About a year and a half ago, I wrote about our family worship rhythms and how we try to incorporate discipleship with our children into a nightly routine. While the foundational aspects of our family worship time have not changed much, our life looks a lot different, even just 18 months later. Our kids are older, they’re both in school, and we’re busier than ever. However, family worship has become a nonnegotiable part of our day, one that has grown with us and our children.
Much of our time looks exactly the same as it did when I wrote that article last year. Our family worship time generally looked like this:
- Recite memory verses. Our kids attend a Wednesday program at our church where they learn memory verses each week. We have them recite each verse, not just the week’s new verse, so that by the end of the year’s program, they are reciting about 28 verses every day until the program starts over again in August. (I realize this may sound like too much to ask, but it’s amazing to see how much they can memorize from week to week. It’s effectively helped them at school, too, where they also memorize a lot of material as a form of learning/retention.)
- Bible story (From The Biggest Story Bible Storybook); see this list for other storybook and Bible suggestions for kids. We always ask the kids what the previous night’s story was about in order to help them retain what they’re learning. Transition to bed
- Sing the Doxology
- Pray
However, in the last six months, we have built in two new components and rearranged the order of our family worship time. One was an intentional addition and the other was a bit accidental. Both were small changes, but have enriched our family discipleship.
Prayer for Missions and Missionaries
We are blessed to have so many friends who serve as missionaries around the world. Additionally, by nature of my husband’s job, he travels to different countries on mission trips several times a year. He started bringing home magnets from those countries for our kids. Magnets are easy to find, fairly inexpensive, and pack up in his carry-on. This has been a great way to help our kids learn about the world and the different people in it.
While we had already made a habit of praying for missions and our missionary friends, we have not done it as intentionally as we would’ve liked. In order to be more purposeful in our prayers for missions, I bought a magnetic whiteboard, collected all of the prayer cards we had gathered over the years, and hung them on the board with the magnets from all over the world. Every night we ask each kid who they would like to pray for and we all take turns praying for our missionary friends.
Having a visual reminder hung in the kids’ room has helped us remember to pray specifically for each person we know and love who are sharing the gospel around the world. Though our kids have not met all of the people on their board, they feel like they know them because of their parents’ friendship with them. It has made our prayers more personal and meaningful now that we can look at each person as we pray.
Singing
When our kids were younger and had a harder time going to bed, I would occasionally sing a hymn to them before leaving their room at night. This was sporadic at best, and I usually sang the same handful of songs that I had memorized. However, this petered out as the kids got a little older and their bedtime routine changed. My husband and I talked about wanting to incorporate singing into our family worship time, but we hadn’t gotten around to actually doing it.
Until I accidentally started it. My husband was on a mission trip and one night the kids were having a hard time settling down at bedtime. So, remembering what I used to do with them a few years ago, I offered to sing a hymn to them. This became a nightly thing while my husband was away. I would look up a hymn on my phone and we would all sing together. At first, I thought this was just a good thing to do while Daddy was away.
When my husband got home, though, he wanted us to keep up the habit. We initially kept singing with the kids while they were in bed, but this new habit led us to rethink the entire structure of our worship time together. My husband bought us a couple of hymnals (yes, really), and we began singing out of the hymnal at the beginning of our time. It sounds a bit strange, but we both grew up in churches that used hymnals and we love that our kids are becoming familiar with the hymnal and songs that they don’t often encounter in our church now (don’t get me wrong, our church has a wonderful worship ministry.)
Singing is likely the most awkward part of our family worship time. It’s not for the four of us, anymore, but I can see our kids feeling a bit silly about it as they get older. We also include anyone who is in our house (grandparents, friends, etc) in this time, which can feel a bit unusual (though anyone who’s been there at this time has been great about participating with us). I will also say that while my husband and I aren’t being asked to sing solos anytime soon, we can both carry a tune so that helps.
So now, our family worship time looks more like this:
- Recite memory verses.
- Sing a hymn. We take turns choosing which one. Some favorites include “Alas and Did My Savior Bleed” (this is by far our kids’ favorite); “Nothing But the Blood’” “Blessed Assurance;” “In the Garden;” “Come Thou Fount;” and “A Mighty Fortress.”
- Bible story Transition to bed
- Pray- each kids chooses a missionary. We pray for family and other friends, too. My husband and I take turns praying every other night, and each kids gets a turn to pray every night.
- Sing the doxology.
Though it seems like a lot, this whole thing only takes 20 to 30 minutes in the evening. Of course, with elementary age kids, extracurriculars, ministry commitments, and occasional after-hours work commitments, this routine is regularly adjusted. Sometimes we are doing the first part in the car, sometimes we do the first half earlier in the evening before our activities, and sometimes we are doing this with other people who are visiting. We are grateful that we have two sets of grandparents who are willing to do this routine in our place when my husband and I are not home for bedtime.
This routine has become a nonnegotiable part of our day. We believe it is vital to our kids’ spiritual formation and we pray everyday that the Lord uses our efforts as part of His plan to bring our kids to salvation.
Header image generated with Google Gemini.
