One of the touchstones of healthy family worship is opening the Bible and reading it together as a family. One of the other touchstones of healthy family worship is singing together and worshiping the Lord through music. While these two activities are usually done separately, I am thankful that God has gifted many of His children with the ability to write music that communicates the words of Scripture. This way, families can sing God’s word and learn God’s word at the same time! While you can find many individuals and organizations online who set the words of Scripture to music, one of my absolute favourites is Seeds Family Worship.
Seeds Family Worship was founded in 2004 by a Christian music producer who was asked to write songs for an upcoming VBS at his church. After seeing how much the children loved the songs, and after realizing the remarkable ability for music to help children (and adults!) to remember Scripture, he began to write entire albums of word-for-word Scripture set to music. Today, Seeds Family Worship has produced 15 albums comprising 176 songs in total and have since expanded to provide other family worship resources as well.
Perhaps most wonderfully of all, they offer this music for families to stream online for free. You may—of course—purchase copies of the albums if you are so inclined (and I’m sure they appreciate the business!), but all of these songs have been made available on every major music streaming platform as well as their YouTube channel for families to enjoy without the need for any payment.
If you are anything like me and you grew up attending some form of Sunday school or children’s ministry, you probably don’t remember any of the Scripture you tried to memorize through brute force (if you do, you are part of a rare and special group of people!) However, I can almost guarantee that if I asked you to recite the passages of Scripture you learned though music, you would remember them word for word without any difficulty, even though you may not have thought about them in decades. God has wired our brains to be powerfully affected by music, and our memories to be significantly improved through song. Children’s entertainment producers (and the advertisers associated with them) have known this for as long as children’s entertainment has existed, and we can leverage God’s wonderful gift of music in our own family worship to help sow seeds of Scripture into our children’s hearts that will take root, grow, and flourish for a lifetime.
If you want to check out Seeds Family Worship for yourself, head on over to their YouTube channel (here) and take a look at what they have to offer. Many of the songs also come with actions that make the process of learning Scripture even more fun for your children. And, if you aren’t careful, you may just find yourself learning more than you expected too!
All the best,
Luke
