I wonder what thoughts come to your mind when you hear the words ‘family worship’. Maybe a family sitting in a circle looking captivated as their dad reads to them the Bible. Maybe something you know would be good to do with your family but is something you haven’t been able to do regularly.
Setting up Stones: A Parent’s Guide to making your Home a Place of Worship by Greg and Martha Singleton speaks to both these things. It shows that family worship is much more than just sitting around studying the Bible, it can be far more creative. At the same time it encourages and provides practical steps about how to make this happen in your family.
This book gets its title from the passage Joshua 4:20-24 where Joshua and the Israelites set up stones to remind them of what God has done. This book is about helping your family remember what God has done or in the words of Joshua, setting up stones.
In the first half of the book they remind us that through Jesus’ death on the cross there is now a new way for us to have fellowship with God, and we are invited to do so. In our homes we are encouraging our children to live a lifestyle of praising God for who He is and what He’s done as the get to know Him better. In order to do this we need to be prepared, purposeful and perceptive in spotting those teachable moments.
Then in the second half they share some of the ways in which families can worship God including music, stories, prayer and traditions. It finishes with a reminder that God’s role for us as parents is to step up the stones so our children can discover Him.
The style of this book is engaging, the personal experiences back up the points they make, and the huge number of ideas they have provided for how a family can worship God are extremely useful (I hope to incorporate some of them with my children). There are a couple of weaknesses though. I would have liked there to have been a chapter on the more traditional elements of family worship (Bible Study, Catechism). Also there are resources they recommend I would discourage people from using, such as Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis. But these two things should not put you off get what I thought was a helpful book on family worship.
Setting up Stones is available to buy HERE (UK), HERE (USA).
Related website HERE.
