Sing With Your Family
Singing With Your Family Gets The Right Questions Asked and Answered.
Singing the gospel changes hearts, and singing the gospel prepares hearts. Singing is of course not a magical formula that will guarantee deep faith in a child, but it is a way to sow and water the Word of God in their heart. If a child does walk through a rebellious season, what do you want them to remember about the Christian faith, calling and inviting them back? Fill their memories up now with the gospel, through songs that will keep singing to them through the years to come.
While our faith must be taught, it is also “caught” in our homes, through what our kids see and hear from us. And singing is catchy. So sing with your kids. You don’t need to be able to sing well. Our singing always remains more important than the sound it makes.
Singing Trains a Child’s Appetite.
In an essay on writing for children, Lewis also suggested that children don’t learn like a train going from station to station but rather as a tree grows by adding rings. Kids add and build on what they already know, and so do adults; so we must take care to try and make those first key rings of growth healthy and strong, providing a solid foundation a child can build on. We consider the balance of the content they sing and what vision of God those songs are growing in their minds.
Singing Can Still Reach Teens, Even if You Just Start Now.
Singing Should Bring the Sound of Church Home So Your Children Will Be At Home In Church.
Ten Practical Ideas To Sing With Your Family
Use All The Help and Opportunities You Can Get
Teach Your Kids Songs You Want Them To Grow Old With
Actively make a list of the songs you would like your kids to know throughout their lives, that clearly and richly teach the faith. Then play them in the car and around the house; sing them yourself as you go about your day, and draw attention to them when they are sung on a Sunday.
Talk About What You Are Doing And What The Songs Mean
Use a lyric as a conversation starter about faith. We teach our girls a hymn of the month. When we learned “Holy, Holy, Holy,” we had some fun with cherubims and seraphims! We recommend Joni Eareckson Tada and Bobbie Wolgemuth’s series Hymns for a Kid’s Heart for helping with this.
Prepare For Sunday Services
Model Passionate Participation in the Services.
Grow the love for hearing and joining the voice of the congregation, so much so that church would be strange to them if they didn’t hear that sound. They should come to church expecting to sing.
Be Aware of All The Music Your Kids Are Into
There are ultimately no neutral lyrics. All songs share a message about how we should view the world. So we should be listening, discussing, and understanding what our kids are into. It’s not that we ban everything that does not explicitly teach the gospel! We love and play all sorts of music with our kids. But we want to equip our kids to listen with discernment and thoughtfulness.
If Your Kids Are Into Music, Encourage Them
When We Have A Children’s Choir, Support It
Cultivate High Opinions of All Types of Art
Some of the issues in church music today are not that a certain style isn’t quite right but rather that we are too narrow and maybe even too boring in our expression. Inspire your kids with different instruments, sounds, and languages, and by speaking positively about all these things yourself. Teach them to be lifelong students of discovery in this amazing creation God has built all around us and in us.
Sing Today!
There may never be a perfect day to start singing truths with your kids. But there is today. They are not too old. They are not too young—we have been surprised that even our two-year-old knows several songs well. (Remember the ancient motto—“Give me a child until they are seven and I will show you the man.”) Don’t wait. We were kick-started into this by a hilarious experience at Wilberforce School (New Jersey) when the kids wanted to perform one of our songs (they began by explaining how they used different hymns to help teach the kids the faith), and our daughter Eliza (four at the time) jumped up to join the choir and of course, was the only child who didn’t know all the words—an embarrassing parenting moment!