Did you know that you can get a rocking kids music, split-tracks, and lead sheets from CBC Music’s online store?
Developing, maintaining, and promoting awareness of the music available from our Kids Choir has filled every spare second of my work time for the last several months. I have immersed myself in Facebook ads, search optimization techniques, flash media players, online shopping baskets…if it involves an online store or social media, I’ve probably done some sort of research on it.
You see, over the years here at CBC, we have completely changed the way we thought about how to run a kids choir program. Part of it was thinking intentionally – from almost the beginning, we have had our kids choir divided into two (now three) separate choirs. Clearly, what works for a kindergarten class will not translate to a sixth grader. Not to mention that at some point, you run out of a place large enough to hold your whole choir at once. Each group has programming targeted specifically to their needs, but tied together with one vision – to teach kids about worship. Not to teach kids about music, but about worship.
Part of it was necessity – we simply had too many children enrolled for the typical “program-in-a-box” curriculum to work for us. When you have 600+ kids enrolled, it isn’t economically feasible to do crafts that cost $1/child each week. It is logistically impossible to play the suggested games or do the class activities geared to work in a program with 25-30 kids.
But I would say the biggest factor in creating our current system is vision. From our Senior Pastor, who allows our kids the privilege of being worship leaders in “big church” and not performers…on down to every staff member, past and present, who share a passion in raising up a generation of worshippers. A big part of that is being able to meet kids where they are – creating music that is reminiscent of what they are hearing on the secular radio by listening to Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga ourselves; choosing songs for our middle group that are easy enough to let them have the freedom to have fun in worship, but aren’t “baby” songs; allowing our tiniest group to choose friends to be in their classrooms so they feel comfortable in what might be their first extra-curricular activity.
As you might guess, finding music to fill all of those needs is challenging. For our younger groups, we still use existing music for the most part. Typically, we pick a yearly theme, choose songs from different projects, and write our own curriculum to build a semester. That works really well until about 2nd grade. For our older elementary choir, it’s not just the curriculum that is custom-designed…about 50-75% of the songs that they learn are CBC originals. 100% of the songs have been rearranged and re-tracked to sound fresh and relevant to music they hear every day. Sometimes we add raps written by one of our staff members. We’ve done a mash-up of two different songs. We let the soloists ad lib (to a certain extent). We are constantly trying to find ways to help engage kids in worship by creating music they want to sing. We don’t want to teach a child a song for a few months. We want them to hide those words in their heart for a lifetime.
Out of this mindset, a lot of music was born. We know there are other churches out there that have similar needs, so we are trying our hardest to get resources online and get the word out. I hope you enjoy the fruits of our prayer, passion, and time by visiting us at http://www.cbcmusicstore.com and getting some great kids music. And pass the word along.