Supporting homes to talk about faith
“Most certainly father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel.” Martin Luther
What wonderful words from Luther! Advocating that parents are the primary sharers of faith.
Growing Faith at Home is a simple tool to help you connect your weekend worship with the faith life of your home. It is based on the church readings for the week and contains Bible readings, prayers, blessings, and faith-sharing ideas for households to use each and every day.
Here is a story from a family that uses Growing Faith at Home…
As a family we use the Growing Faith at Home sheets regularly (just about every evening). We started really simply with the reading, the prayer and the blessing.
We now read the verse for the week, then the prayer, one of the readings (with a “This is the Word of the Lord.” Thanks be to God response), occasionally a discussion about the meaning of the text as it takes us, followed by our prayer based on the text (usually by the reader), Lord’s Prayer and then the blessing.
Our three and a half year old runs to get the Bible and put it away. She joins in (sort of) with the Lord’s Prayer – we started using it when we heard her trying to join in at church and realised it was time. Leading is usually rotated between the two adults and our ten year old or split with one doing the liturgy and one doing the reading. The ten year old seems to like doing the blessing, when he hasn’t done anything else. He’s not so keen on the longer readings though. We use the New International Readers Version, so it is easy reading.
The ten year old seemed not to be wildly into the faith conversations early on so we haven’t pushed that for the moment, but we do sometimes really get into talk about the Bible texts. And we sometimes use the questions provided. I think it might yet develop.
My parents reflected early in our use of them last year about the great simplicity of our approach at that stage comparing it very favourably to the LONG devotions and family prayers that were a trial to them when they were kids.
I like the resource because it gives such flexibility. And we like that our congregation prints them (so we can slip it in the Bible) but also that they get emailed out, so even when we lose or don’t get the print copy, we always have access each night.
Thank you Grow Ministries, The Thomas Family
Find out more about Growing Faith at Home here
