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Do you think it is weird that I’m telling you not to read this blog? Well, I am.
I want to offer encouragement to those churches and church leaders who still have a robust children’s choir as a part of their ministry program. Keep doing your thing! Don’t roll over and take the ideas from this blog and slide backwards to a smaller program like this blog describes. Keep doing what you’ve been doing to recruit little singers and parent volunteers. Keep writing God’s word on these kids’ hearts.
I have no data to back this up, but I have this gut feeling that there are not as many churches that have robust children’s music programs as there once was. I’m talking about the kind of choir that meets for an extra hour during the week outside of normal Sunday morning worship and Sunday School times and does extensive performances during the year.
When I was young, my home church had a very vibrant children’s choir program. It was an extra hour on Sunday evenings. Parents had to bring their kids back to church for it (shocking!). We did two separate hour-long musicals a year, with costumes and cues and sound effects and cranky dress rehearsals and a script/score purchased by real Christian musical productions houses. There was a real, upright piano on the second floor of the education building where all the children’s classrooms were. There were practice CDs (correction, practice TAPES) that were sent home to each family and there were auditions and budding performers hoping to be cast in their favorite role.
And there were important Gospel truths being taught TO the children and proclaimed BY the children each time they performed.
I have been a part of several churches since I moved away from my home town after I graduated high school, and I think only 1 of the churches I’ve been a part of has had a large children’s choir program like this. I don’t mean this as a knock my former churches, but it seems that as churches prioritize their different programs, a children’s choir ministry might be one of the first things to go.
Why the (perceived?) decline? I have a few ideas.
- With the increase in popularity of “worship teams” fewer churches even still have adult choirs. The concept of a choir simply is not part of the culture. There isn’t a hymnal in sight, which is more “choir-ish” than words projected on a wall above the drummer. So, no little boy or girl is even thinking “I’d like to sing in choir like my mom, or Mr. So-and-So.
- Fewer churches have full-time vocational Music Ministers. The church is more likely to have a cool (and bearded) 25 year old guy who can play guitar and also is in charge of the youth programs. At the end of the day, if a church has a full-time music minister, this man or woman has a full-time job of managing all the music programs of the church and would probably have a children’s choir as part of his job description. Not necessarily leading the nitty gritty operations, but making sure it happened, allocating part of his budget to it, ensuring there was a parent volunteer to lead it, etc.
- More churches are operating out of rented spaces like theaters or commercial buildings where they don’t have the infrastructure for additional programming of this sort. Their discipleship programs are home groups or service projects, etc. Those are all great programs, but are not conducive to really raising up a church load of little singers.
Thanks be to God, my dear home-town church still has a children’s choir program. My sweet mom continues to offer assistance with the annual Christmas program – designing and building the set, procuring costumes, offering the directors constructive criticism during the dress rehearsals, etc. I hope the people leading that sweet choir DO NOT follow this blog. Unless it is to read this bit of encouragement—KEEP GOING!