An Ignoble Experiment: We Finally Found the User's Manual!

Dear Indiana,

The Family Worship Book
by Terry L. Johnson

There has been a great resurgence in the last 10 years or so of the practice of family worship. Most of us, in one way or another, are probably convinced that corporate worship in the home is a good and biblical thing. But if you're like me (and I pray for your spouse's sanity that you are not), you find the idea of family worship a whole lot easier than the actual practice of it. If this sounds like a good description of you, then I have some welcome news: Someone has finally written the user's manual on family worship.

Now, I know many of you are sarcastically thinking, "God wrote the manual on family worship thousands of years ago; it's called the Bible. Why do we need yet another book to tell us what God already told us?" Well, for some of you, this may be very true. If you were raised in a faithful Christian home where family worship was regularly practiced, it may seem a bit strange to you that so many of the rest of us struggle with it. Even if you were exposed to it as a child, you may have found that the role of active leader, rather than passive listener, is much more challenging than you thought. All of us are in different stages in our sanctification, and we all have different talents and abilities. Where one Christian struggles, another excels. We each have strengths, and we each have weaknesses; we know this quite well. The difficulty is in finding the balance between focusing our attention exclusively on our weaknesses, thereby neglecting our strengths; and the opposite extreme of neglecting our weaknesses by focusing primarily on exercising our strengths. We need to be doing both, and I think family worship is an area where our strengths and weaknesses become clear very quickly.

Terry Johnson has done a great service to the Christian church. The Family Worship Book is exactly what it sounds like: a "how-to" manual. Too many books on family worship give the reasons and scriptural proofs for the doing of it, but almost never offer anything practical to the reader when they become convinced (or convicted) that they should begin doing this in their own home. Johnson saw this lack of practical application and determined to do something about it. He explains his motivation in the Preface:

For years I have been hearing cries from heads of households for help in conducting regular family worship. Their questions have been fundamental: what are we to do and how are we to do it? This work is designed to come to their aid by providing the following:

* An order of service for family worship;
* Resources in prayers, creeds, commandments, Psalms, hymns and catechisms in a single book;
* Tables and schedules for Scripture reading, learning Psalms and hymns, and memorizing Scripture.

To this end, The Family Worship Book is short on arguments for the practice of family worship and long on methods and steps for actually doing it. The book even has a ribbon bookmark, anticipating the fact that it will be used often as an outline and a step-by-step "order of worship," similar to your church bulletin. The book has a hardcover and is well-made, ready for years and years of use. I plan on getting six copies myself, one for each of my children as a wedding gift...

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Hardback; 197 pages • RETAIL: $19.99 • YOUR PRICE $17.99 • ORDER NOW!
http://www.reformationbookstore.com/familyworshipbook.aspx

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