We are not a musical family. We try to be. Different ones of us poke around on various instruments, but let’s be honest, we’re nothing special. Yet despite not rivaling the Family von Trapp in any way, we sing together as a family almost every evening in worship.
As I wrote in an earlier post about how we stumbled into family worship, we haven’t always included singing as part of our family’s worship times. For a long time, we just read a Bible story and prayed. This all changed for us when Keith and Kristyn Getty released their album Facing a Task Unfinished. Josh was excited about this new album, and really wanted us to learn the songs together.
Up until that point, we’d always done family worship in the boys’ room. The kids would all sit on one bed, and whichever parent was reading the story would sit a couple of feet away from them on the other bed in the boys’ small room. We started out by trying to pull up the lyrics on a laptop and playing the song from it. This was before we realized that YouTube had lyric videos or Apple Music even existed. We would search for the lyrics online and have them up on the screen while we sang. This would probably work out fine for a smaller family, but we have a lot of kids, and it was hard for all of us to gather around the small laptop screen.
So we moved our family worship to the living room and began to use our Google Chromecast device to cast the lyrics to our larger TV screen. And thus began family worship the way we’ve known it for several years, although we now mostly use YouTube lyric videos.
Singing is obviously not a required part of family worship, but it is one that we really enjoy. Just as when we gather with the larger family of God for church, singing about God’s goodness, sovereignty, love, and mission in the world is a great way to focus our minds and prepare our hearts to receive his Word.
Our family prefers the richness of hymns, which includes both old and new hymns. We lean heavily toward artists who sing the old hymns we know and love (like Audrey Assad), or who put old hymns to new music (like Indelible Grace), or others who write new hymns (like Keith & Kristyn Getty, Matt Boswell, and CityAlight).
I don’t personally believe kids are ever too young to start learning hymns, but if your kids are younger, they might be more engaged with some songs just for their age group. The Gettys have some great kids hymnal albums (linked here, here, and here on Apple Music), and we’re also big fans of Seeds Family Worship, which puts scripture to catchy tunes for all ages to memorize. Many Seeds songs also have videos with hand motions to go along with the songs, which our kids really loved when they were younger.
We’ve created a few playlists for anyone who may be looking for some inspiration for your family worship time. These are just a sample of some of the many songs we love, and not at all an exhaustive list! We will add to these lists occasionally as we feel the need. You can find our family worship playlist on:
We hope these songs bless your family as much as they have blessed ours!
