Author: Teddy Ray

Family Worship

I said earlier that the best children’s ministry in town is in your living room. A big part of that for us has become “family worship.”

Our family has family worship most nights of the week. It has been one of the best things to happen in the life of our family. Before we started, we couldn’t imagine we would have time or energy to do something like this at the end of the day. Dinner-time and bed-time are wild enough with four young kids.

But family worship has actually brought a centering time to the ends of our days. Through it, I believe we’re bonding as a family, teaching our children orthodox Christian belief, and teaching them how to participate in Christian practices, or “holy habits.”

What we do is pretty simple:

Sing – We sing and dance. We have instruments (a triangle, cymbals, etc.) that we play while we sing. It’s a pretty raucous time.

John Wesley noted: “Our little children we instruct chiefly by hymns; whereby we find the most important truths most successfully insinuated into their minds.” It may not be that different for adults. How many sermons can you quote? Now how many songs? Not to mention what a great medium song is for our worship.

Read the Bible – We always have an Old Testament lesson and a New Testament lesson as part of family worship. Reading both of the children’s Bibles I mention in the resources below, we finish the whole Bible in about 3 months’ time.

Catechism – We teach our kids from a catechism – a summary of basic Christian beliefs. The one we’re using has 98 questions and answers. Our six year-old knows about 15 of them. Our four year-olds know about 10. Our two year-old knows two. I expect they’ll know all 98 by 5th grade.

I think teaching theology, not just Bible stories, is crucial. I explain why in “Why we’re teaching our kids a catechism” and “How Sunday School created a theologically illiterate Church.”

Pray – Praying together as a family has become a great blessing. Sometimes we let the Bible stories or catechism guide our prayers. We often share what we’re thankful for. Other times we have confession and say what we’re sorry for. We even anointed our daughter with olive oil and prayed for her one night when she was sick. Sometimes Emily or I pray, and sometimes the kids lead the prayer time.

That’s our family worship. Some nights we spend 10 minutes, others 30. At the least, we pray, read an Old Testament and New Testament story, and sing. Unless we’re getting home really late, it happens every night. The kids make sure of it now.

Parents: try it for at least a week with your kids. What a great way to share your faith with your kids and bring them up in the faith!

Resources

  • Singing – Sometimes we sing a cappella, sometimes we pull up songs on Spotify and sing along. Some of our kids’ favorite songs: Doxology, Gloria Patri, This is the Day, Mighty to Save, Come Ye Sinners Poor and Needy, Big House. They especially enjoy VeggieTales versions.
  • Scripture – Our kids are ages 6, 4, 4, and 2. For their ages, we especially like The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories (good for 1-4 year-olds) and The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name (good for 3-7 year-olds). If they were a bit older, I’d probably use The Golden Children’s Bible. And by age 9 or 10, I’d consider just reading the Bible itself. We look for Bibles that attempt to tell the Scripture story in a straight-forward manner to familiarize children with the stories and characters (as The Beginner’s Bible does), or Bibles that interpret stories in light of our faith (as The Jesus Storybook Bible does – interpreting every story in light of Christ’s saving work). Beware of the several children’s Bibles out there that attempt to turn the Bible into a set of fables — teaching children simply to be good, moral people.
  • Catechism – I worked with some friends to update and revise an old Methodist Episcopal catechism. It uses simple, Scriptural language and goes all the way from beliefs about God and creation to beliefs about death, judgment, and eternity in 98 questions. Asbury Seedbed recently published it. Find it here.

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The best children’s ministry in town…

The idea of a church with a big children’s ministry – lots of programs and full-time staff – is relatively new and relatively confined to American Christianity. At the same time as youth and children’s ministries have become more popular, even expected, the church has failed tremendously to keep those children as they grow up.

A great children’s ministry is not the answer to bringing the next generation along in their faith.

A note before I’m taken the wrong way here: I’m not saying that church children’s ministry programs are bad. I am saying, though, that they should be a nice supplement, at best.

It seems that the professionalizing of children’s and youth ministry has communicated the wrong thing to parents. It worries me when I hear parents say that they’re part of a particular church because of its great children’s ministry. That statement tends to mean that the parents will make sure their kids are dressed and fed and will leave the faith upbringing to the church.

Parents: The best children’s ministry in town… is in your living room. Your children need to see YOU – not a church staff-person – as their spiritual leader. Your children need to see things like prayer, Scripture reading, singing, and serving others as a natural part of life, not just as a programmed thing led by someone hired to do it.

Most importantly, they need to see you doing all of these things.

I worry that the programmed, professionalized children’s ministry we promote today has made parents feel inadequate. A lot of parents worry that they don’t know enough, or that they don’t know the right ways to teach their kids the faith. As a result, they shy away from it entirely.

See my post on Family Worship. I share some of what my family is doing to try and take our kids’ faith development seriously. It doesn’t require a lot of materials, doesn’t require extensive theological training, and has been very easy to begin using with our family.

And after that, you should read “Why we’re teaching our kids a catechism.”

What do you do to promote faith development at home? What difficulties or questions have you had? Use the comments section to share.

Grace to you and Peace

cropped-momentum2.jpgThe original title for my blog was “Enterprise to Movement.” I fully believe the premise behind that title: that today’s American Church urgently needs to abandon its Enterprise mentality and get back to behaving as a movement. But I abandoned that title after just the first two weeks.

Why I Titled the Blog “Enterprise to Movement”

• We need to get serious again about evangelism. That’s not the same thing as marketing. We need to quit wasting our time and money on ad campaigns designed to convince church-hoppers to come our way and shift that energy to sharing the gospel with people wherever we can.

• The Church needs to reclaim unity and community as more than what the country club down the street means by them. Our aim isn’t a crowd of people smiling at a potluck. That’s easy. And keeps people happy. Our aim is deep relationships in which people’s lives are open to one another. That’s more difficult and much more messy. But I believe it’s our calling if we are a part of the great Christian movement and not just another social club.

• We need to call people to holiness. Holiness is our calling and standard. John Wesley called it “religion itself.” Want messy? Identify sin, call it sin, and urge people to repent. By the grace of God, the Christian movement has seen many sinners who were cut to the heart, repented, and (re)turned to a life of holiness in Christ. We’ve also seen several people who were confronted with their sins and decided they wanted nothing more to do with those calling for change.

I believe that graciously, but firmly, confronting people with their sins is an important part of our faith. But it’s often seen as bad business or bad social club policy, as the short-term results may include less money and fewer people. We also shy away from talking about sin when we misunderstand unity — when we think it means that our highest priority is to avoid offending or upsetting anyone.

Why I Changed the Title

• I’ve heard a lot of testimonies lately. In several of those testimonies, I heard about poor decisions people made. I’m regularly seeing that people made those decisions because they either (a) didn’t know any better – they were behaving the way they had learned to behave, or (b) were hurting, acting in crisis, or in some other way weren’t in a good personal situation to make wise decisions.

• I’ve been reflecting on the beatings church leaders take. I’ve seen several good people get verbally pummeled. Sometimes they had made bad decisions. Sometimes they had made unpopular, but good, decisions. Sometimes they had even made good and popular decisions that just happened to upset the wrong person(s). In all the cases I’m recalling, though, the person being assaulted was a good person with good intentions.

Because of these, I decided to move away from the title “Enterprise to Movement.” I worried that it was setting me up to start from a position of criticism. Yes, I believe that the North American Church is missing the mark considerably — and that the Enterprise mentality has a lot to do with that. But I believe that its leaders are mostly good people who mean well.

Where those leaders are running enterprises — giving more attention to how their worship can attract people than to how it can honor God, letting sin go unabated to avoid offending a large donor or key leader, spending lavishly to outdo the church down the street — I suspect that they’re making those decisions either because our world has taught them to think that way, or because they see a church in crisis and are flailing to do something about it. As my good friend Jonathan says, “No worship planner asks, ‘How can we worship poorly this Sunday?'” I think the large majority of us truly want what is best for the church, even if I also believe that much of our current attitude and focus is misguided.

The apostle Paul begins each of his letters in the New Testament with, “Grace to you and peace.” Many of those letters go on to include strong critiques. But Paul’s attitude to the recipients always begins with grace and peace. I’m glad Paul addressed the problems in those churches. They were serious departures from Christianity’s true message and calling. And as I see it appropriate, I plan to keep pointing out our own seeming departures from a more robust form of Christianity. But Paul’s larger goal was to point a way forward. That’s my larger goal, as well.