we thought the Lord was going to send us overseas. In a unique way [He] did send us to the nations.
“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. Just as the Lord used my heart for the nations to call me to pastor, the Lord used my love of pastoring families to really start burdening my heart for family ministry.
“The conviction the Lord kept refining 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.
“About six months into pastoring the church, I started praying for a vision to reach families because I didn’t want it to be reactive — once there’s an emergency and marriages are falling apart. [We wanted to put] into practice a biblical vision of family ministry — looking at how do we get the gospel into homes.”
Heart of the ministry
As the son of a Baptist pastor, Williams was raised in church, but it wasn’t until he was a teen that he surrendered his life to Christ.
“My dad, David Williams, was the pastor of First Baptist Church in Flower Mound, Texas for 19 years and my mom, Donna Kay, served at the same church as the music minister for 24 years,” Williams recalled. “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. My dad baptized me a few weeks later, and pretty early in college, God called me into ministry.”
Today, in addition to his role with Gospel Family Ministry, Williams is an adjunct professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth and managing editor of the Southwestern “D6 Family Ministry Journal.”
While traveling around the state speaking at churches, conferences and workshops, Williams hopes to provide families with beneficial tools and resources to assist in implementing family worship as part of their daily routines and rhythms.
“That’s the heart behind our ministry,” he explained. “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 … and ask them, ‘How can we strengthen your family ministry?’”
Williams noted that every conference is specifically tailored to meet the needs of the individual church.
“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 and preach their Sunday morning services and sometimes even do a joint Sunday school class. When I do that, I’ll offer an invitation for families to come up to the altar after the sermon to pray together and pray for their kids, grandkids and their prodigal children.
“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.’ [These] are small starting points that a year later families can see that was the point when God brought about radical transformation in their homes.”
Williams has written, “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” to assist families.
“I really do love partnering with local churches. I get to see anywhere between 30–50 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.
“Even though I’m not a senior pastor anymore, I still have a pastoral heart, and I love getting to walk with families and encouraging pastors. It’s such a blessing.”
Burden
As Williams reflects on troubling statistics about the next generation and the church, he feels a deep burden to equip families.
“In our world today, there are all these discouraging things taking place culturally. Every day you turn on the news and it’s as Paul said to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3, just going from bad to worse. It can be very disheartening … when you see the spiritual attacks on the family and the spiritual attacks on the home. But what the Lord is teaching me is that those things should not lead us to fear, anger, depression or discouragement nearly 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.
“God has been teaching me don’t go to fear, go to prayer and … that He is able to turn the tide and bring revival. There is nothing impossible for Him. 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 and eventually it will bless our nation.”
