Family Worship with Toddlers
“Selah, no more flips on the couch.”
“It’s time to stop looking out the window.”
“Yes, snakes are mean.”
All three of those sentences have been said during our family worship time. Our daughter is almost three years old and is everything you would expect from a toddler. She fills this time we spend together each evening with insanely high energy, the attention span of a gnat, and comments or question that come out of left field. This crazy time of our day can be inconvenient and chaotic.
And I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
The concept of family worship time was foreign to me until about a year ago. When I first heard mention of it, my mind immediately conjured up a picture of a super religious, homesteading family living their best Little House on the Prairie life. I looked at our very rambunctious toddler daughter and chuckled at the idea of getting her to still for long enough to have a meaningful conversation about the faith we had only just started introducing her to.
But the idea certainly intrigued me. I soon learned that many young families in our church lived out this practice. I would receive comments about how precious a prayer someone’s 5 year old offered up about our family. I would overhear young children singing hymns at the top of their lungs that they had learned with their families. I was shocked when my friend’s four year old recited long memory verses perfectly.
My husband and I started talking about trying to start something like this with our young, growing family. We quickly became overwhelmed by all the different options available and honestly had no idea where to start. Our first few attempts felt pointless - our sweet daughter would run wild with pre-bedtime energy while we desperately tried to teach her about Adam and Eve.
But then, my husband got coffee with another dad from church one day whose family had been doing this for a few years now and received these words of wisdom:
“Just start. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But if you just start something, you’ll figure out what works, and it will grow into something beautiful over time.”
So we did.
That night, we grabbed her toddler Bible, read a short story out of it, and tried to teach her the chorus of It Is Well. We ended the time with prayer and that was that!
After about a week of doing this, we reached a weekend night where the day had been busy, we were all exhausted and it was a fight to the bedtime finish line. My husband and I decided to forgo this family worship time for the evening, thinking it was one less thing for us to have to do.
But as we tried to get our daughter down, she looked at us and asked, “God, pray, song?”
Our hearts melted. So we sat down on the couch together and read a simple story from her toddler Bible. We started to sing It is Well and, for the first time, Selah sang it with us - perfectly. We prayed and she went to bed. It was the first time we saw the smallest evidence of fruit from the seeds we had started planting.
We’ve been doing this for almost a year now. While we are far from having it all figured out, I thought I’d share what this time typically looks like for us. I hope it encourages you if you’re looking to start something similar!
Every night we sit down and do four things - read, memorize, sing, pray.
Read - We have a few toddler Bibles that we’ve rotated through. Each of them take well known Bible stories and bring them down to a toddler’s level. Some of them have engaging questions like “Do you see Noah?” or “What else do you see that God created?” I absolutely love the Jesus Storybook Bible, but that one is currently a bit too old for Selah to grasp. One day!
Memorize - This is a new element we’ve added! It amazes me how many things Selah has memorized. Ask her to sing any Disney song and she’s got it down. So we decided to try out some easy Bible verses. All of them are about one sentence and we add in ridiculous hand motions to help with memory. I mean, who doesn’t love a good hand motion? It has been so fun to see God’s word take root in her mind as we pray it starts taking root in her heart.
Sing - Surprise, surprise. This one is my favorite. We’ve taught her several chorus’ to different hymns and now rotate through them. She’s learned It is Well, How Great Thou Art, Because He Lives, and Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus. It’s usually about a week of just Scott and I singing a new chorus we introduce while Selah sits and observes. Then one day she joins in, having all of the words perfectly memorized somehow. There is nothing more precious to me than hearing her sing out these songs. She is usually off-key and takes creative liberties with some of the words as she learns it, but it is the sweetest sound.
Pray - We sat down with her one day and got some popsicle sticks and wrote out the names of our family and her friends. She calls them her ‘pray sticks’ and she LOVES getting to use them! We put them in a jar and every night she picks out one. Whoever’s name is on it is who we pray for! Usually either my husband or myself with pray for them first and then Selah will take a turn. Her prayers are simple and precious and I absolutely love it.
So that’s it really. This whole process usually takes less than 5 minutes. Some days she’s super into it and other days she would rather continue practicing her gymnastics on our poor couch. But every day it has a purpose.
I am often reminded of the passage in Deuteronomy:
You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. Deuteronomy 11:18-19
This time each evening is a culmination of a day spent showing her the beauty of God and his gospel. A time where we can reflect and worship as a family. It isn’t pretty. It isn’t perfect. But it is completely worthwhile.
Do you have a family worship time? What does that time look like for you?
