I do not know a more important and practical topic in Western Christianity than the topic of Family Worship. Most of those who have grown up in 20th century America are radically unfamiliar with the idea of the great tradition of an organized time of Family Worship. This is a tragedy that is stunting the spiritual growth of many Christians and, I believe, contributing to the exodus of many young people from the faith of their parents.

So, this being said, I was thrilled when I heard of a new book about family worship by Jason Helopoulos called A Neglected Grace. This book was hailed as extremely grace-filled and Gospel focused. The fact that WTSbooks ran a sale on it for $5 did not hurt my desire to get it and read it.

And read it I did. I think it took me just a few hours to read this book. That has little to do with my ability or persisitence and everything to do with the way this book is presented. Short, engaging, practical, challenging and encouraging. Focused on our great God and how He administers grace through our worship as a family, this book is immensely readable. It is also short and does not suffer from redundancies or print simply for the sake of print.

The best aspect of this book is that it presents the observance of Family Worship as a means of grace to God's people. The chapters are very practical and offer some pragmatic benefits to engaging in this discipline but, primarily, the benefit of Family Worship is God being honored and glorified by His children being obedient to Him and growing in their love and adoration of Him.

A Neglected Grace is a great book. It is quick and precise and wonderful. I cannot reccomend this book highly enough.
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The sky is blue. 2+2=4. My daughter likes shoes. All obvious, easy to make assertions that are of the type to be found in Helopoulos's book on family worship. Despite its overly simplistic approach to encouraging family worship (this book might be helpful if you family resembles The Simpson's), there were a couple of problems with the approach to family worship described here.

First, the primary reason given by the author to do family worship is "Joyful Responsibility." Helopoulos then spends a lot of words trying to make responsibility not sound like something we should be doing so that in his words, he doesn't give anyone a guilt trip. However, it is hard to understand the meaning of the word responsibility without it being something we are to do. A responsibility is not defined as something we feel like doing. Of course, without this, then the book is more of a blog post than a book so maybe he needed something to fill out the lack of significant content.

And my second issue is the use of worship to a 3-legged stool. He defines the three legs as "secret worship," "corporate worship," and "family worship." That part is fine, but in his descriptions and explanations, the three legs don't seem to be connected by any substance. That's the question I would ask him - as a pastor, doesn't the church have some responsibility to integrate these legs into a common process of sanctification and growth for a Christian instead of the three legs being disconnected from any common butt-holder that would link these three areas of worship? And I'm using the word "responsibility" to mean something that should be done, not just something that we'd like to do. ( )