Seeing the church service through a child’s eyes. How child-friendly are your songs?

I’m pretty good with melodies and recalling those.

I’m really bad at remembering lyrics. I tend to only remember a single line from a song that I repeat (which drives my family mad) or I sing my own version of the words which scan well in the tune but bear no resemblance to what’s actually being sung.

But I love words. Reading, writing and language is a great joy to me, so in spite of my terrible memory I pay attention to and often appreciate lyrics.

Over lunch recently, with no context, one of my sons said, “Mum, who was in the fire last week. And where was the fire, I didn’t see it”.

I had no idea what he meant, but an understanding that ‘last week’ simply refers to anytime in the past and a little bit more conversation where I tried desperately to understand what he meant, helped me realise he was referring to the lyrics of a song he’d heard at church.

There was another in the fire standing next to me

I love this song. The story in the Bible that it references is a powerful picture of the presence of God with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego IN the fire.

But for a five year old boy who doesn’t yet know the story, hearing grown-ups singing about people in fire was quite confusing.

I grew up in church and I remember singing the hymn ‘Crown Him with many crowns’, and I loved and appreciated the poetry of the lyrics which told me that God is the ‘creator of the rolling spheres’ and is ‘ineffably sublime’ but I had no idea what they meant!

Growing up, after someone in church read a part of the bible out loud, they would finish with the words ‘this is the word of the Lord’ to which the congregation would reply ‘thanks be to God’. I’m embarrassed by how old I was before I realised that the words we replied with were not ‘thanks Peter God’…