Your Family Songbook

I am so excited to share about our family’s songbook, the keeper of our corpus of songs. This book serves as a record of the songs we sing together. When we open its pages, we are reminded to sing fully and richly, and it helps us to avoid a song rut. We are also able to build impromptu devotionals from the written song lyrics. I believe every family can benefit from keeping a songbook because it becomes a concrete cue to sing together and talk about the songs.

Our family songbook is relatively simple–definitely not Pinterest-worthy–but it gets the job done. It is comprised of a three-ring binder, some dividers, and paper. I wanted to make it personal, so I created a cover page for the outside of the binder for fun. The real treasure, though, is the collection of dear songs inside. I have catalogued the songs in a table of contents, and I have used dividers to organize the songs into categories.

As you can see, my table of contents pages are hand-written with ample space to add more songs as we come across them. Obviously, the Christmas section could hold so many more, but this book is a work in progress, and as each season comes, we will encounter more songs to add. I also want to keep in mind that this book has been carefully curated–the songs have special meaning and truths that we want to pass along to our children.

We have 8 sections for our songs, and these sections really help in putting together a time of family worship! The sections are Gospel (in message, not necessarily in style), Scripture, God’s Character, Doctrinal, Statement of Faith, Christmas, and Adoration. If our scripture passage is Philippians 3, we can find “Knowing You” by Graham Kendrick in our book, and we have all the words available to a great song written from the text. These songs also serve as a starting point for a devotional.

Once we determined our sections, we just started sorting our songs we had collected over the years, and we had the beginnings of our personal songbook. Some of our songs are sheet music we had bought. Some of our songs are free chord charts, and some are simply lyrics to help us sing a capella or reflect on the poetry.

Simple, effective, and precious, this songbook serves our family as a documentation of our faith, worldview, and values. We could easily just look up words to songs on the internet or open a hymnal, but making our own book keeps these songs in front of us and gives them a weight of importance for our children. If the song makes it into the book, it must be important! And I could talk for hours on the ways this visual tool encourages our family to sing regularly together.

If you want to create the meaningful memory of singing your faith with your children, I highly recommend pulling out some crafting supplies and putting together your family songbook. You don’t have to do it all at once. The beauty of this resource is that you may add to it year after year. Why will a personal songbook help you reach your goal of singing daily with your children? Just seeing the book will prompt you to initiate a song. Once you start singing, your children might open the book and be reminded of a favorite they want to sing. You will also think about the words of the songs you compile and appreciate the artistry of well-crafted poetry as you linger over the written lyrics.

Now it’s your turn! What songs would you include in your book? What categories would you add? How would you use your songbook, systematically or spontaneously? Please let me know!

Remember, the memories you make singing with your children will create lasting connections and deep-rooted foundations that will last a lifetime. Open your book and sing with your kids today!