Reddit reviews Family Worship

Well, first off, we fail a lot. That's okay. I found that having too ambitious or structured of a plan was actually a hindrance. (I had spreadsheets, and outlines, and hymns chosen based on each text, and so on.) The "cost of entry" was high enough that if I was tired, or we got home late, or something, we would just skip it. Right now I'm also considering changing the time of day we do it, although evening still seems the most reasonable time.

To get back into the routine, right now we plan to just read a Psalm, sing whatever song occurs to us, and pray. No prep needed, just the ability to count from 1 to 150. Overall it's about 15 minutes.

When we started in February, I wrote my own plan with an OT passage, NT passage, and Psalm for each topic, with a hymn that was related to the topic in some way. Then we used this plan. [PDF] After that I was considering going through Kitto's Daily Bible Illustrations.

But an extended period of illness and our own failure to create the necessary routine meant we quit after less than a month.

So right now we're just on the simple Psalms plan to get back on track. What I think I'm learning is that there's no silver bullet and that it's possible to over-plan. This needs to become a routine of discipline before it will stick, and we need to keep the bar low to start.

Resources I recommend are:

• Family Worship 101 on Crossway's site - Donald Whitney will take you through your first week of family worship and provide a 30-day plan that's easy to follow at the end. Great way to start and make it easy to build a routine.
  
• Family Worship by Donald Whitney - nice short book that's essentially what the above link is a distilled version of.
  
• Leading Family Worship - a talk by Joel Beeke from the Desiring God pastors' conference in 2011. Very based in Scripture and very practical. My favorite message on the topic.
  
• Family Worship 101 - article from Ligonier. Essentially covers the same ground.

I have a few questions on your post.

Year long engagement? There are valid reasons for a long engagement and yours may be one. But, my friendly advice is to make it shorter if it's at all possible.

Also, would you really want something that stops once you get married? Why not use the opportunity to start on the practice of regular family worship time? This would your search to something that you can continue into your marriage.

Don Whitney has a new, short book about doing Family Worship