Parenting in the Pew

If you didn’t make it to MOPS this month, we missed you!  But we don’t want you to miss out on the wonderful message we had from Nancy Hicks -Women's Outreach Coordinator at COS- on engaging our children in the worship experience, so read on for a little recap!

Nancy has been married for 20 years and has two teenage sons.  She has a great deal of experience in music and a history of leading worship.

She shared that her prayer for her children has always been Deuteronomy 6:5:

⁵ Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Because we can do things that work against our prayers for our children, we need to pay attention and establish a philosophy on how we’re going to introduce our children to God.  The two ways our children learn about God at this point are:

1.  You and your marriage

2.  Worship Experience

Nancy feels that we should focus on providing an age-appropriate, meaningful worship experience for our children.  When it comes to including our children in “corporate worship” or church service, she’d like us to address our children’s heart instead of focusing on trying to fix certain behaviors.  She’s less concerned that our children behave perfectly in worship service but that they are having a meaningful worship experience.  While we don’t want our children to be a distraction to others during worship, we also want to be careful that they are not tuning out from the experience.

Nancy has five suggestions for making the most of Sunday worship:

1. Prepare!
1. Worship begins Saturday night!  Avoid a late night if it will interfere with Sunday morning.  Lay out the kids’ clothes the night before.  Keep Sunday morning as simple as possible so you can keep the Sabbath day holy.

2. Worship Together
1. Keep your children with you during the worship service.  Nancy stepped down as worship leader when her children were little because she wanted to train her children to worship.

3. Engage Your Children in Worship
1. Instead of just trying to occupy them with a toy and keep them quiet during the service, work on engaging your child in the service.  Nancy gave a great example of how to do this.  During a song, Nancy would instruct her children to squeeze her hand every time they heard a certain word, such as “He”.  This helped train the children to listen and pay attention. 
2. Tithing is another way to engage the children.  If your children are old enough for an allowance, teach them to contribute their own funds to the offering plate.  Otherwise, just let them drop your offering in the plate as it comes around. 

4. Model Worship
1. Some Sunday mornings we’re frazzled or just not into it for some reason.  Nancy reminds us that in the Psalms, David coached his soul to worship.
2. Do your children see you worship during the week?

                                                              i.      Consider doing devotions with your children.  Make them age-appropriate and interesting. Nancy recounted giving her children pots and pans and telling her children to “make a joyful noise to the Lord.” 

5. What do you do when you blow it?
1. When we lose our cool or hurt our example in some way, if we come to God with a broken spirit our worship experience is usually more authentic

Psalm 51:15-17 (King James Version)

 ¹⁵O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.

 ¹⁶For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.

 ¹⁷The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

Nancy left us with the following reminder.  Pray, pray, pray for our children and thank God, humbly, whenever we see our children exhibit excitement toward God.  Ultimately, it’s all in His hands.