Research suggests that if you want the faith of children to grow it needs to happen primarily in the home. It's great to have supporting programs happening in the parish but the home is the locus.
Taking this seriously, Stephen Harrison has created the Faithful Families blog, weekly resources to help families grow faith at home. Every idea is simple and easily used.
Here's how Stephen describes the resource. He gives ideas as to how it might be used...
Each week carefully selected ideas and resources are placed on this blog. The purpose is to help you be faithful in nurturing the faith life of your children and family. But how do you use these ideas? Here are three simple ideas.
Table Time
When you eat at the dinner table during the week get in the habit of praying together, reading a passage of the Bible and discussing it. You might even like to play some of the short games together at the end of the meal. Creative resources for doing each of these are provided.
Family Night
One night a week set aside some time way to have an intentional family night. A pattern may be used such as this:
- Game.
- Sharing.
- Story with Discussion/Questions.
- Activity.
- Prayer.
Resources to do each of these things can be found in the weekly faithful families blog.
Use one idea
Each week there will be different ideas that you can integrate into your daily life to build in patterns of family faithfulness. These could be:
- Sharing questions in the car.
- Praying before school.
- Reading the Bible at bed.
- Planning a way of serving together as a family.
Take one idea that you think your family could do and plan to do for a week or two...or longer. Once you’ve mastered one idea add a second.