Family Worship

An important part of this spiritual discipline is to establish a regular, daily routine of worship in the home. Couples without children need to set aside daily quiet time to pray and share their spiritual needs. One way to focus this is to establish a reading schedule together so they can discuss what each is reading. Other couples may find that they enjoy sharing different devotional reading that they select for themselves, while others like to read out loud to each other or listen together to recorded materials. All of these are ways to accomplish the goal of daily couple sharing in spiritual time together.

The Adventist Church publishes a number of daily devotional books each year. Originally, these were called “The Morning Watch books” because they were designed to read at breakfast time, out loud to the entire family or individually. Over the years they have adopted the more generic title of daily devotionals because people use them at various times during the day to meet the variety of schedules that families and couples face today. Each of the readings is one page or less in length and can be read in about three minutes. Currently there are several books provided each year designed for children, teens, young adults, women and other interest groups. Ask your pastor about how to obtain these books to meet your needs. It is not a requirement for Adventists to read these books; they are simply a resource for family and individual worship.

Research has shown that if you have children in the home, family worship requires some creativity and planning. It must be designed to involve the interests of your children and provide activity and interaction. Included in the list below are some tools that should be introduced to families with children in order to help them do a better job with family worship.

A large database of worship resources, especially for younger generations, can be

found on this site: www.worshiptogether.com

The Center for Creative ministry website is an Adventist resource center that provides

materials and help for creative worship experiences: www.creativeministry.org

The worship planning and scheduling tools used by some of the best-known Protestant mega churches can be found at this website: www.planningcenteronline.com

Renovare includes a wide range of information about spiritual disciplines and spiritual

growth on it’s website: www.renovare.org/