"Becoming a disciple means setting a new priority."
-Tim Keller

I speculate that if you were to survey all the families that populate the local church about their weekly priorities and commitments; family worship would frequently be trumped by baseball practice, dance lessons, theater rehearsals, and play dates. And if you were to ask parents why they aren’t regularly leading family worship they would say that there isn’t enough time in the day to sit down as a family and worship. 

As I interact with parents and ask them how they are doing often times I get the response, “We’re busy.” They explain their schedule with all the running around town for various activities and it is obvious why they feel that way. My assessment is that most families are simply overcommitted. When our family makes extra curricular commitments (dance, gymnastics, music, etc.) we are inevitably committing our time and making new priorities. Don’t hear me wrong, I think it is great to be engaged with activities in the community (it is great for mission) but the when we overcommit ourselves priorities get blurred. And when priorities get blurred we tend to forsake our most important commitments, namely, family worship and the discipleship of our children. 

As Christians, our highest priority is to love and serve God. As Christian parents, our highest priority is teaching our children what it means to love and serve God. In doing so, we fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20) to “make disciples…teaching them to observe all that I commanded” in our homes. When I talk about making disciples at home I mean helping our kids to have a personal relationship with Jesus that leads to them looking more like their Savior. It means forming, shaping and molding their heart, mind and behavior around the good news of the gospel.

We are all disciples of something. We are all formed, shaped, and influenced by something outside ourselves. No one can navigate through life without being a disciple and when you boil it down we have two options; either be disciples of Jesus or disciples of our fallen culture. If we aren’t actively discipling our children in the way of Christ then they are passively being discipled by culture. It isn’t a matter of if we are discipling our kids, but a matter of what kind of disciples we are making. Are our children being discipled in the way of culture or in the way of Christ? This is why it is a priority and urgency for us to disciple our kids, because if we don’t they will be discipled by our culture. 

There will be a lot of “on the go” discipleship that happens in life, Deuteronomy 6 identifies this as teaching our kids about the love of God as we “walk by the way.” We should not ignore these endless opportunities for “on the go” discipleship that present themselves throughout the day but one of the most formative ways to shape our children is through family worship. Sitting down with our family to pray, read scripture, to meditate and discuss the things of God, and sing hymns together. This not only provides a great opportunity for gospel formation but it demonstrates your priorities and commitment to making disciples of Jesus Christ at home.