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The Importance of Blessing
Bar Barakah coverCraig Hill, president and founder of Family Foundations, has written a book entitled Bar Barakah (A Parents Guide to a Christian Bar Mitzvah).  This book is also available in Spanish and Portuguese.
This practical guide helps parents to understand and plan the blessing ceremony for their son or daughter at puberty.
Family Foundations’ mission is "To restore God’s timeless foundations to families throughout the earth." FFI is striving to help establish a "culture of blessing" in churches around the world. The primary tool used by Family Foundations is our Ancient Paths Seminar. The seminar includes times of education to teach why and how to bless the next generation. It also includes times of prayer and healing to repair the damage that so many people carry from being wounded and shamed as children, even though God intended for blessing to come. We have discovered Christian parents often have difficulty providing blessing to their children because they have never received blessing themselves. But God the Father desires to provide that blessing in a powerful way once they have opened their hearts to receive.

The Ancient Paths Seminar teaching includes God’s plan for seven critical times of blessing:
  • Conception
  • Time in the womb
  • Birth
  • Infancy (0-5 years)
  • Puberty
  • Marriage
  • Later in life (old age)


Although each of these seven times of blessing is important, we believe a public ceremony is also important to celebrate birth, puberty, marriage and later in life. Our culture provides only celebrations of birth and marriage. FFI has many examples and testimonies of the powerful impact on people’s lives in a publicly celebrated blessing time at puberty and later in life. Of all these times, the blessing at time of puberty is the most powerful, life-changing event in a person’s life.

"Bar Barakah" means "son of blessing" — "Bat Barakah" means "daughter of blessing." Craig teaches that this important ceremony should be taken as seriously by parents as that of their son or daughter’s marriage.
The Bar Barakah (or Bat Barakah) ceremony requires three steps:

Preparatory Time — an 18-month process which includes the parents reading books, both together and with their child.

The Ceremony — the time in which the child is publicly released into adulthood, cut from childhood ties to the mother and set apart by their father’s words into their identity and destiny.

The Celebration — a party/reception following the ceremony.

 

The Bar Barakah book includes two lists of materials as "Parent Packs."  We no longer package these materials together due to several items that have gone out of print, but the following Parent Pack items are available from our online Resource Center, or by calling the FFI office.

Parent Pack #1 (for parents to prepare themselves for the blessing ceremony)

1)  The Ancient Paths (book or audio book),  by Craig Hill,

2)  Raising Godly Children, by Craig Hill, (3 audio CD series)

3)  Stepping Into Adulthood, by Jeff Brodsky (Phoenix: ACW Press, 1997) - out of print

4)  Raising A Modern Day Knight, by Robert Lewis,  - out of print

5)  Imparting the Blessing to Your Children, by William T. Ligon,

 

Parent Pack #2 (for parents and youth to read/listen/discuss together in preparation for the blessing ceremony)

1)   His Perfect Faithfulness, by Eric and Leslie Ludy

2)   Seven Courtship Secrets for a Successful Marriage, by Bill Gothard (Replaces the recommendation for Establishing Biblical Standards of Courtship)

3)   Relationships, by Dean Sherman (Four video teaching series) (YWAM Publishing)

4)   Wealth, Riches and Money, by Craig Hill & Earl Pitts