December 9, 1998 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - For some strange reason, many churches and families who take a stand against Contemporary Christian Music in general allow their children to be subjected to music with a heavy beat or worldly syncopation or incredibly shallow, even unscriptural lyrics. Not only is this inconsistent, it is dangerous for the spiritual well-being of the child. If children are weaned on a diet of "Nashville" syncopation it is only reasonable to assume they will desire even heavier types of such music as they grow older. Also, if children are weaned on music with shallow, even unscriptural lyrics, how will they ever discern between truth and error in music?

Note the following very important comments by men who have studied the effects of music:

"If you raise your child on seemingly innocent but worldly jingle sounding music they will have a definite thirst for the CCM sound when they become a teenager. You won't be able to say, Oh, now that you're older let me teach you what good music is all about. It will be too late. You need to give them a standard of excellence and spirituality from their earliest years" (David G. Parker, Music in Our Contemporary Christian Culture, 1997).

"If we teach our children only choruses and do not give equal weight to the strong, meaty hymns of the Faith, we may be spiritually damaging their generation. To intimidate these hymns of the Faith by saying 'they are too deep and way over the heads of our young people' is to say we have a better way of producing a Christian than our forefathers had. Children of earlier days had their spiritual teeth cut on those hymns, and such music became the bedrock for building mature, godly lives. Such weakness reminds me of a sixteen-year-old young man whom I saw in a church service one Sunday morning bringing a 'cartoon' Bible which had been published by the Jimmy Swaggart ministries. When I casually asked him about it, he said this was the only Bible he understood. And yet, he was born in a Christian home and attended church all of his life. Cartoon scripts used as a method for telling Bible stories may have a place from time to time with a child, but it can never take the place of the Bible itself. If it does, it will plant in the child's mind, 'My parents have their Bible and I have my own.' No, the Bible was given by God for all ages; it is the one book for all generations. Even so, we never want chorus singing to take the place of hymn singing, for the child will unconsciously think the hymns are more for the adults. This may be a growing problem with the concept of 'Children's Church' on Sunday morning: it splits up the family in worship before God, and tends to imply to the child that they are too young for the worship in the sanctuary" (Dr. H.T. Spence, Confronting Contemporary Christian Music, p. 144).

The key to the problem of children's music is the parents and the youth leaders. We must be praying and thinking about the music our children listen to. All too often we don't give serious thought to these matters. There are many questions we should be asking ourselves: Is the rhythm contemporary-sounding? Will it create in the children an appetite for worldly music? Are the lyrics scriptural? Are the lyrics honoring to a holy God? Are they teaching the children to be serious about the things of God? Is this music edifying the children spiritually, or is it merely entertaining them? The Bible says we are to use music to teach and admonish (Col. 3:16).