Podcast: Singing Is for Everyone and Every Day (Kristyn Getty)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

In this episode Kristyn Getty talks about her new book We Sing!, which teaches kids that singing is for everyday, for everyone, and forever. Kristyn discusses how singing shapes children's wellbeing, as well as her own practical methods for teaching her own children to sing so they have songs to carry with them through their whole lives.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• The Importance of Singing Together as a Family
• Songs to Help Families Through Difficult Times
• Practical Ways to Incorporate Singing into Daily Life

00:38 - The Importance of Singing Together as a Family

Matt Tully
Kristyn Getty is an author and Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter. She and her husband, Keith, co-founded the Getty Music Organization, which is dedicated to helping people learn the truths of the Bible through singing hymns that they can carry for a lifetime. Kristyn’s newest book is We Sing!: Teaching Kids to Praise God with Heart and Voice from Crossway. Kristyn, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Kristyn Getty
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
You and your husband, Keith, have spent years helping the church to sing together. You’ve written hymns, you’ve led conferences, you’ve sung and performed around the world. But now with this new picture book that you’ve written, We Sing!, you’re trying to help kids and families to see that singing together isn’t just for Sunday mornings. To start us out, can you just summarize why singing together is so important for everyday family life?

Kristyn Getty
One of the things that I like to tell my kids and other children who I get to chat to you about these things is that singing is for everyday, singing is for everyone, and singing is forever. That’s the hope of heaven, that all nations through all of time join this great angel chorus to bring their praises to our Savior. That is the big hope that we have outlined to us in the Scriptures. And all the way through the Bible, of course, we see this pattern that God’s people are a people who sing. And it’s not just for the grownups amongst us; it’s for families, it’s for children. I think it is a way in which God has created to enable us to praise him. Of course, we’re created to worship and praise the Creator, and music is a way we do that. So we do it in such a way that we wish to honor him, of course, and primarily worship him. But I also think that God instructs us to do all these wonderful things that are good for us. And I think when we sing together, we remember things in a special way when. When we sing congregationally, there is a togetherness there which helps us understand what it means to walk through this life together. We share the same breath, the same melody line, the same text. It binds us together. And I think it’s also a wonderful way for us to communicate our faith to others. It sort of captures ideas, thoughts, images, Bible verses in this musical language that can then communicate great things to all of us within the churches who are gathered but also to those who are watching on trying to figure out what do these people believe? Who is the God of the Bible? What is the gospel? So I think music is this incredible gift that we get to unwrap for ourselves but also get to have the privilege of helping our children unwrap the gift that it is.

Matt Tully
I’m just struck that for many of us—those of us who are in solid, Bible-believing churches that value God’s word, value theology, value singing, even singing the great hymns of our faith—we can kind of know all of those benefits for us in the context of the church’s worship, but sometimes we can not think about those benefits in the context of our homes with our own families. I wonder for you, Kristyn, as you think back on your childhood, was singing in the home an important thing that you all did together? Are there any particular memories that you have of moments or songs that you would say really shaped you from a young age?

Kristyn Getty
One of the things my parents did is they would play a lot of music in the car. A lot of our journeys to skill in the morning were filled with songs of the Lord. And that was a huge help in setting up the mind and the heart for the day ahead. And I have lots of memories with that. My dad was a church planter just north of Belfast, and so that church began in people’s homes and then moved into other spaces, and so there was always a musical component that followed the growing of that church, which was great. But my mom was also involved in the children’s ministry, and so me and my sister were roped into those sorts of things. And so my other early memories are standing up and doing motions with her and being part of the leadership for the younger kids. And then with my great grandmother (I was so tiny when this happened), her favorite hymn was “When I Survey,” and my mom said that she used to sing this to me while she would hold me in her arms. And that’s just such a lovely thing—those sorts of thoughts, those ideas, her prayers for me. So that’s a beautiful thing too.

Matt Tully
That’s the amazing thing about songs, and hymns in particular, is that most songs are, effectively, prayers to the Lord, and so to be able to pray the same prayers that countless Christians across generations and cultures have all sung, is just something really special. And maybe when it’s your own family, you can kind of start to feel the specialness of singing those same songs.

Kristyn Getty
Absolutely. My husband and I have been writing songs for the church for the last twenty-five years, but as other people have said before, we believe very strongly that for every new song you introduce that you are singing several old songs alongside that, because there is tremendous wisdom in those songs. There’s that experience aspect, which you’ve said, but also these songs have been tried and tested over generations, and you’re just always looking for what is the best song that says the best things. And most of those things are timeless.

Matt Tully
One of the things that I really love about this book is it’s a picture book for kids, and the illustrations are just amazing. How would you describe the illustrations? It’s kind of hard to put it to words.

Kristyn Getty
I know. It’s what my seven-year-old would love. It’s as if somebody with paper and scissors and glue and paint has had a lot of fun putting these things together. And so I love that sort of organic feel to the idea it’s made that particular way, and that she’s captured so much personality in all the little faces and characters. It’s amazing.

Matt Tully
It’s beautiful. One of the things that I love about the book is how you acknowledge, in the beautiful rhyming cadence of the book, that singing together as a family isn’t always easy. And one of the spreads in the book admits that while some kids love to sing, others are “scared to make a sound.” When you think about your own home and the things that have worked well with your girls, or maybe not so well with your girls, what stands out to you? How have you seen that play out in your own family’s life?

Kristyn Getty
I think for my poor children, sometimes they’re exposed to it even more. Why were we put in a family where they are talking about sing, sing, sing, sing, sing all the time? So, they’re very honest with us, as kids tend to be. One of the things that I cared so much about with the children was whether you love singing, whether you are really good at it (and everyone’s different in how they approach that), or whether it’s your favorite thing at all, to understand singing is not the same as learning to play cello. It’s not the same as being a great soccer player. It’s not the same as I like chocolate, but I prefer to have salty snacks. There are lots of things in our life which have a preference and we lean one way or the other, and it’s not a big deal which way we lean, in one way or the other. And often we look at singing as being, Oh, you’re a musical person, therefore, singing comes under that category of person. I’m not that person. And I think some of our contemporary culture encourages that: This is for the special few that can have a microphone. But when we look at the sort of spiritual education and well-being of our children, that we actually put singing amongst things like prayer, studying God’s word, and other things that we all will do as part of what it means to be God’s people. Because that’s what singing is. In the Bible, of course, there are moments when you see skilled singers who are to lead the people in singing. So not everybody is skilled, but everybody is “the people” joined together with whatever voice God has given you. And so to grow up with that sort of mindset of, This is what we do. It’s a gift. My voice may not be great, but when my voice is added to yours, added to yours, added to yours, added to yours, then some of the times that we don’t sound so good can be a little more hidden. But together, the overall sound is we’re the same melody, we’re learning and saying the same thing. We’re saying “thank you” together. And this is one of the ways God has given us to do that. So to me, taking it from a special activity to an everybody activity was part of the heart behind the book in that way. And so I’ve tried to, with my own kids I say, Obviously, I love to sing, girls, and I record and I’m in front of a microphone, but the singing I want to talk to you about is completely different. It’s about learning these hymns together. We have a hymn a month that we do with the girls. This month we’re actually doing one of Matt Boswell’s new songs that we got to work on with them called “High and Holy Privilege.” We just shared it a couple weeks ago, and so that’s our hymn of the month. And so I have it on a little chalkboard above the area where we have breakfast. Yesterday on the way to school, I played it through a couple times. Last night I played it. And this is not me singing it. I’m just playing it on my phone as they go to sleep.

Matt Tully
This is a helpful moment, too, that when you say that you played it for your girls, you just pulled out your phone and hit play on Spotify.

Kristyn Getty
I did, yeah.

Matt Tully
It’s good to know that’s allowed.

Kristyn Getty
It’s the easiest way. Our phones can bring so much trouble to our lives, but goodness me, they can bring so many good things too. And that’s one of them—playing songs and playing music of the Lord in the spaces where life matters. Some months I’m better at this. I’ve been doing this hymn-of-the-month thing since Eliza was about four-years-old, and she’s fourteen now. Some months I’m great at this, and other months I’m like, Oh, that wasn’t such a great month. And that’s the thing I’d also love to say is I’ve been a mother now for fourteen years, and I have heard so many pieces of advice and read so many things. I’m sort of at that middle point where you have the overload of information and then there’s a million ways to feel guilty all the time of the things you’re not doing. But I do see this singing thing as low-hanging fruit. This is not a big, big push where your kids need able to stand up and 100 hymns word for word. That’s not what this is, because eventually, they take it on themselves and they’re reading the text like everybody else. So my goal every month is to find touch points in the month where I can talk about what the song means or play the song enough times that they become familiar with the melody. And when I hear them in the back coming along, or they’re playing with their dolls and they’re singing a little bit of it, I’m like, Done. Job’s done. We’ve planted the seed. I just try and get them into a rotation, and I’m just trying to encourage their little voices so that when they stand in church on Sunday, they’re part of it and they don’t feel so much on the outside. And it’s just the beginning of a journey of trying to encourage them to have songs they can carry for all of their life.

Matt Tully
I think I can speak for all of our listeners that it’s encouraging—maybe oddly encouraging—to hear that the Getty family sometimes struggles to sing together.

Kristyn Getty
Sometimes? We try.

Matt Tully
It’s such a helpful way to reframe it. You’re right that so often the way we think of singing—any kind of making music, but especially singing—we think of it in the professional sense, which we’re also familiar with. That’s what we’re listening to on our phones oftentimes. And yet there is something fundamentally Christian about singing to the Lord that doesn’t need to be reserved for people who have this amazing talent or ability. I think that could be freeing to many of us who don’t feel quite as talented. Another benefit of singing together as a family that you highlight in this book is that our songs can really teach us the truth, teach us the gospel, remind us of the things that we need to know about the Lord and that he’s revealed to us in his word. I wonder if you could just unpack that a little bit. Sometimes we can think of singing as primarily honoring and praising God, which it is certainly is that, but there’s this shaping and formative aspect as well to our singing. How does that come into play in your mind when you think about your kids?

Kristyn Getty
If we look at the song book of the Bible, the book of Psalms, there are so many that provide historical narrative just within them, that go through the big story. And these are songs to be sung to remember them so we don’t forget them. In Deuteronomy 31, after the law is being conveyed to the children of Israel, God gives Moses a song. He said teach the people this song so it will be a testimony against them in that. Once they sing this, and they sing it over and over again, they’re showing that they know it to be true because it’s stuck inside them. And so they cannot say, We didn’t know. We didn’t know. No, you did. The song that you sang showed that you did know this truth. So there are lots of little elements in the Scriptures that just show how the singing of truth interact with what we believe, how we feel and think about things, what we remember. And so the same is true for our kids. I think we want them to know the truths of Scripture for generations—and this is not a new idea—and you remember them through singing them. We all learned Scripture verses when we were little through songs. My kids have learned the capitals of the states and the state songs. I’ve learned so much through these little songs, being an Irish person and raising American kids. They’ve learned them through singing, and so it’s utilizing that. A recent example, which is just blowing me away, is that Keith, my husband, had a much more traditional hymn-singing upbringing than I would’ve done. Obviously, this hymnal that we’ve done with Crossway has been a centerpiece of so much of the writing efforts but also the curation of hymns and songs that we love. And it’s been amazing watching hymn over this process just being able to speak out all of these lyrics because of songs that he learned as a little boy. It’s beautiful poetry. It’s not just, Oh, that’s Romans 1. It’s beautifully crafted poetry and imagery that is so evocative, imaginative, and beautiful. And that’s all in his mind and his heart as he understands all these different topics, which of course is what a hymnal helps us. It spreads the songs out so you can see how they plug in to themes and different parts of the service in different times of the year. And you just get this sense of breadth of subjects and ideas. And if you’re singing all those and you sit back and you go, Gosh, if I have a good mind of these songs I knew and my kids knew, that’s a lot of biblical truth that is now being hidden in the heart because it’s been sung in a good way. And so I think it’s just an exciting opportunity. I hope that the hymns that my girls have learned, and even just as it just goes with them even if they don’t know all the words, that what they do know becomes an access point. They can go find out more of that hymn, learn more about it themselves. It begins them on that journey that we talked about a little bit ago.

Matt Tully
And that’s the thing that I think is good for us to remember as parents is that this investment in singing and the time that we spend singing with our kids, we might not in the moment see the benefit of that or feel the benefit quite like we wish we would sometimes. It might not go so smoothly, where we have this sense of, This is a glorious moment. But this is filing away in their minds these truths, these things that they can hold onto for the rest of their life. We have no idea how God might bring that to mind.

Kristyn Getty
Exactly. And having that sort of depth and breadth, how it’s then shaping what they think about God, and that’s why it’s important to sort of reach out widely and deeply so that when you hit a bump in the road or a problem or as your kids get older, that what is filed away is both an authentic and a multifaceted understanding of the God of the Bible. Which is also what a hymnal does, or just understanding that this little book is the Bible is our treasure chest, built up with words that are the best. And as they get older, they can actually draw on that depth. And that’s a faith that’s strong enough and robust enough in understanding, and it’s steady enough to be able to hold the next set of issues, which are so much more than when you’re ten or eleven. You’re twenty-one. You’re at university. Who am I going to marry? What am I going to do about this? What’s my job? These have become these big issues, big decisions. What am I pulling from? You want to make sure the well is deep.

17:18 - Songs to Help Families Through Difficult Times

Matt Tully
In recent years it seems like there’s been more of a focus among evangelicals on the Bible’s language of lament, especially from the book of Psalms, and how that lament can be a crucial resource for us as Christians when we face seasons of pain or of grief. And I know that’s something that you all at Getty Music have been promoting for years, when it comes to the songs that we sing. We need songs that don’t always just have this chipper or bubbly feel to them. We need songs that help us deal with the hard feelings that we often have—the sadness and the pain and the suffering. Help us think about that. What are some songs that you think families and kids should know that can help them in those more difficult seasons that we all face?

Kristyn Getty
When you talked about the psalms there, I think it’s over a third of the psalms are laments that ask these deep questions. There’s a song that we wrote many years ago based on Psalm 130 called “I Will Wait for You,” which is taken straight from that psalm. And in the hymnal we have a whole little collection of psalms, and just singing those more has been something which we’ve been trying to, in our own writing do a lot more of, using the hymnal to show that this has been done for generations. Here are some examples of of those songs. The hymnal goes through three different tracks. One is through the church’s year, one is through the life of Christ, and the other is through a service. And then just setting that out will provide those spaces for lament, and for confession over sin is another one that’s huge for our prayers for the world. The contents page of a hymnal sort of allows you to explore all these things so you can sort of hook songs around them. And so I’m excited because although we have a little children’s section in this hymnal, it’s just a little taster for a children’s hymnal we’re looking forward to doing in in the future. But I hope this hymnal—every part of it—is for the whole family and not just the little children’s section, so that we can actually find songs that we can sing, that we can read through and spend time in that touch on some of these more tricky issues.

Matt Tully
And we’ll be sure to include a link in the show notes to learn more about the hymnal, which has just released, and it really is this incredible resource for churches and for families. And actually, over the next couple months, we’re going to be releasing a number of interviews we did with a whole host of people from the Getty Music team who have contributed to hymns that are included in the hymnal, and really hear a lot of different voices on what’s all gone into this project.

Kristyn Getty
When we were thinking about how we could encourage families to sing and children to sing, we were trying to think of different resources that might help that. Obviously, we have the hymnal. Over the years we did, especially during COVID, these family hymn sings with our own kids. We have done this family hymn of the month and made some of those resources available. But I thought it would be good to write a couple of children’s books that just sort of helped explain it in that different way, using that medium. And we did Pippa and the Singing Tree with Crossway, which was a little bit more of a whimsical, poetic way of looking at it. Because I didn’t want launch straight into, Here’s the brass tacks of all the reasons why you should sing. I wanted to sort of feel the sense of why it was beautiful and wonderful and great, and that’s the Pippa book was intended to do. We Sing! is a little bit more instructional. It has a bit more of a didactic feel. It’s going through some of the key ideas and thoughts that we had through putting together the Sing! Conference and then ideas all around the hymnal, trying to find a little way through for kids to understand what the main priorities would be, what the philosophy is, what the approach is behind it and why we sing what we sing. Who sings when we sing? That’s sort of what was behind We sing!

Matt Tully
And it really is amazing how much you were able to pack into what is a relatively short book. It is very accessible for kids. It rhymes, and yet you’re hitting on things like the Bible as the source of all truth for singing, and the way that singing can help shape our thoughts and what we love. It binds us together as Christians, and it helps us connect with those who’ve gone before. There are just so many facets of singing that you’re able to bring out for kids in a very natural and organic and beautiful way. I think it’s a wonderful resource for parents to get and will serve families.

Kristyn Getty
I hope so. My favorite little page that they did, because the illustrations I just loved so much, but there’s a little page right in the middle of a daddy on the floor, half asleep, and the little daughter is in bed, and they’re both sort of singing a song together. And that to me is, especially when the kids were really tiny, that just reminds me of what it was like. Keith on the floor, me crawled in beside them, humming a song or playing a song, using those songs to help bring a calm and comfort as we go to sleep. Using them to try and be instructive at the end of the day. And also just using them to form the basis of our prayers. When you’re so tired at the end of the day and your brain is not functioning quite well, a song can be the easiest thing to reach for. Let’s use this song as our prayer tonight. And so that page in the book is particularly personal to what my experience has been with our kids.

22:33 - Practical Ways to Incorporate Singing into Daily Life

Matt Tully
Maybe just a few practical questions here at the end. What would be your advice for someone who says, I want to incorporate singing into my family’s life together on a regular basis. What might that look like? What days of the week or what time during the day would you suggest that I try to actually start to do that?*

Kristyn Getty
I think you try and find a way to infuse the spaces where life happens with songs of the Lord, whether that’s going to school in the morning or playing in the kitchen as you make breakfast. That’s usually a crazy time for me. I find the car much better. And we find that singing before going to sleep was a very calming thing. It depends, of course, on the song. If it’s a big, rousing song and they start jumping on the bed, you might want to find a different time of day for that one. But we just find little touch points during the day when it would work. It used to be more regularly, but we’ve as kids get older, we try to have one time a week where we have family devotions, usually on a Sunday. Increasingly, we’ve been meeting with some other families as well to do that, just as the girls are getting older and trying to connect them in and encouraging them to have their own faith and incorporating music into that. That’s more formal. There are the bits where you want it just to be part of the air and the atmosphere, and then there are the moments of being intentional. And so we try to do that. And I would just also say that this is the place where, for pastors or worship leaders at their church, be thinking about your families and communicating to them perhaps during the week what songs we’re going to sing on Sunday, and here are some resources and here are some things that you could use that could prepare your family for this Sunday. I think that’s very helpful.

Matt Tully
How do I lead my family in singing as a parent if I am not very musical? I don’t know how to play any instruments, I don’t have a great voice. How do I do this in a way that doesn’t just immediately feel awkward to my family?

Kristyn Getty
As I said, we use our phones—we play music and sing along with tracks. So it’s not that we bring the band around to the house and they set up the whole thing for the girls. It’s much more low key and easy that way. I would say that the song you choose to sing has a bearing on this. If you’re choosing to sing a more complicated song that requires accompaniment, then you’ll need to be more intentional in how you do that. But one thing I love about old hymns is the folk-like, simple quality, where you don’t need piano or guitar. It’s very easy. “Jesus paid it all, all to him owe.” It’s very simple. I’ve sung that walking around Target before. I can’t do that now; they’re teenagers, but whenever they were younger. If you don’t worry about your voice, they’ll not worry about it. And you just pick the easy songs. Just working it in every day, but then really enjoying whenever you’re gathered together on Sunday, when you’ve got people playing.

Matt Tully
What are a few starter hymns, so to speak, that maybe e every household or a family could start to try to sing together? And maybe you would point to that hymnal and that little children’s section that’s in there that includes a lot of great hymns. But are there a couple hymns from there that you would say would be good ones to start with?

Kristyn Getty
“Jesus Loves Me” is in there, which is one of the most timeless ones. If you we’re starting from nowhere, that is the easiest song. That is the Christian “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” But it’s a great song, and it’s just a good beginning point. And the chances are you probably have already sung that with your kids. The whole children’s section actually opens with “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” which is a lovely song written by Cecil Francis Alexander, who was a bishop’s wife in the north coast of Ireland a couple hundred years ago. It just shows the testimony of that song, which has reached through so many generations. And that’s on creation, and that’s a really simple little song. There’s a few that we’ve written in the last couple of years. There’s a couple wonderful children’s songs are—I don’t know if they call them children’s songs—but CityALight has done a couple of lovely newer hymns. With my kids I think some of the first ones we taught them were “Jesus Paid It All.” We also taught them some of the Fanny Crosby songs, because they had little choruses that they could catch onto. “Blessed Assurance” is one of the earliest ones that we taught them, where there could be that simple little refrain before we would teach them these big, long, verses. And then songs that have a storyline and a direction. “In Christ Alone” sort of does that, but I think a storyline can be very helpful for a child in mapping it out.

Matt Tully
Final question for you. You and your husband, Keith, as many of our listeners will know you, you’ve written countless songs and performed songs that are sung by Christians around the world. Many of us, including my family, have benefited from that work that you all have done. But I do want to zoom in a little bit on your home and on your living room. As you think about your kids, what do you pray that they take from your singing together as a family, as they continue to grow into this next generation?

Kristyn Getty
My deepest prayer for my kids is that each one of them would walk with the Lord their whole lives. Wherever that takes them, whatever they end up doing with their lives, that beyond any sort of grid or experience or relationship in their life, that that right there would be the greatest thing. And that we pray to that end and think of singing to that end, that these songs that they learn may stay with them and continue to sing over them and in them and be carried by them for the rest of their life. And that whether they end up doing any sort of a career in music is inconsequential, and that that singing would be just part of their expression of praise to the Lord and their testimony of their faith to other people. This year as I’ve been going to school in a brand new year, the verse that’s been in my mind is in Jeremiah 32 (I think). And it talks about having one heart and one way, that we may fear the Lord forever for our own good and for the good of our children after us. And so with all of the individuality and all the preferences and all the opportunities in this life, and all the challenges and all their frustrations with their parents—which will be many, and we don’t even know half of them just yet—but that they would see through all of it one heart in one way, and that would be the one they’d want to follow.

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