Every Christian parent wants to raise children who will grow up to love and trust Jesus. Parents deliberately search for the church that provides the most opportunities for their kids to grow up in the Lord. We want Church on The Way to be that church! Yet, as we continue to build our children’s ministry, we must not neglect our homes—where children see our faith on real-time display every day.
According to the Bible, we parents have the primary responsibility for teaching our children about God. His word must be prominent in our conversation and daily life with our kids. Training our children in godliness is not something that we can put off until they’re older. In Deuteronomy 6:4-9, we read:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
The call to training our children in godliness is comprehensive. We summarizes the Deuteronomy 6 passage by saying we have responsibility to teach our children during mealtime, drive time, bedtime, and in the morning.
The Way’s leadership recognizes that we have a responsibility as a church to walk alongside parents as they train their children in godliness. We want to equip parents to pray and plan for the spiritual development of their kids. One goal of this booklet is to introduce you to some of the best resources available for teaching your kids about Jesus. In other words, if you only have fifty dollars per year to spend on teaching your children about God, we’ll tell you what we think you should buy. The second purpose is to introduce the concept of family worship.
What is Family Worship?
Christian author Patrick Kavanaugh compares family worship to a family meal. Just as a “family meal” is the time when all family members come together to eat, so “family worship” is the time when all family members come together for spiritual encouragement. A good family meal requires intentional planning and preparation. Family worship requires planning as well, our worship guides are intended as a catalyst for planning. It contains a list of age-appropriate resources to train your child to know God’s Word: a felt board resource, children’s Bibles, a catechism (simple questions and answers for teaching Bible doctrine), audio CDs, and more. The guide also contains some ideas about how you can use these tools with your family, and we even suggest specific learning goals for you and your children. The concept of family worship is not new with us.
Like a great meal, family worship should also have color and variety. We hope this guide will be a great starting point, but be creative. Don’t get stuck in the rut of simply reading stories. Act them out. Draw and paint. Let a sock puppet tell the story. Adding variety to our times of family worship helps them become times of discovery, and it helps keep our kids’ interest as well.
Moreover, we encourage you to ask other parents to share what they are doing to teach the Bible to their kids. Consider asking someone to pray for you and hold you accountable. Find another parent with whom you can share ideas. We can learn a lot from each other and be encouraged by one another’s faithfulness.
When? Consistency is Key
Some parents pray and teach the Scriptures to their kids each night before bedtime. Others supplement nighttime stories and prayers with more structured worship services that include singing. Some have family worship around the table—during the family meal. Family schedules are as different as the families that set them. But times for family worship should be planned regularly. Young children respond best to a planned routine—something they expect. Consistency is key. And regularity is more important than frequency. It would be better to gather the family once each week without fail than to exasperate one’s family with failed attempts to meet every day.
Know this as well: Creatively teaching the Bible to kids is not limited to an intentional time of family worship. As parents, we must make God’s word prominent throughout our lives and conversations. Children learn as much from what we do as from what we say. And kids have lots of questions that present us with opportunities to teach the truth. Dale tells the story of how he used his daughter Grace’s disappointment about a broken toy as an opportunity to teach about how Adam and Eve “broke the world.” Such “teachable moments” arise more often than we realize.
