Yep, I’m posting about Christmas. Not because I’m excited that the stores started in with the holiday ads already, but just because after you make that transition from plain old regular adult to parent, planning ahead becomes a much bigger deal. Christmas is coming, and as Christian mamas, we’ve got to be ready. I’m not telling you to write your shopping list now–that’s not the planning I mean. What you really need is a toolbox full of practical ways to keep Christ in Christmas this year while we celebrate with our children.

Keep reading, and I’ll help you out with that.

A few months ago, my husband came upon the concept of missional communities. He’d heard of them before, but hadn’t really done a lot of research into the idea. He read a little bit about some of the underlying concepts, encouraged me to read about it too, and all of a sudden we were having a discussion about making our own family more mission-minded. It didn’t take long before we knew we had to commit to becoming a missional family.

Welcome to Family Stories, the 4th post in my Building Family Identity series! If you haven’t read them already, feel free check out the first 3 posts in the series:

• Part 1: Building Family Identity– Establishing a family identity in Christ as a foundation for your kids’ personal identities.
• Part 2: Family Core Values– Steps for writing your family core values list, and how to use it to build a distinctly Christian family identity
• Part 3: Family Traditions– Why family traditions are important for building family identity, how to be intentional about your traditions to bring your family closer to each other and to Jesus

Family stories are very important for building family identity (and, therefore, personal identity), which is why they are the focus of my final post in this series. Today we’re going to talk about different ways you can share your family stories, even if you’re not a great storyteller!

The holidays are here, and this time of year most of us have more than a few family traditions that we attempt to keep up. I love traditions (especially holiday traditions) and my husband and I have kept a fair share from our families of origin, plus we’ve thrown quite a few into the mix for our own little nuclear family.

But, there are probably some of you out there who aren’t into tradition, and I get it.

First of all, it can be exhausting…

This is the second post in the Building Family Identity series here at Disciple Mama! If you missed the first one, check it out here: Building Family Identity, Part 1

What are family core values?

If you’re serious about discipleship parenting, you’ve probably put a lot of thought into defining your family values.

Discipleship parenting means being intentional about passing our values on to our children.

If you haven’t done it yet, or if you haven’t really articulated your family values with your spouse–do it! After all, this intentionality is the whole idea behind Deuteronomy 6:6-7, right?

This is the first of 4 parts in my new Building Family Identity series. We’re entering the holiday season, and I want to spend some time this month diving into how we can be really constructive and intentional about our families and what we focus and place value on.