The idea of family worship can be really overwhelming and seem very “other” to those who aren’t experienced with this practice.  People wonder how to start family worship at home, when to start, what it should look like, what it includes, etc.  Let me let you in on a little secret: it doesn’t have to be all that complicated.

When to Start

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says, “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”  When it comes to family worship, the best time to start was as soon as you had a family to worship with.  The second best time is now.  Your kids are never too young for family worship; they’ll just start out less able to participate and grow into increasingly more active participants.

Family Worship in Our Home

Family worship at our house is pretty simple.  Each night before bedtime we read Scripture together and pray.  Occasionally we’ll sing a song or two.  Usually we don’t, although we’re a musical family, so we sing together at other, more spontaneous times (and in recent months we’ve begun having a weekly hymn sing as a family to help make up for our challenges in finding a new church home).

We’ve done this ever since our oldest was an infant.  At that point, Michael would just read to us and then we’d pray before putting her to sleep.  As the kids get older, they follow along in their Bibles, sometimes help with the reading aloud, and take turns praying.

(This is actually a big part of why and how our kids have learned to read.  They’re eager to become readers so they are able to take part in reading during family worship.  And then they practice their fluency by reading with us.)

We choose a particular book of the Bible to read through — usually alternating between a New Testament book (or two or three if they’re the short ones) and an Old Testament book — and typically read a chapter each night, or sometimes a section of a chapter if the chapter is very long (or if  tempers are very short!).

There’s no special “system” to how we decide which book to read next once we’ve finished one.  We just try to include some variety so we’re not reading and rereading the same couple books and skipping everything else.

We often will sing if the passage we read contains a song or parts of a song in it, or if someone has a particular song on their hearts.  And then we pray.  The kids are encouraged to take turns praying, but usually no specific individual is required to pray.  The kids are all comfortable enough praying aloud at home, but sometimes one is tired, or not feeling well, or just feels like everyone else has “covered things” adequately with their prayers.  And then my husband usually wraps up.

Do You Ever Deviate?

We’re not perfect.  But we do prioritize this.  It’s pretty rare that we skip family worship altogether.  If everyone is pretty sick, we might miss, or if we’ve been out of town and we get back really, really late at night and the kids are already basically asleep, then we might miss altogether.  That doesn’t happen very often.

What’s more common is that we may scale it back on some days if our day has run unusually late, folks are not feeling well (e.g. sore throats make speaking hard), etc.  We might read a shorter selection, leave all the reading to Daddy so it goes more quickly, and/or just one person might briefly pray on behalf of everyone.

If someone is missing on a given evening — again, not something that happens with great frequency, but happens on occasion if someone is out of town — we might take a break from our regular reading and read from the Psalms so the missing individual doesn’t miss out on the current reading and lose the context.

What About Catechism, etc.?

Because we homeschool, we have plenty of opportunity to engage in discipleship of our children outside of just our “family worship” times.  So our family worship really is just as simple as I’ve described — but it isn’t all that we do.

We do make use of a children’s catechism, and we memorize some Scripture; we just don’t do it during family worship.  I actively — ‘though not consistently — work with my littles on catechism questions and Scripture memory, but the heaviest catechism and Scripture memory influence is through song.  We have a “kids’ theology” playlist, and play it frequently as background music, which is a low-effort, high-impact way to hide God’s Word — and other established articulations of doctrine — in all of our hearts.