The
      Precedent
      Priority
      Practice
      Pitfalls
of Family Worship

When to have a family worship time
Lord willing these articles have been convincing you of your need to meet with your family or household regularly to worship God. When should you do this? Unfortunately there is no simple, pat answer that will be work for every household. Instead of trying to come up with a standard time of day that we all meet for family worship, it is more important for you find a time of day that works for your family and plan that time into your routine. Put it on the family calendar, the weekly agenda, or however else you plan your family life. Strive to plan a time when the whole family can be together, including Dad. Feel free to be creative with your time and piggyback it onto a meal, during driving time (as long as there is a reader who isn’t driving or you can listen to the Bible on CD!), or while dinner is in the oven. If you need to have it at different times on different days of the week that’s fine – again, you should do whatever will actually work for your family’s particular circumstances. It might sound really godly to plan to have your whole family up, fed, and ready to alertly and eagerly worship God at 6:30am but that might be very unrealistic. Let me caution you against scheduling family worship during a meal. The mechanics of eating, passing food, and dealing with children during a meal will distract everyone from paying attention and really thinking about what is being read or taught. You also probably don’t want to hear (or participate in) several people trying to sing while eating.

What to do in a family worship time
Once a family has committed to gathering together to hear from God and respond in prayer and song and has come up with a plan for when to meet, the biggest challenge can be what to do. There are three key components of family worship: Reading, Praying, and Singing. Or, if you prefer alliteration: Scripture, Supplication, and Song. I like to refer to the order as “read, pray, sing.” This happens to be the exact wording of the last line of the Family Worship Hymn which I’ve written to be sung to the tune of He Leadeth Me:

O God to whom all praise is due,
Our family bows to worship You;
We trust in Jesus’ work alone
To come before Your holy throne.
Come, Holy Spirit, now subdue
All that distracts our hearts from You;
Endear us to our glorious King
While now we read, and pray, and sing!

Reading
The goal of reading God’s Word is to hear and understand from God what God is communicating about Himself, about Jesus, and about us. We should not neglect reading from Scripture directly, even if the readings are short or paraphrased because our children are so young. It’s easy to get caught up in reading children’s books about the Bible and neglect to actually read the Bible. For that matter it’s easy for adults to do as well! There are many books designed for use in family worship or for devotions that are separated into short daily lessons. We have used these successfully in the past, especially books that offer a passage of Scripture or two to read in addition to the devotional thought. Once you have had practice reading Scripture and someone else’s devotional thoughts, you will hopefully be able to start giving your own devotional thoughts and will become a preacher to your little flock! Your “sermons” should be age-appropriate and focus on helping everyone comprehend the meaning of the passage and applying it personally. I’ve found it helpful to also explain how the passage relates to Jesus (when it’s apparent to me). In my private and family worship I find it extremely helpful to start with a Psalm that I might learn and be reminded of how and why to praise God.

Praying
If you have time allow everyone an opportunity to pray. We have found two methods for giving our small children prayer requests effective: writing requests on index cards (or just drawing pictures of the request) and giving each child a concrete subject and number of requests to pray for. For example, we might go around and ask each child to choose a person that they want God to save as well expressing thankfulness for something God has done or some aspect of His character. We might help them start the request by saying “Tell God ‘Thank you for being so…’” or “Say ‘God, please save…’.” Practice saying the Lord’s prayer together. This is an important prayer that will help all of us remember what to pray for and serve as an effective outline for our extemporaneous prayers.

Singing
Even if you are not musical do not neglect to sing in your family worship time. The Bible is replete with commands to sing His praises and to sing to one another about the great things of God. If your embarrassment over not singing well hinders you from singing you might actually be teaching your kids that our reputation or image is more valuable than the things of God! It is a wonderful sign of humility and devotion to God when you sing from your heart even if it sounds bad. That being said, if you can’t sing very well I recommend the use of recorded music or an instrument (if someone in your family plays one). You can find many hymn tunes on the Internet (cyberhymnal.org is a great resource) and you could use other CDs of worship music. If the worship leader can’t sing very well you might appoint a spouse or older child, someone with a stronger sense of melody and range, to lead the singing. Save handouts from Sunday with lyrics and sheet music for the songs we sing in Gathered Worship and sing them in family worship time. I’ve found it very helpful, both for singing with non-readers and when we don’t have lyrics available for everyone, to sing in a call and response fashion; I sing a line of a hymn then the rest of the family will repeats it.

The Duration of Family Worship
Just like the time of day of family worship, there is no universal guideline for how long the worship time should be. It will naturally vary depending on your schedule or the age of your household. With small children 5-10 minutes might work well (all the while using the time to help train your kids to sit and pay attention for a longer period of time). Now that I have some older kids who can sit still, pay attention for longer periods of time, and meaningfully interact with what I’m teaching, I have found that 30 minutes is what is required to read a Psalm, sing a song or two, read Scripture and/or a devotional, talk about what it says, and pray. Some days because of poor planning or other distractions our time is cut short and we don’t get to every element. Always remember that even spending 2 minutes together in prayer or reading a Psalm is better than nothing! So if you are in a hurry ask yourself if you can’t spare just a few minutes before rushing out the door.

The Gospel
Lastly, I challenge you to remember the gospel, even in your planning and executing on having a family worship time. For some of us, particularly fathers who have never been faithful to have family worship times with our families, an article like this can kick start out guilty consciences and seem to set a standard that we fear is impossible to keep. Well, in one sense you’re right! Next week we’ll look at the pitfalls to family worship. If left to our own natural tendencies we would all veer away from having regular and meaningful family worship. For some of us that might mean not having it at all, for others it might mean having it “religiously” but without true humility, transparency, or relevance to our daily lives. Before you commit to having a worship time please first commit to prayer for it. We need to humble ourselves under God’s mighty hand, beg for the Holy Spirit’s work in our hearts to motivate us to act, and acknowledge that without God’s enabling our family worship times would fail abysmally!

May God be glorified as we grow in the area of family worship.
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Our fourth article on family worship will consider some of the typical pitfalls you can expect to encounter when trying to start or continue the habit of family worship.

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