09/27/2007 - 09/27/2007

Do you read and pray with your children or spouse?

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Yvonne Colyn and I represented our church at our regional Classis. For the most part these CRC meetings tend to be quite business oriented. There is a lot of things to take care of, many details concerning many ministries that we as churches are supporting together (church plants, campus ministries, etc). They are important and it's exciting to hear what's going on, but the work we do at classis can often feel less than inspiring.

This time however, we had the time to have some round table discussions about what's going on in our churches. One large question we explored was what our churches were doing for faith formation. Within our smaller groups we were to start this discussion by speaking of a personal situation, Sunday school class, or relationship that had an impact on our faith formation. In our group of seven, all of us spoke not of the influence of a Sunday School class, worship, catechism, etc. but we all talked about Bible reading and prayer with our family or spouse.

We often underplay the importance of scripture reading and prayer in our homes. We'll rearrange our schedules for soccer, piano, coffee with a friends, etc. but do we rearrange our schedules to make sure that prayer and scripture are shown to be a priority? I'm not talking about legalism, but I am talking about a consistent message to you and your family about priorities.

I encourage you to click on this link for Deuteronomy 6. It's a passage we might well take to heart when it comes to faith formation.