At church services across the country this Christmas, wiggly kids will take the stage and stand in crooked lines to sing “Away in a Manger” and “Joy to the World” to a crowd watching them through the screens of their iPhones.
Andrew Pressley, who has spent the past 15 years transforming the children’s music ministry at his East Texas church, thinks it’s time for the grownups to put the devices away.
“We encourage parents not to take pictures and videos of their children when they are up front,” he said. “That was an adjustment. But when kids look out and see a sea of people singing with them, that’s a different message than the one they get when they look out and see their parents behind their phones.”
When Pressley joined the staff of First Baptist Church Lindale in 2010, about 750 people attended weekly, but the dwindling children’s choir maxed out at 6 singers. He made an intentional shift in the vision, “moving from performance to participation.”
Rather than cultivating a children’s choir that puts on a brief show on holidays before exiting the stage, Pressley wanted to give kids a more robust experience as worshipers and worship leaders—one that would help them grow up to better understand how and why they sing.
Pressley founded KidsCore, a small organization that produces resources for churches that want to cultivate a stronger singing culture, starting with children.
“Lifeway and Brentwood Benson have pared down their music for children’s ministry,” Pressley recalled. “I couldn’t find a curriculum that accomplished what we wanted to do.”
Lifeway discontinued some of its children’s choir products in 2002. The company still produces arrangements of worship songs for kids, as does Brentwood Benson (an old guard Christian publisher based in Franklin, Tennessee), but Pressley was looking for something more than musicals and performance pieces.
Pressley was looking for something specific—a resource that would help children become musicians and worshipers. He wanted a combination of musical and spiritual formation that harnessed the power and fun of music-making to help children participate in the life of the body of Christ.
Starting in 2010, Pressley and a music educator at his church began designing their own program. Over the next decade, Pressley saw the singing culture of his church change completely, beyond what used to be a six-kid children’s choir in a congregation of 750.
“In the past 15 years, kids have learned and grown, and now we have a culture of family singing, where so many more people are interested in making music together.”
KidsCore now has a small team of volunteer musicians and educators who have created arrangements and accompanying curriculum for around 40 songs, new and old. Each song comes with a packet that includes song arrangements, multiple devotional lessons, music lessons covering principles like phrasing and rhythm, and optional activities like coloring pages and word searches.
Songs like “Be Thou My Vision,” “By Faith,” and “Joy to the World” come with pages of material that schools and churches can use to teach the song over the course of days or weeks, using each as a central theme to teach kids about music fundamentals and the Bible.
KidsCore is one of several emerging initiatives across traditions focused on children in worship. In September, the Lilly Endowment announced that it had approved over $104 million in grant funds to 91 organizations and institutions through its Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative.
“Congregational worship and prayer play a critical role in the spiritual growth of children and offer important settings for children to acquire the language of faith, learn their faith traditions and experience the love of God as part of a supportive community,” said Christopher L. Coble, the endowment’s vice president for religion.
Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa, received $1.25 million to fund its “All Kids are Worship Leaders” Initiative.
“We have all of these faith formation programs for kids,” said Jeremy Perigo, one of the initiative’s directors. “But we don’t invite kids to be part of the leading and the planning and the reflection. The Spirit is poured out on all flesh, sons and daughters, children and adults.”
Perigo, a professor of theology and worship arts, said the project team hopes to work with congregations to imagine new ways of letting children lead in their church communities.
“We want to attend to and respect how children experience God,” said Perigo, who added that for some churches, this may require significant and permanent changes.
“Some churches have services that are highly produced and pulpit- or platform-led. They have extremely high expectations of performance. One challenge will be helping those churches create hospitable spaces.”
In many churches, kids spend Sunday morning services in classrooms while adults participate in corporate worship. The logistics of switching to family worship can be daunting, especially when they involve reconfiguring child check-in or dismissal processes. But in the end, those changes can be worth it.
“Over time, we started bringing children into the worship services, and they would help lead and teach the congregational songs,” Pressley said.
The changes around worship practices require some teaching and guidance for the rest of the congregation. When a church is used to children serving only as occasional, cute performers, it can be hard for adults to see them as leaders.
“Children are people. They are not sentimental objects,” said Robin McLaughlin Conine, a K–12 music teacher and composer in Greensboro, North Carolina, who arranges music for KidsCore. “Kids’ music doesn’t have to be fast; it doesn’t have to be synthy and frenetic. Kids love singing slow songs and songs in minor keys.”
Conine and the other musicians who work for KidsCore are selective about the songs they choose, but they try not to focus exclusively on either classic hymns or new praise songs.
“We’re trying to pick songs that seem like they will have staying power,” Conine said.
Pressley said he’s been inspired by Keith and Kristyn Getty’s slogan: “songs to carry for life.” The KidsCore team has arranged several of the Gettys’ modern hymns, including “In Christ Alone” and “Christ Our Hope in Life and Death.”
Kirsten Shive, a worship leader and early childhood educator in Nashville who writes music lessons to accompany KidsCore arrangements, said that kids can and should sing songs with challenging words and melodies, provided the music is beautiful enough to draw them in.
“Kids know the difference between low-quality and high-quality music,” Shive said. “They love hearing and making beautiful music.”
Acknowledging the musical and spiritual capabilities of children is central to KidsCore and Dordt’s “All Kids are Worship Leaders” initiative. Both projects aim to reorient music programming for kids around worship and collaboration, rather than performance. Leaders involved in both recognize that this shift will require some teaching and discipleship around the treatment of children in the church.
“Children are capable of way more than we give them credit for,” Pressley said.
Shive insisted that those capabilities include leadership and spiritual friendship and that children are called to be more than just receivers of information or entertainment.
“There’s an opportunity here for intergenerational discipleship. We can learn from these kids. All of us, children and adults, are called to speak truth to each other.”
Pressley and Perigo both spoke of the positive changes children bring to the dynamic of a worship service by helping adults to take themselves less seriously and focus on the dynamic, relational work of God in the body of Christ. Whether children lead by singing from a platform or by standing side by side with adults, they bring playfulness, wonder, and joy.
“There’s something about an awkward family gathering that children can fix. There’s something children bring that unites us and gives us perspective,” Pressley said. “When kids are around, parents do silly stuff that they wouldn’t do otherwise.”
“There might be some noise, or a microphone drop, or a silly comment during a quiet moment,” Perigo said. “But changing some of our norms will help welcome everyone in the community of faith. It may mean going back and rethinking how we do church.”
