Chris Carter

For King and Country

Resources for Family Worship

I’ve written a small post here on some of the basics of family worship.

Men are Pastors of Their Families

Men are specifically called as the heads of their households to lead their families to faith and obedience to Christ (Ephesians 6:4, Joshua 24:15). A father is the pastor of his home, shepherding his wife and children on the road to eternal life, guarding their hearts against the wolves of unbelief and heresy, and directing them back towards Christ when they are taken astray by confusion, sin, and false teaching. He is an example to his sons of how to believe, obey, and worship God, and an example to his daughters of the kind of piety they should seek in the man they consider marrying.

Neglect of this task is a great abdication on the part of a father. It is not whether you catechize your children or not, but by whom they are catechized. Everyone is trying to get your children to believe something; your job is to equip them with the wisdom to discern the truth and the character to act on it.

Elements of Family Worship

Family worship should be brief enough that you aren’t tempted to skip it for the sake of time, but thorough enough that it truly blesses your family.

The Westminster Directory for Family Worship outlines about four elements of family worship:

  1. Prayer and praises.
  2. The reading of the Scriptures.
  3. Catechism.
  4. Admonition and rebuke.
Prayer

The Directory recommends a pattern of prayer that involves a few elements that I have summarized here:

  1. Confession of the greatness of God and unworthiness to be in His presence.
  2. Confession of individual sins and the sins of the family.
  3. Petitions for grace to repent, believe, and obey God.
  4. Thanksgiving for the mercies of God and for the light of the gospel.
  5. Requests for particular needs.
  6. Prayers for the church of Christ, for civil magistrates, for neighbors, etc.
  7. That God would be glorified in all things, with assurance of our pardon before God.
Praises

I am not sure that the Directory has singing in view when it says “prayers and praises”, but it is a practice that my family has adopted.

We prefer to sing the Psalms, but since neither my wife nor I have any formal musical training, it can be difficult to find resources to help you sing the Psalms when all you have is sheet music.

The Genevan Psalter website is a digitization of the psalter commissioned by John Calvin between 1539 and 1562. The website has sheet music and audio recordings for all 150 Psalms.