New Family Worship Book (Quarterly)
We’ve just finished assembling the family worship book for the third quarter. For those who might have missed my earlier post, it’s a compendium of short scripture readings, catechism questions, a memory verse, a bible reading plan, and a hymn of the week published quarterly for our church family. I almost always choose one or two of the readings, the hymn, and sometimes even the catechism questions for use in our public worship. This lets families do lots of preparation days or weeks ahead of time helping their children learn how to participate.
You can download a PDF of the book Here. It’s in booklet form, so you’ll want to print it two sided and fold it together to make sense of it.
Please note that on pages 10-12 I have rewritten the questions on the Sabbath and added a footnote to explain. Most reformed catechisms include questions demonstrating the view that the Sabbath of the Mosaic Covenant has become the “Christian Sabbath,” to be observed on Sunday. We do not hold that view, and I didn’t know of any catechisms for children that did not follow the historic reformed ones. Note that Calvin did not believe that the Sabbath was to be observed today…
[...] David Ward at Doxologue has provided a Family Worship Book for download. I have been giving serious consideration to something like this for Citadel Square but haven’t had an opportunity to distill all the available materials into a cohesive unit. David has apparently been compiling these materials for his church for some time. [...]
Thanks, David, for this great resource. I just posted a link to it on my blog. Hope that’s okay. I have been mulling over resources to enable our congregation to worship more effectively outside of corporate worship and something like this was one of the things I had been thinking about. Thanks for allowing us to take a look at your book!
[...] On the post before last, the hymn-writing Pastor Eric Schumacher gave us a link to a helpful family worship book for July through September of 2006. This looks like a great tool, and I’ve printed and intend to use at least parts of it. [...]