I have failed at family worship more nights than I have succeeded.
This is the fact I had to accept before I could do it consistently. The standard I was holding myself to — some imagined scene of rapt attention and appropriate solemnity — was not achievable in a house with children under ten. Setting it as the target meant failing toward it every time.
What works, for us, is smaller than that.
The shape of ten minutes
We open a psalm. We read it aloud — I read, the kids follow when they can. We do not explain it. We sit in it for a moment. Then we pray, briefly, using the language of the psalm where possible. Then we are done.
That is it. Some nights it is five minutes. Some nights someone cries. Some nights a child says something that stops me cold — a question, an observation, a repetition of something I said three weeks ago that I had forgotten and they had not.
Those moments are not the reward for getting it right. They are just what happens when you show up enough times that the ordinary rhythm has a chance to work.
"A holy and well-governed family is the preparative to a holy church." — Richard Baxter, The Godly Home