Going Beyond Fun, Trendy, and Upbeat

How We should Stop Making Our Kids Sing

In June of 2024, I published a paper in the open access journal Religions about how children’s worship is more focused on making sure the kids have fun instead of focusing on whether the kids are worshiping. As I wrote in my introduction,

To look at how fun was preferenced over worship, I looked at the online materials (videos, posts, blogs, social media) of four churches, Hillsong, Passion, Elevation, and Bethel. I found that for these four churches fun was more important than worship, due to the way that worship was framed.

It might sound like I’m being a kill-joy, but worship designed for childern should let the children express the fullness of their feelings. I have been saying the same thing about adult worship on this Substack.

The Real Reason for this Post

I was sitting at my desk today and got a notification that the article I discussed above was cited in a recently published article. I clicked the link thinking that it would just be a quick citation acknowledging that they read the paper but had nothing to really say about it. But that was not the case.

As I started to read Laura Benjamins and Anneli Loepp Thiessen’s article, “Fun, Trendy, Upbeat: Musical Tastes, Social Conditioning, and Contemporary Worship Music for Kids,” I was deeply honored that they took my research to a whole new level and drew out some insights that I was not able to. They write that

And they live up to their promise of building upon my work. They took a look at the music videos of Bethel’s “Ever Be", Rend Collective’s “My Lighthouse”, and Hillsong’s “Who You Say I am” cateloging the differences between the adult versions and the children’s versions. They conclude

I do not want to spoil any more of the article, so go read it. Find more of their work, as they are both doing great things. I wanted to highlight their research, and hopefully widen their audience.

(As a bonus, they throw in a citation for my 2022 paper “Over-Generalizing, Under-Promising, and Over-Promising: Singing Sadness and Joy in the Church” where I discuss how sadness and joy are represented in the top 25 CCLI songs from 1988-2018)