FORT WORTH, Texas – Long before Jonathan Williams began serving in his current role as the senior pastor of Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, he felt a strong burden to assist local churches in the area of family ministry.
It led him to leave the pastorate and launch Gospel Family Ministries in 2014. Through that ministry, Williams has launched conferences and resources aimed to strengthen families and direct them straight to God’s Word.
Williams also is an affiliate professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he received his doctor of philosophy and master of divinity degrees in family ministry.
Before his current calling to the family, Williams was called to the nations, even serving in the Amazon jungle through the International Mission Board’s Journeyman program. His wife Jessica felt that call to missions as well.
“We thought the Lord was going to send us overseas,” he said. “In a unique way, the Lord 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. So, the Lord did use my heart for the nations to pastor a church for the nations and just as the Lord used my heart for the nations to call me to pastor, the Lord used my love as pastoring families to really start burdening my heart for 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.
“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.”
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. He surrendered to ministry a couple years later.
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 and ask them, ‘How can we strengthen your family ministry?’”
Williams has written several books including, “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 his conferences and workshops, Williams often receives testimonies from families about the impact of implementing family worship and how transformative it is in in the home as families 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. He meets with 30 to 50 churches each year.
As Williams reflects on troubling statistics about the next generation, he continues to feel a strong conviction to equip and encourage families to seek the Lord together.
“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,” he said. “It can be very disheartening and very discouraging when you see the spiritual attacks on the family and the spiritual attacks on the home, such as entire organizations in our country who say their goal is to destroy what they call the traditional family, which from what they describe sounds a lot like the biblical family. …
“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.”
Williams has been greatly encouraged by the influence of family ministry at work in local churches in the Texas area, especially through the Jack D. Terry School of Educational Ministries at Southwestern Seminary.
In addition, Williams has also been inspired by the desire and partnership of local pastors who share this vision, including Blair Robinson at First Baptist Church in Irving, Texas, which has hosted several Gospel Family Conferences over the past few years. Robinson is the co-author of the book, “Equipping Fathers to Lead Family Worship.”
“I think about the next generation, and I have three kids in this age range so it’s their generation,” Williams said. “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.”
But he is not without hope. He knows God can bring revival.
“My prayer for the next generation and for all the families that we minister to is Psalm 78:7, ‘O Lord, let them set their hope in you, let them not forget your works but let them keep your commands and obey your commandments.’
“God has been teaching me don’t go to fear, go to prayer. … There is nothing impossible for Him, and I think it is a fitting prayer as we pray for our culture and for our nation, to start with prayers for the family.”
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