Book Review: Family Worship
Family Worship: In the Bible, In History, and In Your Home
Author: Donald Whitney / 88 pages
Seeking a Renaissance in Family Worship
Changing the direction of a large ship takes great effort and can often take significant amount of time. You cannot simple call "all stop" and expect a good result. A ship takes a large crew and a sound captain to set the course. Then together they can navigate raging seas and turn the massive ship in the true direction.
Changing the culture of a large organization, like the church, is no different. The direction of the Church at large has been drifting toward professionalized discipleship that allows families the opportunity to hand their off to the church and expect Godly results to develop over time. However, in gaining professional attention, we have lost the personal touch of family faith. This exchange has left Children with parents that are pursuing their own life of faith and relegating the faith of their children to another class in their education to be followed up with.
The Church needs to train and equip parents to faithfully disciple their children and create an environment in their home for faith to grow. Don Whitney believes, and I agree, that a renaissance of Family Worship is needed.
What is family worship?
In this book Donald Whitney set out to create a short and helpful resource for churches to use to encourage families to worship together. The book has been laid out to be valuable for a parent wishing to instill family worship for the first time, but also have enough meat to be encouraging to a veteran of family worship.
The goal of a book like this is to open the conversation over Family Worship and to present a vision that is attainable for every Christian.
Keep it Simple
Don Whitney presents a simple rubric for family worship. Read - Pray - Sing. Family worship can be conducted with in a simple manner by just Reading the scriptures, Praying together as a family and responding by Singing. Perhaps more importantly, the simple form of family worship allows us a parents to fulfill our responsibility and encounter our God along with our family.
I think the best conclusion that we can draw from this book is that Family Worship ought not to be a complicated endeavor. We should consider our responsibility to create a family atmosphere of faith to be a simple and joy-filled endeavor. We are simply passing on the faith by which we have been saved, and changed.
This short book is an easy read and well worth an hour or so of your time.
