Ten Practical Ideas
Content from the Sing! book by Keith and Kristyn Getty
1. Use All the Help and Opportunities You Can Get
Sing as you go around your home. Stream the songs from Sunday during breakfast, or over your smartphone during the bedtime routine. If your kids are learning to play instruments, get hymn sheet music. Ask your children what songs they enjoy singing in church and sing them at home. We are not saying that your home should sound as though Maria Von Trapp took up residence there. But aim to have truth being sung in the spaces where life takes place. Keith’s family regularly sang the blessing before a meal, and we now do the same with our kids. For example, Calvin’s Doxology, “Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow,” which is a wonderful Trinitarian lyric for kids to sing.
2. 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, songs 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. The best songs for our youth are often the best songs for our old age.
3. Talk about What You’re Doing and What the Songs Mean
Take time to talk about why we sing, what happens when we sing, and how we use the gift of singing to serve one another. One of the funniest things is to hear your kids mispronounce lyrics, because they don’t know what a word means. Take a moment to draw attention to a word or phrase that you could explain. 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.
4. Prepare for Sunday Service
Before we had kids, we had no idea what a major achievement it is just to get the whole family out to church on time on a Sunday! But when you can, help your kids to sing on a Sunday in church by singing the songs as a family beforehand. This means they’ll know the tune, understand the more complex words or concepts, and be able to sing with confidence and joy. There are few sights more lovely than the expression on the face of a young child who has just realized he or she knows the words to the next song being sung in their church. There are few sounds more wonderful than hearing a young child belt out those words in church (perhaps to a slightly different tune!) because they know the words. Equally, it’s great to chat about or sing the songs from church later on a Sunday. Most of us drive to and from church—a great time to talk, pray, and sing together about what we’re about to do, and what we have just done (we’ve found Bob Kauflin’s insights on preparing your family for Sunday in the book Worship Matters very helpful).
5. Model Passionate Participation in the Services
Always remember when you sing at church, your children (and everyone else around you) can see you and are watching. We both have strong memories of watching our parents and grandparents singing in church and valuing what they were doing. It’s a wonderful thing to stand beside your children and sing with them. Children also need to see other parents, and kids older than them, singing, so that they see it is not a “childish” thing to do, and neither is it just some strange trait that only your family does! Sit somewhere in your church building where your kids are surrounded by strong singing. Use the songs of the church to help strengthen their vocal muscles and by extension their faith muscles too. 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.
6. Be Aware of All the Music Your Kids Are Into
Keith has a vivid memory growing up of a school-friend’s mother hearing of a new friend her child had made and asking him, “What are his friends like and what music is he into?” What an interesting question! It may seem somewhat simplistic and judgmental (and it may have been)—but it gets at the truth that music—all music—affects us as we listen. 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.
7. If Your Kids Are into Music…
Encourage them! If they have a gift for music, help them to see that it’s given them by the Lord, for using to serve the Lord’s people (Eph. 4:7-8, 12). The church is (and has been throughout history) an incredible breeding ground for musical training and expression. We both grow up with parents who not only drove us all over for music lessons and rehearsals, but had homes with “open doors”—four long-suffering parents who, as we began making music, opened their homes for eating and meeting, rehearsing and discussing, celebrating and commiserating. If your kids are musical, then be those parents. It’s tiring, but it’s also joyful!
8. If Your Church Has a Children’s Choir, Support It If You Can
In the busyness of life this can feel like yet another thing, another carpool journey (more time to play music, though!). It’s an encouragement to the children—it will draw them into lifelong singing in the church and they will learn to be singers. It’s an encouragement to a whole congregation—when kids sing it has a very special impact on people listening (Ps. 8:2). One of the reasons we began our “Kids Hymnal” series was because hearing kids sing inspires other kids, and grown-ups, to sing.
9. 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 life-long students of discovery in this amazing creation God has built all around us and in us. In the Getty and Lennox households, we both benefited from lively artistic discussions on classical music, books, travel, and faith that encouraged curiosity, sincerity, and creativity.
10. 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 (who was 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
Think of one or two things you need to change, and get started, and keep going. Sing together today.