Hello, Coram Deo family! It’s always been our goal to partner with parents and families in the discipleship of their kids, and we’ve been working hard to figure out ways to help bridge the gap between Sunday morning worship and midweek discipleship. We recently launched the Sermon Note sheets to help your kids engage with the sermon on Sunday mornings and this week we are excited to offer a new resource to assist families in their weekly discipleship at home!
Our new Family Discipleship Weekly Resources sheets are meant to be tools for families to use to help connect Sunday’s sermon to the rest of your week, fostering conversations and habits of worship.
Designed to be versatile, this resource will work for different schedules and family types, whether you have no children or ten children. It can be a one-on-one conversation starter or a group discussion tool for your Life Group. If you have been a Christian your whole life or are just beginning to ask questions, this resource will help you disciple your family in God’s Word.
We’ve tried to make it as simple and user-friendly as possible, organizing the materials into two sections: a weekly rotation and a monthly rotation.
Weekly Resources
Every week, you’ll get a brief, kid-friendly summary of the sermon along with five discussion questions. Each question is written to begin a conversation around one aspect of the sermon and the Gospel.
In my family, these conversations last about five minutes or until my four year old’s attention span reaches its limit. Other families might have longer conversations with older kids who are exploring God’s Word in a deeper way. Whether your conversations happen between bites of chicken nuggets at the dinner table or while sipping your morning coffee with your spouse, every moment spent together worshipping God is valuable.
Along with the discussion questions, every week we are providing additional scriptures that were referenced in the sermon, an attribute of God, and a prayer focus for the week. There are many different ways you can work this into your week. For example, you can use the prayer focus with your bedtime routine or talk about the attribute of God while driving to your Life Group. The scripture references can be helpful in practicing Bible navigation. Get creative and do whatever works for your family! The point is not to use every element every day, but to give you a tool to help weave a Gospel thread throughout all the God-given aspects of your family’s life.
Monthly Resources
The second half of this resource will be updated monthly. First, we will highlight a worship song for your family to sing together during the month. It can be challenging for kids to follow along and sing at church if they aren’t familiar with the songs and this will help them! By the way, if you haven’t already downloaded our church’s Spotify playlist, I highly recommend it! I’ve been amazed how even just having worship songs playing in the background during our day has made such a huge difference in my kids’ worship on Sunday mornings.
There will also be a memory verse and question from The New City Catechism to work on as a family throughout the month. Giving our kids (and ourselves!) a firm foundation that is solid in scripture and truth is so important and these are just a few simple ways to do that.
Tips & Ideas
Does all of this sound overwhelming or are you unsure of where to start? Don’t worry! We’ve created tips and ideas on the back of each Family Discipleship Weekly Resources page for how to utilize it in your day to day life. We all have to start somewhere and we hope that this tool will encourage and support your personal and family discipleship.
Getting Started
Our hope in creating this resource is not to add another lengthy “thing” to your already busy schedule, but to help you incorporate scripture and worship into the activities you are already doing. Deuteronomy 6:6-7 says, “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” Our hope is that this resource will give you a starting point to making this scripture a reality in your family.
The Family Discipleship Weekly Resource pages will be available for you to grab this Sunday morning. You will also be able to access them digitally through our website, app or on Facebook the next day. May we be a people who saturate our minds and hearts with the truth of God’s Word and His goodness to us. May he bless your family as you continue to learn and grow together.
