Worshipping at home with a young family? At home we’re developing a particular worship style I’ve come to fondly call “Chaos Church.” We first create a sacred space, we sing some songs together while the kids bang on their instruments and make a huge noise, we read the bible together (again, if you need a bible for your children at home let me know), we talk about the story and then we pray together.
Here are some resources for you to use in worshipping with your family at home.
If you’re finding your way here from outside the GUC community welcome! you can receive updates of new resources each week via our community email list.
Sing
The song Praise The Lord Every Day by Yancy is filled with actions and animations, we’ve found our kids love singing along to these videos. They also produced the song Hosanna Rock that we’ve included in the last month.
Each week we continue to put together a playlist for people to listen to throughout the week.
Story
Darren reads this week’s bible story from the Growing in God’s Love Story Bible and provides some guiding questions for conversation here.
Rev Sarah Agnew over at Wesley UCA has created her own audio retelling of the story of the Road To Emmaus which you can find here.
But nothing beats sitting with your children and reading the story together, if you need a bible or stories to read with your family please ask Darren and he’ll try and find something for you.
We’ve put together a list of great bibles for families on our website here, Darren’s recommendation (and what we’ve been reading through over Easter is the Growing in God’s Love: A Story Bible which is available in hard cover book and also a kindle book (which works fantastically on the iPad, not the kindle)
This Week’s Readings:
Acts 2:14a, 36-41 (CEV)
Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19 (MSG)
Luke 24:13-35 (CEV)
Action
We invite your family can spend some time together baking bread.
As the bread cools, go for a walk together (here are some other walking conversation topics), spend some time talking about what you’d like to talk with Jesus about if you were able to go for a walk with him.
When you get home break the bread together and tell the story again of the disciples walking and breaking bread with Jesus from this week’s readings.
Perhaps you’d like to talk about your favourite meal stories from the bible. Theodore and I have created a short video of us making a soda bread with recipe here.
Play / Create
Spend some time with LEGO, create the story in lego form, what did the road look like, how do you imagine the characters in the story, what did their neighbourhood look like? If you don’t have LEGO, why not draw, paint, sculpt or use stuffed toys or puppets?
Table
This week perhaps you add a spare chair to your dining table. As you eat together you can invite everyone to imagine Jesus eating at the table with you. If you shared a meal with Jesus, what would you like to talk about? What has happened today that you’d like to share with him? What questions would you ask?
Pray
We’ve built a prayer wall at home for our family to use as a prayer space, I’ll put some instructions out this week, but you could easily create a prayer fridge, using magnets or a prayer wall using post it notes, or perhaps you’ve got a blackboard paint wall or board that you could use.
My favourite way of talking about prayer nowadays is to look at 4 types of prayer: Help, Thanks, Sorry, Wow…
- What do you want God to help you with, or who do you want to pray for?
- Offering gratitude for the day, the week, our family, giving thanks to God for all that we have.
- Apologising for the times when we have hurt others, intentionally or unintentionally, also saying sorry to God for the times where we made choices that didn’t match with the way god wants the world to be,
- Expressing amazement and awe at the world around us, music we hear, amazing things that happen to us, the earth, sky, moon and stars…
Use these as a guide for your family prayer time, it takes some time to get used to, but if you do it more than one time each week you’ll become familiar with it.
