Cultivating Worship for Every Generation

Today, I'm excited to have Yancy share an article with you. Yancy is a long-time friend and is a worship leader and songwriter for kids and families. She travels the globe doing family concerts and training worship leaders. Her worship resources for kids include the popular series: “Little Praise Party” and “Kidmin Worship."

“Heartbeat” is a new, 5-week curriculum series from Yancy that teaches kids about worship. It is available at YancyMinistries.com/Heartbeat.

In the following article, Yancy shares how to develop a heart of worship in the kids and parents in your church.

I believe an active mission of every church should be to help believers become who God created them to be. One of the things that God created all of us to be is a worshiper. Worshiping God is one of our greatest purposes. Although a lot of churches check the box of worship off the list each week, I feel there is still a lot left to be desired in how we are leading others to encounter the presence of Jesus during our times of worship when they gather. I have a burden to help teach this generation so they can understand why we worship God and what that looks like in their life.

I know that many of you who are reading this are involved in adult worship. I want to invite you to think about how your church is raising Christ followers up to be the worshipers that God intends for them to be? As a young child, preteen or student how are they experiencing God’s presence and growing in their expression of worship? One thing I’ve noticed when ministries work as silos, as opposed to with a strategy and mission, is that worship happens all over the map. You could have one age group that has great worship where people are engaged and then another age group that has weak leadership and let’s be honest, a major disconnect.

Worship is happening at various speeds and levels of intentionality because there’s no overall vision of the house for worship. Because of your role and position in your church I want to invite you as children’s ministry leaders to start a conversation with your Worship Leader/Pastor/Director and student ministry pastor. Go to lunch or grab coffee and start dreaming about what worship can look like for your church. This could be the beginning of an ongoing relationship and solution in which you can all dream and work together to raise up worshipers within your church. Have you ever stopped to ask your Pastoral leadership what kind of worshiper you want adults in your congregation to be? One of the ways you can accomplish seeing that vision come to pass is by starting the process in the preschool ministry of your church, and then building upon that foundation in the elementary ministry. It doesn’t end there, the roots can grow deeper as a preteen and middle-schooler and the impact spans even greater as a high school student. A wise friend of mine once shared with me: "Teaching kids to worship is not the issue. They know how to worship. Directing their worship to Jesus is the issue. Help them put God first." I believe over the span of one generation you can completely change the way that worship is cultivated within the life of your congregation. The possibility of results of this effort is to have men and women that understand that worship is a communication tool in responding to God. What a win! I want to cultivate in the hearts of God’s people that there is safety in His presence.