What is Family Fire?

Family Fire is a Christian ministry which shares the good news of God's design for relationships, marriage, parenting, and grandparenting. Together, we explore spiritual, emotional, and physical intimacy and how the Spirit empowers us to live out our faith within and through our family relationships.

Relationships can be messy. We are imperfect beings, and our broken edges scrape up against one another as we engage in fellowship. We all fail to love one another perfectly. But families are God’s design and the center from which we live out all our roles. By God’s Spirit, our families can be formed and fueled in healthy ways for flourishing. At Family Fire, we care about stoking the Holy Spirit’s fire in the furnace of our relationships. Our ministry uses God’s word as the foundation for navigating the messiness of lives at home. We offer wisdom from Christian counselors and pastors on how to wisely cultivate our most intimate relationships.

We offer a variety of resources on our website, including articles, e-books, and videos to help our families flourish in God’s grace. We also offer opportunities to engage with us on Facebook or request prayer for your situation. Our active private Facebook group connects women who are praying for healing in their marriage.

What, then, does it look like to live out our faith in the context of our home life? How might the Holy Spirit empower us to live in contrast to the culture that surrounds us?

How does God’s redemptive story shape us?

God’s story, as told in the Bible, is one of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. All of our human relationships are set within this redemptive context. God made his creation perfect, but sin entered God’s perfect world, bringing pain and heartache into all the corners of our lives. Broken people are naturally drawn together by God’s design, but with our jagged edges we can’t help but hurt one another. Through the perfect sacrifice of Jesus, we experience forgiveness and receive a model of love to emulate in our relationships. The Spirit is at work transforming our lives and helping us live into our restorative calling. Although we live in the not-yet of waiting for God’s kingdom to be fully established, we can live into the hope of God making all things right once again, even within our families.

As we look at God's role in our relationships, we begin with recognizing our spiritual identity as God’s beloved children, fashioned in his image. God loves us with an unconditional, unfailing love and we are image bearers of God, reflecting his glory back to him as we live flourishing lives as we were meant to.

How does God’s redemptive story guide how we live in relationships?

God walks faithfully with us through all of the pain and struggles that we experience in this broken world. Even in difficulties, we catch glimpses of God’s kingdom breaking through into our circumstances. God shapes us as we lean on him through life’s struggles. Our losses give us empathy for one another and opportunities to share our testimony of God’s compassion and care.

God’s grace is at work transforming our lives, and that grace ripples out to our relationships. As we look to God’s word for how we ought to live, we find a model of forgiveness and sacrificial love in the person and work of Jesus.

Evidence of our brokenness and separation from God is all around us. We are blessed with opportunities to echo gospel repentance in our relationships and an opportunity to share the good news of God’s response to our spiritual state—that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

God’s calling shapes our lives, whether we are single or married, as parents or as grandparents. There is no area of our lives that is not under God’s faithful leadership. God cares about our mental and physical health as well as our intellect and even our sexuality.

How can the gospel be enacted in our relationships?

The fire of the Holy Spirit renews and equips us for the tasks set before us. By exploring God’s calling on our relationships, we hope to fan the flames of the Holy Spirit’s transformative work in our lives. As we embrace our identity as God’s beloved child, God’s grace flows through our lives and impacts our relationships.

In our relationships we can choose to live out the grace that God has shown to us. We point others to Jesus sharing the good news of grace with our hurting world. We guide our families to live in relationship with God.

Theologically, our ministry is rooted in the Reformed tradition, which recognizes that everything, including our relationships, fall beneath God's sovereignty and that by his common grace believers and unbelievers alike are capable of building healthy, redemptive relationships that point to the redemptive love of Jesus. Sometimes our relationships will struggle, but we will also see glimpses of God’s redemptive love transforming our lives and families.