A Plea for Family Worship (Part One)

Recently I talked with a godly parent and they were lamenting the fact that now that their children are adults they hardly ever darken the door of a church. They were somewhat disillusioned to say the least. As a family they attended church faithfully, a church that preached the Bible. Their children were part of the Sunday School program and the youth program.  Growing up in a great Baptist church in the south they participated in all the activities, camps, retreats, and programs the church had to offer. Yet now that their children had graduated and left the nest and no longer had to answer to parental authority they forgot the faith altogether. This parent was bewildered and asked, “How can this be? How is it that we had our children in church all their lives and they turn away from the faith?” The question the parent was really asking was this, “Where did the church go wrong?” This is not the first time a parent has asked me this question. In fact this same scenario of a bewildered Christian parent has played out before me over and over. In some cases they blame the church, the youth pastor, the children’s worship leader, the Sunday school program, or pastor. In other cases they blame the Christian school to whom they paid thousands of dollars expecting in return a well balanced, academically excellent spiritual giant. Some may read this and think, “Surely this is an exception and not the norm.” Not so! According to the latest figures from the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention 88% of churched youth leave their church after they finish high school. Researcher George Barna’s statistics are only slightly better. He noted, “When [church going teens were] asked to estimate the likelihood that they will continue to participate in church life once they are living on their own, levels dipped precipitously, to only about one out of every three teens” saying they expect to stay in church. That is alarming! What is the problem? Why are our children forsaking church and God after they get on their own? The test of how well we have taught and trained our children is what they do when Mom and Dad no longer have the final say so! So what is the problem? More importantly, what is the solution?

Some would surmise that we simply need better programs. We need better activities, better camps, better music, and fun things that attract youth. Their solution would be to try the same things only work harder! Is that really the answer? Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Not only do I not think that it is the solution, I think it is part of the problem. Parents have pinned their hopes of the thorough spiritual training of their children on these things. In most cases there is nothing wrong with these programs and ministries if they are based on biblical principles. But the problem is parents have placed their trust in them! I recognize this as a pastor and again I have seen this before. When I was an Administrator of a Christian school I saw this same dynamic at work. Parents would send their children to the school with the expectation that the school program would produce the desirable values and virtues that would make them proud parents. When the school program failed to live up to their expectations the parents made a bee-line to my office wanting to know what was the problem. They were, after all, paying the tuition (at least some of them) and they were expecting us to produce. Like an angry drive through customer at window number 2 expecting their “happy meal” they were wondering what was the hold up! At this point I would refer them to the wise words of Solomon. Proverbs 17:16 Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, seeing he hath no heart to it? In other words why put money (tuition) in your child’s hand and send him to the Christian school with a note saying “make him wise” if he has no desire for it? Yes, there is the tuition in his hand and the petition from his home, but what you have failed to take into consideration is the condition of his heart! They have no desire for spiritual things whatsoever. The parents sent us Dennis the Menace and wanted D.L. Moody in return. They sent the school Madonna and wanted the program to give back to them Mother Theresa. What the home put to death they expected the program to resurrect.

The problem is parents have spent zero time at home cultivating the heart of that child with regard to spiritual things. No prayer, except grace at the table now and then. No reading of Scripture together, no family worship! No time to memorize Scripture or teach the Bible! No study of the ten commandments which break up the fallow ground of a child’s heart cultivating it making them ready for the seed of the gospel! No talk of the holiness of God, no time cultivating a fear of God in the heart of the child which the Bible says is the beginning of wisdom. Parents expect the church to do all that because they are extremely busy trying to make ends meet. If you are too busy to do those things you are busier than God intended!

In the average Christian home today, the father is passive or apathetic spiritually. The mother is working full-time outside the home plus a second job in the home. T.V. is raising and instructing our kids. Yet, despite all of this we expect the weekly dose of church to take care of all the spiritual training of the child. The parents come to church but for most it is Sunday morning only and sometimes not to Sunday School. So their children get one or two hours a week of spiritual instruction and training and even then they were up late Saturday night and half asleep when they come. On the way home the parents critique and sometimes criticize the sermon and pastor or evangelist so the child learns to never really take anything he says seriously. Yet we wonder why our children as soon as they get on their own leave church and don’t come back. We vaccinate our children with a mild form of Christianity so they will not catch the real thing.

Every once in a while God is His wonderful grace and mercy will do a wonderful work of salvation in the heart of a kid from a nominally Christian home or even from a home that is not Christian at all, to show everyone in that family and remind everyone in the church what real Christianity looks like! But then the poor kid has the zeal and vitality of his Christian walk and passion for Christ sucked out of him by a lukewarm family.  In addition he has to contend with the youth group at church which consists of kids from Christian homes who are worldly and have no desire for the things of God! 

The root problem of all of this is there is no spiritual training in the home.  In America today we have out sourced all the duties that come with raising the children! We pay professionals to do everything for us! We have professional babysitters and nannies to watch them. We have professional tutors to help them with their homework. We have professional coaches to help them learn to play ball and professional psychiatrists to help them cope with hardship. We have professional doctors to give them medication so they will behave. We have professional lawyers to take their case when they get into trouble! It just makes sense that we have professional Christians to help them get to heaven and make them spiritual. Meanwhile we have parents that have paid everyone else to do their responsibilities for them. Parents never really get to know their children. They are too busy working to pay all the professionals! PARENTS YOU CANNOT OUTSOURCE THE SPIRITUAL TEACHING AND TRAINING OF YOUR CHILDREN! The church and the school can only supplement the steady diet of spiritual food you must feed them at home. Don’t get me wrong I am not relieving the church of its responsibility. Some churches have capitulated to the pressure to give our youth what they want rather than what they need but that is a subject for another blog. Parents don’t depend on church programs only to make the gospel clear to your child.

God’s plan from the very beginning is that parents teach their children the things of God! Ephesians 6:4 And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. All through the OT and NT God has laid the responsibility of spiritual training at the feet of the father! God organized the human race through families and has dealt with them through the headship of the father! God expects fathers to pass their faith on to their children and holds us responsible to do so! Douglas Kelly wrote, “Family religion, which depends not a little on the household head daily leading the family before God in worship, is one of the most powerful structures that the covenant-keeping God has given for the expansion of redemption through the generations, so that countless multitudes may be brought into communion with and worship of the living God in the face of Jesus Christ.” We need to get back to family worship where fathers read the Scripture to their family, teach them and pray with them. Teach them the gospel yourself! Then depend upon the gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit to do the work of transforming your child’s heart! If you don’t know the gospel well enough to teach it then learn it! What is more important?  Most if not all of these teens (who never come back to church after high school) have no lifelong sweet memories of family worship. Spurgeon said, “Brethren, I wish it were more common, I wish it were universal, with all [Christians] to have family prayer. We sometimes hear of children of Christian parents who do not grow up in the fear of God, and we are asked how it is that they turned out so badly. In many, very many cases, I fear there is such a neglect of family worship that it’s not probable that the children are at all impressed by any piety supposed to be possesses by their parents.” Even in our best churches little to no family worship takes place. Barna reported that 85% of parents with children under age 13 believe they have primary responsibility for teaching their children about religious beliefs and spiritual matters. However, a majority of parents don’t spend any time during a typical week discussing religious matters or studying religious materials with their children. Parents generally rely upon the church to do all of the religious training their children will receive. This post is a plea for the church and families to get back to family worship. In the next post I want to give some practical suggestions on how to do it! Meanwhile I would encourage parents in reading up on this subject. The picture of the book above is one I would recommend for fathers to read. It is called Thoughts on Family Worship by James W. Alexander. There was a time in church history when this was considered an indispensible part of spiritual training. May God help us to get back to it.

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