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The Abandoned Discipline of Family Worship
Posted by Tony Sisk in Uncategorized
The family is under attack. At least that is what everyone keeps telling me. It seems every news item I read nowadays, someone has got it out for the family. A new group seems to sprout up out of nowhere every day that opposes “traditional family.” Though there is a lot of talk in the media about the apparent assault on the family, there seems to be a lot of preachers who howl from their pulpits that the family is under attack by every activist group in America, yet there seems to be little instruction in churches on what to do about it (besides elect a president who purports family values).
Perhaps we should send the families in our churches to a family life seminar. Perhaps the associate pastor should teach another study focused on child-rearing. Maybe another Sunday School class focused on young families will do the trick. Though these ideas are noble, they do not address the root problem. If the family is being eroded, it is not because the church is not offering enough programs to bunker its hills. Rather, the family is decaying from within and it is a truth many pastors and church families do not care to recognize.
I sat in an elderly member’s home. She had lived her entire life in that house at the end of a three-quarter mile dirt road. As we talked that frigid winter day next to a pot-belly wood stove, she reminisced about what she referred to as “the family altar.” Intrigued, I asked her to please explain. Each Sunday night, her family would gather together for a time where the father would open his large Bible in his lap, read a passage of Scripture, they would talk about it, pray together, and even sing together.
In my mind’s eye, I could see her family gathered around that same stove, installed in the fifties about twenty years after the house was built, the children gazing wondrously up at their dad as he read from the family Bible. It may be a nostalgic story from a bygone era, but one I believe would do families a world of good to consider. The idea of a family gathering together for worship is virtually unknown. Living lives of strict compartmentalism, worship is relegated to the times when we are at church.
And to say we are busy is an understatement of gargantuan proportions. As families get busier with sports, school activities, hour long commutes to work, volunteering at church, and occasional recreation, time to have a constructive family worship hour is almost a laughable prospect. However, if the family is under attack, a full-scale counter-offensive must take place, and it must take place in the home.
The fact of the matter is not that family worship does not take place; the fact of the matter is that families spend very little devotional time together at all. As Tom Hanks’ character Chuck Noland in the film Castaway scolded his employees, “We live and we die by time. And we must not commit the sin of losing our track on time.” If something is important to us, we will make time for it.
We live in a society that has been trained not to replicate. This is the reason many churches do not have a Sunday evening worship service. The attitude is, “Well, I’ve already done that today.” A family worship service smacks against this notion. Why replicate something we have already done this week? We have spent time at church, in Sunday School, AWANA, or name your program, so a family worship service just seems redundant and therefore a waste of time.
That time we are worshipping together as a family could be much better spent doing something else. However, if the truth is told, those Hamburger Helper commercials on television are not too far off the mark. Everything else is important except the maintenance of the family; hence my conclusion that the family is decaying from within and sadly families have allowed it to happen. No amount of Hamburger Helper is going to salvage the family from the bondage of a materialistic society.
It is time to stop looking for reasons the family is disintegrating outside the family unit. It is time for the family to look inward. It is time for parents, fathers especially, to take up the mantle of spiritual leadership in the home and make family worship a priority. It is time to demolish the culture of busyness in our lives that so easily seduces us away from spiritual disciplines. It is time to reprioritize, cut out time wasters, start saying “no” more often, and make our main concern what it ought to be: our children and grandchildren. Hamburger Helper just is not cutting it.
And I don’t even like Hamburger Helper.
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Tony,
A most excellent reminder. I will be the first to confess that my family has always struggled in this area. My kids are now in high school, and we rarely have a sit-down family devotion time. I suppose we do compartmentalize and have the majority of our devotion times on our own. My struggle has always been a source of guilt in my life, and I think my wife feels the same way.
But as I look at our family over the years, I find that we have taken a more “Old Testament” approach (if you will) to our spiritual training in the home. In the Shema, which I think is the foundational Scripture that stressed spiritual training in the home for Israel, the Word says:
“8 Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 19 Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 20 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates,” – Deut. 11:18-20 (NIV)
Spiritual training in the home is so much more than sit-down worship times. We must also teach our children in the flow of life, as we lie down and get up, as we ride to work and school. Our home is defined as a place of refuge and a house of the Word.
My point is simply that doing a family devotion every now and then isn’t going to “fix” things in family life anymore than a weekly trip to church is going to make a person “spiritual.” It cannot be simply trying to stick a “holy band-aid” on a broken family system.
Spiritual training in the home must be systemic … not just “by appointment.”
Geoff
Oh … and I would like some clarification on the Sunday night service thing. Is that practice, indeed, a necessary spiritual one … or simply a southern cultural “tradition?” We opt for worship on Sunday mornings and small groups in homes on Sunday evenings. Does that pass your muster?
Geoff,
I know a family devotion isn’t going to fix the overall difficulties most families experience. However, we must start somewhere and as the post explained, most families don’t do anything spiritual together other than go to church.
I am not saying that family worship is commanded anywhere in Scripture because it isn’t. What I am saying is that the family unit is where character development, instilling morals, and biblical teaching ought to first take place. That seems to be what Deuteronomy 6:4ff seems to intimate. A family worship time is the perfect opportunity to cultivate these things.
My primary argument is that if the family is disintegrating, it is because Christian families are neglecting spiritual disciplines in the home and are outsourcing those to other institutions, i.e. the church.
I don’t think anyone would argue against the merit of family worship. That is the reasoning behind replicating worship times. No one will say that family worship is a bad thing but many say that it is an unnecessary thing.
On Sunday night worship, many southern churches do still have it. Of course it is not a necessary spiritual practice. My point was simply that many churches, especially southern ones, having had Sunday evening worship for millennia, are abandoning it because as times grow faster there is little time for doing something that has already been done once already. They opt for visitation, discipleship training, or even family meetings in the home, focusing on something different rather than replicating what has already been done six hours earlier in the day.
Tony,
Great post and great truth. Our family started doing family devotions every night a few months ago. I don’t know why we never did this before consistently, but now I don’t think we will ever stop. Talking together, reading, memorizing scripture and praying together has been a tremendous blessing to all of us.
Also, as a pastor, it has given me a good reason to stop working each day. Several times I have gotten off the phone or dismissed a visitor by telling them it was time for family devotions. This discipline lets our church know that family comes before church ministry, and reminds me of that as well.
This decision to start family devotions happened at the same time we decided to get rid of cable TV. And I think this is no accident.
I would recommend that everyone turn off the TV and begin family devotions immediately and stick at it. You will be blessed.
Great post that reminds us of the ministry of the home. I believe that there should be a time of family worship, and that it is Biblical to recommend it. God’s method of instruction in the Old Testament was the family. His teachers were parents, specifically fathers. There were no Sunday Schools, not discipleship training classes, no AWANA programs. And yet there were still holy days of gathering at the temple in Jerusalem to worship. There were both, home and temple. Synagogues as places of worship began to develop only when the temple was inaccessible. They became centers of training, but the parents were still primarily responsible for training their children. Again, there were both the home and the synagogue. In the first century, and for several centuries, the church still did both. The pattern didn’t change. They gathered daily in the beginning, and then on the Lord’s Day later for public worship and instruction, and then they met in their homes. And, according to the N.T., parents (specifically fathers) were still responsible for training their children in the ways of God. The church, whether local or family, has always gathered and it has always dispersed. I think our training should be the same. And, I HATE THE TYRANNY OF BUSY-NESS. If we don’t fight it, we’re going to lose to it.
Roger,
I serve an older, more traditional church. When I first began, they had the mentality that they “own” the pastor; a typical response of a lot of established congregations. My emphasis on family worship has helped to stem that tide somewhat.
The single most detrimental factor to a family worship time is the television. I chuckle when I walk in to someone’s home and all the furniture in the den is pointed toward the TV. If you are going to have a meaningful worship time together as a family, the TV has to be turned off. It has to be. When it is available, it is too easy to turn it on, because like I emphasized on Cyle’s post on prayer, these things take WORK.
Cyle,
The OT and NT are consistent on the priority of familial instruction. Timothy learned of spiritual things at his mother’s and grandmother’s knees. Then we must emphasize Ephesians 6:1-4 and Colossians 3:20-21.
Family worship, which we have been doing for about a year, much less consistently since the new baby was born (five kids is tough sometimes) but we miss it when we don’t do it.
Tony,
Fabulous post! I love where you said, “If something is important to us, we will make time for it.”
That is where the rubber meets the road. That old saying, “The family who prays together, stays together,” still has a lot of truth.
Les
Excellent Post!
I have often ended dinner by having family devotions. With a one year old and a two year old it is very trying – but by the time they are older, it should be just dandy for them. My only problem is that it seems no one has developed a family curriculum designed for the family altar (now no one jump me here – if you people purchase curriclum for your Sunday School so that teachers can “keep on track” then that is all I am asking for). Most devotionals are geared toward individual study – not family devotion. Perhaps some of those folks who read this blog from LifeWay can help in this area.
Rob
Les,
Thanks for the words of affirmation, brother. I think I have seen that saying on a church sign somewhere…
Rob,
My family and I just go through a book of the Bible. We don’t use a curriculum primarily because, like you said, I just don’t know of one. I use an approach Steve Maxwell shared at their “Encouragement for the Homeschool Family” conference. You can see it here. I have modified it a bit to fit my family, but of course you will do that. I really like the approach and it is one that has worked well for us. We have begun doing it at breakfast because our evening routine is so hectic. Getting five kids bathed is tough. I have considered installing one of those laser washes like at the local oil change shop.
One of my fondest memories with my children is the time we had in family devotions when they were growing up. I have loved watching my son-in-law take his boys each nite and read a particular word regarding Christian character, honesty, diligence, perseverance, etc. and teach them what it means. Then he had prayer with them.
Today, it’s just my husband and I, but I rejoice in the time the Lord gives us to share together in devotions each morning. It sets a priority for our day and when we skip it, the day simply doesn’t go as well.
There are several books in the Bookstores which are geared toward object lessons and devotional times for children. They make great guides and create interest. Also, just that little loaf of bread with scriptures on it is great for reading each day. You can have role plays and special music and even discuss a Veggie Tales movie. But one of the greatest things for families is praying together for the needs of the day. Teach your family to pray. For each other, their teachers, their country and the missionaries. The Open Windows has the missionaries names and birthdays. Great way to have them pray for someone specifically.
Another thing you can do is use the newspaper to pull a story of folks in need for whom to pray and point out some truth or principle in the Bible that could have guided the people in their situation.
GREAT POST Tony. Very needed. Just hope many pastors will use it as a jumping off place to encourage their congregations to start some kind of family time together that is consistent. I will say one thing…satan doesn’t want you doing it. Every interruption in the world will occur when you start one. That tells me how important it is. selahV
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