Introduction

This Directory has a different origin from the rest of the documents in this collection. It was not drawn up by the Westminster Assembly, but by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which approved it in August 1647 as a complement to the Directory for the Publick Worship of God. If that one ordered the worship of the congregation, this one orders the worship given to God in the household and in secret. That is why the Scottish editions always printed it together with the Westminster documents, and so we include it here.

The Confession of Faith distinguishes three spheres of worship: God "is to be worshipped everywhere in spirit and in truth; as in private families daily, and in secret each one by himself, so more solemnly in the public assemblies" (WCF 21.6). Public worship does not take the place of that of the family nor of that of each believer alone, nor do these take the place of the former: the three sustain one another. A people that seeks God only on the Lord's day, at church, will hardly seek him well there.

The family is the first school of the faith. God said of Abraham: "I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD" (Gen. 18:19), and Joshua summed up his life in one resolution: "as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD" (Josh. 24:15). Fathers are commanded to bring up their children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord" (Eph. 6:4). The Directory gives concrete form to that command: it requires that the family gather for prayer and praises and for the reading of the Scriptures, with plain catechising that helps the simplest to profit by public worship; and that on the Lord's day, on returning from the congregation, the head of the family go over with his household what they have heard and spend the rest of the day in catechising and in conference upon the Word. Thomas Manton, in his Epistle to the Reader, which can be read on this site, summed it up thus: "A family is the seminary of Church and State; and if children be not well principled there, all miscarrieth".

The Church of Scotland took this duty very seriously. The act approving the Directory charges ministers and elders to enquire, family by family, whether any neglected family worship; and the head of a family who, after being admonished privately and reproved by the session, persisted in that neglect, was to be debarred from the Lord's Supper until he amended. At the same time, the Directory keeps order: it does not allow family worship to degenerate into meetings of several families competing with the congregation, nor to be led by idlers and vagrants who, "under pretence of a calling", creep into houses, because its purpose was "for cherishing piety, for maintaining unity, and avoiding schism and division".

Today family worship has disappeared from most Christian homes, and often without anyone missing it. Haste, screens and the habit of leaving the instruction of children in the hands of others have emptied the home of what for centuries filled it: the Bible open at the table, prayer together, the psalm sung at the close of the day. No reformation of the Church will endure if it does not reach the families, and no family is so small or so simple that it cannot begin today.

The Directory is preceded by the act with which the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved it in 1647.