ɫ��ɫ

Many Christian congregations segregate by age for worship. This helps leaders focus on children’s stages of faith formation but means that generations miss out on learning from each other in worship. Children, youth, and teens may form strong bonds with their teachers and age-mates, yet too many teens graduate from youth worship without ever developing a sense of belonging with the adults worshiping in the main worship space. Instead, they drift away.

“Recent research reinforces the importance of . . . immersive communal experiences for helping children encounter God and grow in faith. Through Lilly Endowment’s (NCWPI), we are encouraging congregations to be more intentional in engaging in worship and prayer practices that more fully nurture the faith of all children as well as adults,” says Christopher L. Coble, Lilly Endowment’s vice president for religion, in a press release on the Endowment's website.

At least three Christian universities are using their Lilly Endowment grants to focus in part on children’s songs and songwriting for children. They are gathering different generations to write songs together; connecting, creating, and training leaders so all ages can sing and pray together; and teaching spiritual disciplines through songs that children can lead in worship with space for adults to chime in.

Though they haven’t completed their grant projects, leaders from Belmont University (Nashville, Tennessee), Baylor University (Waco, Texas), and Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena, California) are producing resources and strategies that you can apply in your church, school, or family context.

Intergenerational songwriting process

“Originally, songwriting was going to be a little piece of our grant. Then we began identifying our charisms,” says , assistant director of Belmont University’s In Every Generation grant.

Because Belmont is in Nashville, a hub of contemporary worship arts, Perez says, “You can’t swing a cat in Nashville without hitting five musicians. ɫ��ɫ a third of Belmont’s 9,500 students are involved in its music-related academic music program. I’m a contemporary worship scholar. , a leader in theology and the arts, used to be a touring musician, still plays music, and is our grant’s principal investigator. , formerly with Integrity Music and the band Caedmon’s Call (among other roles), acts as our project manager and is connecting us to musicians in Nashville.

“Churches that do contemporary worship value the idea that God is giving us a new song,” Perez explains. “It’s in their church-growth DNA to segregate worship by age to share faith more quickly and efficiently. Many churches do music from the . They tend to choose Kidz Bop-style songs from groups like Elevation Kids or Hillsong Kids for their children and youth ministry. There’s often not much attention to cultivating intergenerational relationships.”

Guthrie often describes . Belmont decided to center its grant on including children in worship and building intergenerational relationships through the process of writing songs for children together. Perez calls it “uncharted territory.”

Belmont’s first initiative, The Friendship Project, has invited about thirty Nashville musicians at a time to its . At the camp, groups of writers were assigned prompts such asscripture verses, theological topics, and church occasions such as opening songs for worship, baptism, or sending someone off to a new school.

Musicians range in age from college students eager and honored to learn from seasoned musicians to veteran songwriters worried that their music might be seen as passé. Attendees also represent diverse genders and ethnicities, and only about half have a contemporary worship background. “It’s Nashville,” Perez says, “so we also get songwriters who do country, blues, gospel, or indie. Only a handful already had experience writing for kids.”

One early highlight was hearing from a 70-year-old white man and a Black woman in her 20s. “They were both crying as they talked about how meaningful it was to reflect on their prompt together as they got ready to write a children’s song together,” Perez says.

Musicians shared everything from rough songs and simple choruses to polished complete pieces. “Some songs highlight friendship but not specifically intergenerational friendship,” Perez says. “Songs work best when they aren’t too on-the-nose with the topic.”

Project leaders will choose which songs to record and then release for free. They’re also compiling resources to help churches reflect together on songs and host intergenerational songwriting events.

“We believe it’s important for the whole church to voice faith together; it’s also true that generations have different music preferences and cultural norms about worship,” Perez says. “Having a diversity of songs helps us connect to a bigger world outside ourselves. As long as we keep attending to how music forms us as a community, we can reflect on whether our strategies are successful or not. We can nurture hospitality and charity so that each generation appreciates and is sensitive to other generations’ cultures and gifts.”

As long as we keep attending to how music forms us as a community, we can reflect on whether our strategies are successful or not.

Themes to transform music ministry

, a church music expert at Baylor University, is co-principal investigator of The Dunn Center for Christian Music Studies’ . When she and co-principal investigator applied for the grant, they planned to work with church music faculty and staff to identify and explore ways of nurturing children in worship and prayer beyond the children’s choir model.

The grant outcome will include a scholarly book and a practitioner book. The grant began by surveying more than two hundred denominations and churches across urban, suburban, and rural areas in Texas. It also hosted events to form learning communities across the state.

“Our process is to connect, create, and train,” Monteiro explains. “We connect current church leaders, the practitioner-writer cohort, children’s ministry practitioners, and theologians. We create inclusive scholarly and church music resources to integrate children into the congregation’s liturgical life. And we train leaders to shape young worshipers.

“We identified seven themes for transforming music ministry, such as spiritual formation, developing musical skills, and including children with disabilities,” Monteiro adds. “People started asking for a curriculum about choosing music and identifying songs related to the themes. So, though children’s songs weren’t specifically in our application, it has become important in our grant, now named .”

People have shared stories about the connection between early spiritual formation and music at learning community events and at the , Baylor’s annual music and worship leadership conference. “One woman talked about coming from a dysfunctional family. She found God through singing hymns,” Monteiro says. “So many people remember learning hymns from grandparents. But it’s not just the notes and words or musical style that make a difference. It’s the context, experience, and memory of singing and praying together across generations.

“Our learning community members come from churches with all kinds of models about including or segregating children in worship. Everyone is welcome and we all see and learn from each other,” Monteiro continues. “I am music director at (First Mexican Baptist Church) in San Antonio. Our bilingual congregation already values intergenerational involvement, so I often share the benefits of avoiding age segregation in worship. Our congregation’s children speak mostly English, but I’ve taught them songs and refrains in Spanish so they can sing together with adult Spanish speakers.”

Before COVID-19, , who teaches music education at Baylor, offered free weekly for Waco-area youth (grades 1-12) with special needs. (Baylor’s mascot is a bear; oso is Spanish for bear.) “Our grant has provided money to hire an administrator to revive Oso Musical, which matches Baylor students with those with special needs,” Monteiro says. “It is spiritually transforming to learn that children don’t have to be able to read to learn music or lead adults in worship. Movement in song can be healthy.

“We’re also learning that seminarians don’t necessarily engage with children’s education and—even less likely—children’s music education. So we are strategically incorporating revised content into the church music curriculum,” Monteiro says.

Nurturing arts-based spiritual practices through four song templates

“Our recent survey of some mainline, evangelical, and nondenominational churches showed that, in many congregations, children and youth are so isolated from the worship life of their churches. And there are statistics showing that many youth leave the church after age 18,” says, who directs the Brehm Center–Fuller Theological Seminary’s NCWPI grant, .

“Our grant goal is clear: to cultivate children’s holistic engagement in the worship life of the church and family,” Willmington explains. “We are focusing on ages 6 through 12. Our method is to equip diverse ministry leaders, artists, congregations, and parents with arts-based resources that will nurture intergenerational worship through nine spiritual practices, such as celebration, worship, and wisdom. We’re creating an in five formative categories: theology, word, arts, song, and embodiment.”

For song, Imagining ɫ��ɫ with Kids is creating music in four templates of varying complexity. 

• Responsorial/echo songs, such as “,” are easy to learn and use in family worship at home.
• New worship songs for kids, such as “” have just enough rhythmic difficulty to be interesting yet manageable. 
• Hymn-based arrangements of “” and “” include options to add SATB adult voices and instruments and provide opportunities for children to lead the congregation in song. 
• Choral anthems such as “” (which riffs on a and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”) and “” work well in church and school choirs where kids have enough time to rehearse.

“Our goal is to create fifty to sixty songs with universal appeal and from different cultures,” Willmington says. “So far I’ve been working with African, Korean, Hispanic, and African American former students and church friends who compose and arrange music. The grant project has commissioned people to create

resources from other arts, such as visual arts and a storybook for each spiritual practice. We’ve already produced one album, , and my grant spreadsheet for song alone is huge.”

Willmington’s long résumé includes teaching graduate level music and worship courses; composing, arranging, and publishing choral and instrumental music; and serving in local church pastoral worship leadership. His home congregation, the historic in Pasadena, worships intergenerationally one Sunday per month. “We’ve learned that we need to welcome kids to worship better than we have historically,” he says. “Singing together is a way to do that. It’s also important for kids to lead in worship. At our album launch event, the sang ‘.’ We had kids go into the aisles and stretch their hands in blessing as they sang. The adults sang back and stretched their hands in blessing toward the children. No rehearsal was necessary. The moment gave me chills.”

Describing the grant project as “an arts-based add-on to other curricula,” Willmington explains, “We hope these resources create conversations among senior pastors, worship pastors, music directors, and children’s ministers. We also hope these resources will ‘leak’ back and forth between families, churches, and schools.”