Why We Worship With Our Kids

This was originally published last spring.  As I am co-teaching a class on worship this month, I have been reconsidering how we train up a generation who will love worship.  
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Several years ago I had a conversation about worship with our friend and pastor, Zac.  It challenged the way I look at Sunday worship as a family. 

Zac said, “Worship is the only thing our children will do forever.” 

Forever. 

Worship will be the one and only thing I teach my children that they’ll do forever. 

They will not need to pee in the potty, or do long division, or tie their shoes forever. 

They will do only this one thing. 

Worship.

With all the effort I put into the things that time will wash away, I started to hope I’d get this  one thing right.

Not out of fear that I will have the only kids that show up to heaven who stand when they should sit or raise a hand when they should bow their head.  For that has very little to do with worship doesn’t it.?

No, they will get it right.  Scripture promises us that. 

I need to prepare them for the worship they do before forever starts.

There are those who are better equipped to talk about the why’s and how’s of worship (Zac’s blog would be a good place to start).  But I know this... through worship my girls will encounter the object of that worship.  The One who was and is and will be worthy of their worship, forever.

We’ve changed what Sunday morning looks like.  Pete and I have stopped thinking of Sunday morning as our time off.  Our time to drop the kids off in an age appropriate program and take on the big adult business of worship without them.  Those 10 words Zac shared with me turned Sunday morning into the most important parenting hour of the week.  Not because worship only happens in the confines of Sunday morning service, but because it should actually happen there. 

We have been through an extended time of church shopping.  God has yet to show us where our church home will be here in Raleigh.  A fact that weekly tears at my heart and leaves me feeling homeless.  But God has used this time to sharpen Pete and I, for there isn’t a comfortable children’s program to lean on, there is just the four of us.

Recently we walked in to a church full of strangers.  Emily and Sarah were approached by a helpful volunteer to go a watch a Veggie Tale movie during the service.  Without hesitation, they both declined.  I watched Emmie clutch her “church purse” a little closer when she said it, as if she was guarding it’s precious cargo. 

She was, in fact, guarding something precious.

We took our seats and Emmie unpacked her things. She took out her church journal. She found her pencil. With Pete’s help she looked in the order of worship and found the passages that would be read and marked them with an offering envelope. She settled back in her seat just before the first song began. With classic Emmie exasperation she looked at me and said, “why would I go watch a Veggie Tale movie?”
 
She was here to Worship. 


If you are looking for a place to start on this journey.  I highly recommed this book.  It was where we started.