Our Mission (1 of 4): Encouraging Christian Parents

Our heart is to encourage the hearts of Christian parents to raise wholehearted children who will live for Christ.

Our children were eight, six, and three when we first began to realize that we wanted to encourage Christian parents. We had been parents just long enough at that point to know that we needed courage instilled in us to be the kind of parents we heard God calling us to be in his Word. And that is what we wanted to give other parents—we want to help them become wholehearted Christian parents.

Encouragement is both the foundational and the formational motivation for this ministry. Foundational because God gave us hearts to encourage other Christian parents to “bring [their children] up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). Formational because everything we would eventually do to give help and hope to Christian parents would emerge from that motivation and conviction.

We wanted our children to be “whole” in Christ, like David prayed for his son, Solomon—“know the God of your father, and serve Him with a whole heart and a willing mind” (1 Chronicles 28:9). We also wanted to “consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds … encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:25). We still want to encourage parents to take up the call of God to raise their children with whole hearts and willing minds for the Lord. That is where our ministry begins and will end.

Materials and Ministries:

• Mom Heart Conferences and events

• At Home with Sally podcasts

• At Home with Sally blog

• Whole Heart blog

• Seasons of a Mother’s Heart

• Mission of Motherhood

• Ministry of Motherhood

Our Mission (2 of 4): Equipping Christian Parents

Whole Heart is at its heart a discipleship ministry—we equip parents and children to follow Jesus wholeheartedly.

Before we became parents we were disciples, but we were also disciple makers. As single adults, we both had served on staff with a ministry that focused on evangelism and discipleship—winning others to Christ, building them up in the Word, and sending them into the world to do the same for others. As disciple makers trained by that ministry, we were equipping others for ministry for Christ.

When we became parents, we found that the ministry principles that had been instilled so deeply in us as young adults would find a new expression—our children would become our most important disciples. We realized that Christ’s Great Commission—to “make disciples of all the nations”—must begin with the nation of our home, and our children. We were grateful to have been trained by our earlier ministry to be able to make that pivot into our family.

The second priority of Whole Heart Ministries is to equip Christian parents to be disciple makers in their homes. We hear the words of Paul to his disciple, Timothy, that the Word of God works in every area of his life “so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every God work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Our desire is to find all that the Word of God has to say to us as Christian parents, and to equip other parents with that truth. We want to equip them to become disciple makers at home.

Materials and Ministries:

• Educating the WholeHearted Child

• Read for the Heart

• Caught Up in a Story

• Taking Motherhood to Hearts

• Leader Intensive Training weekends

• Podcast courses and series
  
  

Our Mission (3 of 4): Enabling Christian Parents

We work to create and place into hands of Christian parents resources, tools, and ideas to shape their children’s hearts.

If you want to build a house, you need good tools. If you want to build a family, the same principle is at work. The better the tools you have to work with, the stronger your family will be and the longer your home will stand. From the very start of this ministry, we have been committed to creating good tools for Christian parents—to build their children, their home, their testimony, and their heritage.

Enabling is the “hands-on” extension of encouragement and equipping. Our tools are parental empowerment for building a Christian home. They are primarily words—written, spoken, printed, posted—that come from God’s Word. They are tools to build the kind of “house” that Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount that, even though pummeled by rains, floods, and wind, would not fall because “it had been founded on the rock” (Matthew 7:25).

Peter starts his second letter with a powerful picture of enabling. He exhorts his readers to diligently build faith, moral excellence, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love into their lives. These qualities, he says, will ensure that the believer is useful and fruitful “in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:2-11). We design our enabling tools and ministries to give parents confidence in Peter’s promise. It’s what we want for our own children.

Materials and Ministries:

• Our 24 Family Ways

• Mom Heart groups

• Book study guides

• 10 Gifts of Heart

• Leader Intensive Training

Our Mission (4 of 4): Engaging Christian Parents

We create ways to connect Christian parents in virtual community, in small groups, in events, and other ways.

Our fourth and final mission priority is about shifting from hearts (encouragement), heads (equipping), and hands (enabling), into help (engaging). When gears are engaged, things start to move. When we find ways to engage with Christian parents we do that to move them—to new family and life habits, better parenting choices, Christian home building plans, and lifegiving actions for their children.

Whole Heart does not have a worldwide staff that can engage personally with parents around the globe, but we’re thankful for the world wide web which allows us to engage virtually through streaming and on-demand online training and helps. We still try to meet personally with parents and moms in local events because we consider that kind of engagement important, and we want to have eye-to-eye connections with the parents we want to serve.

Engaging is the next logical step after we have given parents training, materials, and ministries. We find ways to engage with parents so we can help them move from being not only a “hearer” of the Word, but to being “an effectual doer” of the Word (James 1:22-25). When all the parental gears are engaging with the gears of God’s Word, then our children will be moved to follow Christ in their own generations, and to “put their confidence in God and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments” (Psalm 78:7).

Materials and Ministries:

• Whole Heart events

• Sally Clarkson events and studies

• Life with Sally online community

• Life with Sally Forum

• Mom Heart Groups Facebook group

• Mom Heart Groups

• At Home with Sally Podcast