I have a post over at the Christward Collective, a blog of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, on the topic of family worship. It’s the first of a two part series, dealing with some practically applied ideas that have helped our family gain some ground in our regular gathering for worship. We find that family worship works best when it supports and feeds into Sunday morning worship, particularly in regards to the means of grace.
By thinking of family worship in this way, we connect what we are doing in our living room to what is happening at church Sunday. If we think about our time as being part and parcel of the life of the church, we are able to see family worship as part of a larger movement of the gospel in the world. The heart of family worship is that it serves to help us be better worshippers on the Lord’s Day with the covenant community.
So in reading God’s word as a family,
Our family better receives the preached word on Sunday if we have spent time in it during the week. That is why our family worship usually includes a direct reading of the Bible or at least allusions to biblical passages that address an issue we are talking about. We want ourselves and our children to be literate not only in the biblical text but the overarching themes and narrative that hold the biblical story together. We want them to be cognizant of the major biblical stories but also of the major biblical story.
Read the rest here.