Book Review: Shift

Haynes, Brian. Shift: What it takes to finally reach families today. Loveland, CO: Group Publishing, 2009. 139 pp. $14.99.

Introduction
In this book Brian Haynes has shared his ministry strategy that he has implemented at Kingsland Baptist Church in Katy, TX, where he is an associate pastor who oversees spiritual formation. The contents of this book have been formulated, tried, and tested over multiple years of ministry in a local church setting. Haynes’ goal, as he states in the book, is not to convince his readers that his plan is the one and only way to reach families today in local churches (42); rather, he is sharing what he has found to work in his local community of believers, hoping to stir the hearts of ministers in all kinds of different contexts to begin thinking of creative, God- honoring, Biblically-based models of reaching the entire family with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Summary
The author begins the book by showing how churches have, throughout the last few decades, shifted into a largely program-driven, age-segregated model of ministry. Rather than simply following the model that seems to be the norm today, Haynes takes the reader back to the Scriptures and seeks to find out what God says about how families are to be structured and taught. He refers repeatedly to Deuteronomy 6:4-9, otherwise known as the Shema. In this passage of Scripture, Haynes points to the father of the household as the primary faith influencer of their children. This does not remove any role of the church whatsoever in the training and teaching of children with the Word of God, but it does question the assumed model where the Church is treated as sort of a “spiritual drop-off” service where parents can drop off their kids and expect to pick up a mature, God-honoring adult at the age of eighteen. Haynes suggests that both the parents and the church need to be taught and challenged on how they are to lead and train children. Parents need biblical teaching from the church, outlining their God-given role to disciple their children, and the church needs to rethink its many programs and events that are mainly numbers driven and strictly age segregated and seek to restore unity within the home, partnering with parents rather than replacing parents.

The model that Brian Haynes has suggested to allow parents and the church to partner together in the discipleship of children is what he calls the path of milestones. Before looking at each of the milestones individually, Haynes finds it necessary to define a few key terms that are associated with his model. These terms include milestone, core competencies, faith talks, god sightings, church events, parent summit conference, parent seminars, family celebrations, take- home Sunday, and generational team. Their definitions, along with a few examples, are given on pages 42-47.

After giving some introduction on why he has implemented this model and defining some terms necessary to be able to understand some of the specifics in his plan, the author moves on to discussing the seven milestones themselves throughout the rest of the book. The purpose of the milestones is to celebrate key, formative events that occur in the lives of every believer, and use those celebrations as things that that child is able to look back on later in life and remember how God has worked in their life through both their parents and their church.

The first milestone is the birth of a baby. This milestone is for the parents since the child is just an infant. In this milestone the church will train the parents on what it means to be a parent, how they are to be the primary faith influencer of their child, and celebrate with the parents as they make a commitment to raise their child in this biblical way. The second milestone is the celebration of a faith commitment. In this milestone the church works together with the parents to train them on how to lead their child to Christ, and both celebrate with the child when he or she decides to make a public profession of faith. The third milestone is preparing for adolescence. Here the church works together with the parents to train them on what to expect as their child enters this age, and the parents spend some quality time with their child on a road trip, where they will teach and guide their child through this formative time. The fourth milestone is a commitment to purity. The parents, together with the church, teach their child what it means to commit to purity and celebrate with a purity ring celebration. The fifth milestone is the passage to adulthood, and this is where parents teach their children what it means biblically to be a man or a woman. The sixth milestone is high school graduation, which is where the parents and the church prepare the child to leave home and enter into the real world as a mature, gospel-centered man or woman. The final milestone is life in Christ. This milestone focuses on adult discipleship and is a continuous teaching and training of adults of what it means to follow and serve Christ throughout their adulthood. Together these milestones serve as key events in the life of any believer and is a structured approach seeking to have both parents and churches partner in the discipleship of their children.

Critical Evaluation
This book consists of many strengths that make it a resourceful book for someone looking to implement a new family ministry model in the context of their local church. One of the strengths of the book is the first section, called “Starting Out,” where the author lays some groundwork for why he developed this model and why he feels it is crucial that churches and families rethink how they are reaching the children of the upcoming generation. He provides statistics relating to the state of families and teens in today’s society (28-29) and contrasts that with what the Scriptures say about the family and what God’s original blueprint was for the development of the spiritual lives of children (33-40). While the author includes many good statistics and Scripture references in comparing and contrasting God’s original plan with the state of the family in today’s society, he does so in a very brief and rushed manner. Indeed, the focus of his book is not to provide numerous statistics to serve as the go-to guide on the state of the modern family, nor is it intended to be a complete biblical theology of family either. However, I do think that a few more Scriptures discussing the role of the parents, especially fathers, in the spiritual development of their children would have been very helpful. He exegeted Deuteronomy 6:4-9 in the section on God’s original blueprint for the family (33-36), but that is the only Scripture that he dealt with. Readers who are serious about learning what the Scriptures as a whole say about the family and the discipleship of children by parents would be greatly served by looking at some other books that go into greater detail and depth. Two such works include the volume edited by Randy Stinson and Timothy Paul Jones titled Trained in the Fear of God or Steve Wright’s, ApParent Privilege.

Another strength of the book was the author’s detailed method of milestones that he uses in his local church. While this exact plan is not meant to be replicated detail for detail in every context (which the author says himself), the detail and reasoning for each of his components in his plan serves as a starting point for other pastors to look at and learn from, identifying what may work in their context and build upon that.

The only major weakness that I saw in this book is something that I have seen in most of the books that I have read on family ministry: where do children without Christian parents fit into this model? A child that has parents that are either unengaged with the church or entirely against Christianity whatsoever will be unable, for instance, to participate in any of the “family celebrations” that each milestone has. The author does recognize this possibility and discusses it towards the end of the book (129-30). He says that these children would experience church just like they would have without this plan being implemented. The fact that the church still has programs and activities for such children is a much better model than the family-integrated model where all age divisions are removed at the entire church is focused around individual families. Unlike the family-integrated model, where it seems that these children would at best feel very uncomfortable, or at worst, be neglected altogether, this model that Brian Haynes is suggesting still has activities and groups for these neglected children to belong to. However, it would be great if somehow there was a plan for fathers of children in the church to “adopt” one of these neglected children and treat them as their own. If this were to happen, the children whose parents are negligent of their children’s spiritual life would have a family in the church to walk through the milestones with them. I do not think that the author would disagree that this would be a great thing to see happen, but he does not address this possibility within his plan of the milestones.

Conclusion
Overall I thought that this book was a good resource that accomplished what its goal was: to give the reader an example of what it looks like to rethink the way current youth ministry is done and shift into a model that involves the family as a whole, with the parents and church partnering together in the discipleship of their children. While I may not agree with or use every single detail in the author’s plan, I think he gives the reader a very good starting point by which ministers can begin to develop a strategy to shift into a model that better and more intentionally reaches the family as a whole.