Some Practical Guidelines for Family Worship (Part 2)

Read the series.
Be creative and thoughtful
Speaking of the element of prayer in family worship, Alexander writes, “Family prayer should be varied, otherwise the inevitable result will be formalism and tediousness. Indeed the snare into which we are most prone to fall, in this service, is that of sameness and routine.”4 I fear that the form of family worship practiced in some Reformed circles has degenerated into mere outward formalism. After dinner, the father reaches over to the hutch, grabs the Bible, and turns it to the next chapter to be read. He reads the chapter in a monotone voice, puts down the Bible, and says a brief prayer. Family devotions over.
We don’t want our family altar to degenerate into a mindless ritual. One way to guard against that is to bring variety into our family worship. And, by the way, variety for variety’s sake is not necessarily a bad thing. If you look at the world around you, you soon discover that God delights in variety. Therefore, provided that we maintain the general framework of what constitutes true worship, variety can be a good and useful thing. But in order to keep a measure of variety in our family worship, we need to be creative. At this point, I’d like to offer you several suggestions:
1) Read through the Bible