Family worship need not be daunting

Family worship can seem like a daunting task, especially to those who have never really engaged in it, but it need not be this way. I mentioned in part 1 of this piece that God has nowhere specifically commanded family worship as such, but rather He has commanded that we teach our children throughout the day—as you sit in your house, as you walk by the way, as you lie down, as you arise—and family worship is perhaps the most obvious way of achieving this.

What this means is that although the elements of family worship can be deduced from the Scriptures—reading from God’s Word, explaining and talking about the meaning, singing, praying—the way you do it has not been prohibited. The details have very much been left in the hands of fathers primarily, although fathers would be foolish to ignore the suggestions of their wives.

It is sometimes tempting to look around at other families and see how they do it and think that this is the way it must be done. So we see a family that has family worship twice a day, every day without fail, for 20 minutes each time, where the family gathers in the living room rather than the meal table and where the father reads from the Scriptures and then finishes by praying for his family. And we think that this is what family worship is. Well it may well be for that family what family worship is, but that does not mean that this is what family worship must be, and it doesn’t mean this is how it necessarily has to look in your home.

God has not prescribed how you go about this. He has not prescribed the time that you do family worship; He has not prescribed the place where you do it; He has not prescribed how long it should take; and He has not prescribed the order that you should do things. All of which means that family worship will look different from family to family, and the task of heads of households is to work out a pattern that works best for their own family.

Your overarching concern in family worship ought to be to help your children to love God, and therefore it ought to be a time of joy as well as learning for your children. You want to make it a time that they love and a time that they will look back on in years to come and remember with delight. “That was the place that I learned about God and how to love Him.” “Those were the times when I began to understand what that mysterious and majestic book, the Bible, was talking about.” “This was the way that I learned from my parents about Christ, and what repentance, faith, and joy actually looked like.”

In practice this is, of course, difficult to achieve. One of the most difficult things is to strike a right balance between a decent formality and overstuffiness. You want your times of family worship to have some structure and to avoid chaos, which can easily happen especially if you have children at different ages and different stages of understanding (I speak from experience!). Yet it is possible to overformalize things so that you become rigid and unbending and you lose sight of what it is you are aiming at: to help your children to love God.

I think the best way of achieving this is to get your whole family involved in the process. I have heard some people who have gone through their childhood doing family worship who say that they hated it. This coming not from apostates, but from those walking in the faith! The reason that they hated it is almost always the same: the father always read the Scriptures, the father always explained them, the father always prayed. In other words, the whole thing was a father-centered rather than a father-led experience, and everyone else’s duty was to keep silent and listen to him.

This does not appear to me to be healthy and I would encourage a different approach. I am not saying that the father should not do all these things—he should—but I am saying that unless he involves the rest of the family, family worship can quite easily turn into father-worship, rather than The Father worship, if you get my meaning.

How did Jesus teach His disciples? By telling them a bunch of stuff and insisting they listen? Not at all. When He spoke in public He spoke with authority and people were astonished; when He was in private He asked His disciples questions and encouraged them to talk and ask questions. We ought to aim at something like the same thing.

But how do we get the whole family involved? This can be done in many ways. For example, letting your little ones take turns reading the Scriptures to the family. Or asking your wife to pray for the family. Some fathers and husbands seem to think that this kind of thing is a usurpation of their authority—only the father has the authority to do these things. I don’t see this. In fact, if a father asks his little ones to read, or asks his wife to pray, far from being a usurpation of Biblical headship, it is an affirmation of it. And not only this, but that man’s children and that man’s wife will feel so much more involved and eager to do family worship than if the man does everything himself.

So don’t be afraid to get your wife and children involved. Let them read. Let them pray. Ask them if they can explain a passage or a verse. Ask them some questions about what has just been read. Ask the children if daddy’s explanation of the passage made sense to them, or if they can spot any problems with it. This kind of thing is a great way of encouraging them, and a great way to challenge the thinking of fathers, without losing sight of who is meant to be leading the time.

What of singing? I’ve heard some Christians say that they don’t do singing in their family worship or around the meal table because they don’t like to sing. Well, too bad. Sing anyway! One of the marks of Christianity over and against all other religions is that its adherents are commanded to sing.

Islam doesn’t command singing. Buddhism doesn’t command singing. Hinduism doesn’t command singing.

But for Christianity, singing is an integral part. “Is any merry? Let him sing Psalms” (James 5:13). That ought to tell us something.

Singing is didactic—it teaches. Singing also unites people like no other thing. That’s why God has put loads in His Word about singing. “But I can’t sing,” you reply. “Sure you can,” says I. “Not very well, maybe, but yes, you can sing.” God knows you can’t sing in tune very well, and your family may well concur in this appraisal, yet God still wants to hear you sing anyway. As far as family worship is concerned, singing is by far the best way of uniting your hearts together. Everyone can be involved in singing at one time in a way that is not possible during any other activity. Therefore, regardless of whether your voice makes cats wince, sing with your family and do so with joy.

It can be tempting to get very uptight about things being done right. But remember, this is family worship, not the gathering of the Church. If you are going to find it difficult to fit family worship in on a particular day, that’s OK. Maybe just read a few verses around the meal table and pray. Doing something is better than doing nothing, but you are not constrained to follow the same pattern every day.

Neither should your aim be to have a trouble-free family worship, although that might be nice. There will be times when your 3-year-old interrupts the reading to make a point about jam or airplanes or something else utterly irrelevant to the argument Paul is making in his epistle to the Romans. That’s OK. Be mindful of their frame. Laugh it off, and try to find ways of involving them so that their minds become less focused on combine harvesters and more on what God is saying to them. And if you have children of many different ages, be careful not to neglect either the older ones or the younger ones. Find ways of involving them all in the experience.

Don’t be afraid of letting humor enter in. It is possible to get so solemn about family worship that all expressions of humor are seen as irreverent. He is a Holy God, therefore we must be ultra-serious during family worship. Well the news is that the Holy God is also the God who created laughter and humor and gave this as a gift for bringing people—not the least families—together. Why would He be offended when we laugh during our family worship times? “Serve the Lord with gladness” (Psalm 100:2).

In my own family, we sometimes go completely off topic and end up with some pretty hilarious conversations. Is this irreverent? Some might say so, but I really think that this misses the point. The purpose of family worship is that it is the engine that drives our family in our efforts to love God. Humor and going off on tangents brings the family closer together and so is often a great way of achieving the aim we started with: to love God.

So if you’ve never done family worship before, go for it. Start small and work up. Don’t expect everything to come together at once. Don’t expect your children to all be sitting wide-eyed hanging on your every word. They won’t. They’re children. Things will sometimes be pretty rough around the edges. No matter. Do what you can, with a genuine desire to get your children to love God, and ask God to bless your efforts no matter how feeble they might be. He will, and you and your family will be all the richer for it.

Rob Slane lives with his wife and five home-educated children in Salisbury, England. He is the author of The God Reality: A Critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, contributes to the Canadian magazine Reformed Perspective, and blogs on cultural issues from a Biblical perspective at www.theblogmire.com.