Family Devotions

[Steve]

I was just curious how the Jude2 community does on this. I recently heard that among Southern Baptists, 96% have family devotions at home 1 time a year or less.

[Tracy]

Southern Baptist here....

We have family worship time several times a week. Usually after supper while we are still at the table. My husband reads the Bible--we go through book at a time. We finished Acts a little while back and are now in Matthew. He reads aloud to us and we all discuss it, pulling out commentaries and dictionaries if we choose to.

After the Bible dicussion, he works with the children and their catechism. He also uses with the children, from time to time, Operation World. It is a world prayer book for the countries of the world. This book gives stats and information on countries and what the prayer needs are. Locating these places on the globe is helpful for the children.

Then there is prayer time at the end.

We take singing hymns in spurts. For a while there we sang hymns nearly every family worship time, but at this point we are not singing.


The children and I are memorizing the 8th chapter of Romans. I love to hear my children spontaneously start quoting Romans 8 as they go through their day--just all of a sudden sometimes they will start chanting it indoors and out.

That's how this Southern Baptist family does it.

Tracy

[Kenya]

When our children were younger (and we were all in one place at one time), we had nightly devotions before bedtime.

Now that they are teenagers, we are more prone to use "teachable" moments to train our children as they go. We will take advantage of any teachable moment we have. Sometimes they role their eyes at us, but it still sticks. And most of the time, it leads to good discussions. We try to teach them that every action we take in life should involve the Father.

[Pastor Bill]

I can't really say never, but we tend to do more the teachable moments like Kenya mentioned. Our lives should be lived for Christ, and modeled toward his teachings, if we are living it, our children will learn more by our example and incorporation into daily life than adding one more thing to a busy schedule.

Now some of that may change now that they are out of school, and Rose is no longer working outside the home, they may do a little more formal study or lessons here and there.

[Paully_44]

Everynight I read the bible to each of my sons. They both have their own based on age. Then we pray.

As for formal "family" devotions, we don't.