On The Rhoads/Brad

The idea of “family worship” has been getting a lot attention at our home church. It’s a pretty simple idea: us Dad’s are supposed to be the primary spiritual leaders in our homes. We’re supposed to be the priests, prophets, and protectors of our family.

This past weekend I attended our men’s retreat in Lake Geneva, WI. The speaker was Voddie Baucham. He suggested that to be a spiritual leader meant that we should do these things with our families:

• Read Scripture together
• Pray together
• Sing together
• Memorize Scripture together

I’ve been convicted about this and have tried to implement this in the past. Our Family Pastor, Rob Reinow has been teaching this for some time. His Visionary Parenting course is outstanding. But I had not been very successful for very long at implementing this in our home.

I was convicted about this again this weekend and thought a lot about why I have failed in the past. I think God gave me at least part of the answer. I realized that even though we eat (at least) dinner together most nights of the week, there’s typically little conversation and when someone was done eating, they’d head off to play or watch TV. God gave me a revelation. I need my family to Stay At The Table!

In fact that’s just what I’m calling this event of family worship in our home, Stay At The Table. The idea works on so many levels. First, it’s literally what I’m having my family do. No more dine-and-dash! We’re going to stay at the table and hear God’s word and talk about it and pray together. We’ll probably sing some of the time, although it’s been a custom since the kids were born to sing to them at bed time. I haven’t quite figured out where the memorization is going to come in, but the kids are in AWANA, so we’ll probably play off of that.

Then besides the literal meaning of Stay At The Table, there’s the fact that God’s word is spiritual food that we need to keep taking in. Plus, as my kids become teenagers, I want them to Stay At The Table of our home and of God’s word.

Tags: family worship, parenting

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 12:03 pm and is filed under family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.