No summer of my childhood would have been complete without Vacation Bible School. Wafer cookies wrapped in a napkin, styrofoam cups filled with Kool-Aid, crafts in the church basement, and memory work competitions that drove me to spend every afternoon of the week cramming Bible verses into my brain so I could win a trophy and beat my classmates for the most Bible verses memorized. (Probably not the best motivation for learning God’s Word, but hey, it worked. I definitely stored up His Word in my heart.)
Another favorite part of Vacation Bible School was the music, so when we started planning our nursing home Vacation Bible School, I was super excited but also conscientious about what songs we would sing. I wanted to sing “children’s songs” as opposed to hymns. We normally sing hymns each Sunday at the nursing home but I wanted our week to have a real throw-back feeling of Vacation Bible School. I was also a little concerned that the residents might not want to sing children’s songs. I always try to be super mindful of never treating them like children, so I wondered if singing songs and doing the hand motions would make them feel infantilized. To my surprise, they loved it! They sang with enthusiasm and joy. Even residents who don’t normally participate tried to do the hand motions.
I wonder what has happened to those songs I grew up with. Similar to the singing of hymns, the trend in children’s music seems to be to leave behind the “old” songs. Instead of singing “Deep and Wide,” many church kids today are singing “adult” praise choruses which have been altered by children’s ministry bands so that they sound more youthful. When I was a child in Sunday school, the teacher led the songs a capella–there wasn’t a cd (ok, a tape) playing with accompanying instruments and voices. Of course there’s nothing wrong with using a cd for children’s worship, but what has happened that has made us think we can’t just keep it simple and sing with only our voices? I confess I have a hard time with this at the nursing home. Often a resident will request that we sing a particular song and if we don’t have the music for it, I usually suggest a different song. The residents always insist, “Well we can sing it a cappella!” And then I start to wonder about how I’m going to sound.
Perhaps that is one reason for the change. In many churches’ “adult” worship, we have bands leading us who are always quite talented. We’ve gotten used to relying on them to fill in some of the awkwardness we feel when we try to sing without the accompaniment of instruments. “If people can hear me sing, what will they think?” Maybe we’ve forgotten that we’re not really singing for the approval of the people around us.
I believe another reason for the shift away from the older, simplistic children’s songs is that many people think their lyrics don’t contain very sound theology. Now, on this point, I will agree. One example is a song we sang at VBS as a kid called “Oh You Can’t Get to Heaven.” The verses are all silly like, “You can’t get to heaven on roller skates…cause you’d roll right by those pearly gates,” or “You can’t get to heaven in a limousine…cause the Lord don’t sell no gasoline.” (Bad grammar in addition to weak theology–though true, in fact!) What made that song fun to sing? It had a repetitive nature which made it easy to sing along with because the leader sang a line and then the crowd repeated it. It was fun to be in the sanctuary where we normally sang grown up, more formal songs, to be singing something that we all knew was obviously silly! Yet songs like that filled the sanctuary with such great joy! Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 18:3) The context for this statement was that the disciples had just asked Jesus who was the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus is making a point that a childlike faith is one that doesn’t aim for prestige or greatness; it’s faith that is humble, teachable, grateful, and joyful.
I love to watch the nursing home residents as we sing “Amazing Grace” and “‘l’ll Fly Away.” You can see the joy on their faces as they long for their heavenly home. There’s a subtly different kind of joy with the simple children’s songs. Maybe it’s the freedom we feel to be a bit undignified, the permission those songs automatically give us to be a little more uninhibited with our praise. For some of us, those songs invoke happy memories of childhood or of the days when we were raising young children. That, in turn, puts a smile on our face as we think back to those days when perhaps we felt more secure and when life was less complicated.
The Sunday after our Vacation Bible School, one of our residents asked if we could sing “The Arky Arky Song” (aka “Rise and Shine”) after our hymns. Despite knowing we didn’t have the music for it that day, I smiled and said, “Sure! Let’s sing it a cappella!” And we all sang with excited smiles on our faces. In fact, just this past Sunday the residents seemed quiet and a little down. There weren’t many of us in the dining room because many of our friends were sick. We sang a few hymns, and then I said, “Let’s sing “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” They perked right up, sang along, and did the motions with enthusiasm. We even ended our afternoon with a resident singing a solo (a capella of course) of a song he made up, asking God to bless us.
So I’m working on being willing to just burst forth in song whether I have accompaniment or not. Our songs of praise don’t have to be polished; they just have to be sincere. They don’t have to be in tune; they just have to be a joyful noise. They don’t always need to have deep theology in the lyrics; they just have to be full of praise, or gratitude, or even lament that is the overflow of a heart that cries out to God honestly and purely.
(And on a completely random side note, I cannot even type the word “a capella” without thinking about a scene in The Andy Griffith Show where Barney was poking fun at someone because they didn’t know how to sing “a cappella.” When Andy asked Barney if he could sing a capella, Barney sang, “A capella, a capella….” to a tune he created on the spot. Makes me laugh every single time!)
