Parenting in the Pew: Guiding Your Children Into the Joy of Worship

This book if full of excellent and practical advice to help train your children to worship the Lord right along with mom and dad in the service. I have implemented most of the ideas and have reaped wonderful rewards. It is a wonderful experience when your kids worship with you. Even my two-year-old is sitting relatively quietly and more importantly, she is participating in the service!

One of the perennial issues all parents have to deal with is how to effectively train their children to participate in the morning/evening worship service. This can be one of the most embarrassing seasons in any parents life. But it is also one of the most important seasons in the life of your child as they learn to participate in the right worship of God among congregation of the redeemed. Robbie Castleman has written a very helpful book on how to train your children to be in the worship service. This book is a very practical guide to help you train-up your children to enjoy the worship service. She helps the reader understand that the quality of what happens on Sunday starts on Saturday evening. As a pastor's wife, Castleman had to sit with her children as a "single mother" because her husband was in the pulpit. She tells you how she not only survived but how she learned to make the time in the pew Christ honoring both for her and her children. I could not over state how helpful this book was to my wife and me as we brought our children into the worship service and toddlers. Great gift idea. Should be on every church's book table and a regular part of a congregations' helping young parents in training-up their children in the way they should go. This book should be given to every young family that attends church services.

My mother gave me this book. I wasn't very excited about it since we have some differences in how we parent and our views on church. I loved it though! I couldn't put it down and have been recomending it to every christian parent I know. In fact my parents have been getting large orders of this book and giving them away and I think that is what I am going to do as well. This is a book about how to raise your children to be spiritual people who understand and know God. It is about including them in church instead of sending them off to be entertained so that the adults can worship. It is a very convicting book and if you follow it you will find church to be both harder work (parenting) and more fulfilling.

I am a church planter. Wondering what to do with kids and not feeling like "Children's ministry" was the way to go, I came upon this book. Robbie breaks us all out of our "children's ministry looks-like-this" mentality, to a new world where parents are actually together with their children. Many people think that this is going back to and age of "children just be quiet" or gearing the service "just for kids" which it is neither. Robbie breaks us out of both paradigms bringing us to a place where parents are to parent and not simply escape into the mystical point of worship. Where worship is not simply seen as a feeling to attain, where children get in the way, but where worship is something children can be trained in. This is a must read for all who are thinking about church planting and bringing the family together in a practical way. I have made this manditory reading for all my leadership team.

We are using Parenting in the Pew as the basis for a series of seminars for parents and children. Castleman rightly puts the focus on worshiping God and not "what we can get out of it" or "how to keep kids still." She says that while we often say "Bless my soul, O Lord," the Scripture says "Bless the Lord, O my soul." Rev. Cynthia O'Brien, Smith Memorial Presbyterian Church, Fairview, Portland, Oregon