At Faith Community Church in Lynden, we know that music is great for helping kids memorize Scripture. GT and the Halo Express was instrumental for many of us to hide God's Word deeply into our hearts and we still remember many of the songs and Scriptures that we learned as children that way.
Ever since becoming Awana Commanders at FCC, we have been keen to use music to help kids memorize their verses. Sometimes we found existing songs on YouTube and we would send the link to the parents in our weekly emails. Other times our senior pastor would write songs himself and perform them on the guitar for the kids. He even recorded some of them and put them on YouTube!
But this approach had its problems:
We did not have songs for any of the T&T gold verses.
And sometimes we did not even have songs for the main verse.
Some of the songs we found online were not all that great
Sometimes songs were only available in different Bible versions from the one that we use (ESV).
In the summer of 2024, we learned about the ability to make songs with AI, and we realized quickly that this could really benefit the kids at our Awana club. We set out to make songs for every single T&T verse (main and gold) of the Grace in Action book. We mainly used Suno.com but have also used Udio.com. We made the songs with a variety of music styles, from gospel and worship, to country, pop, hip hop and even some rock.
Each week, we shared a link to the verses/songs that the kids had to memorize, and the results were astonishing. More kids than ever memorized not only the main verse of the week, but quite a few also starting memorizing all the four gold verses, every week!
The previous year, we had one kid memorize all the gold verses (and afterwards we learned that he did so because someone promised him $100 if he completed all the gold verses). This year, nobody was offered any financial rewards, but we had four kids memorize all the gold verses!
The previous year, the average number of verses our T&T kids memorized was 23 (and with 26 sections, that is less than one per week), this year that number jumped to 38. That's an increase of 65%! And the only thing we did differently was to provide songs for each verse.
We now incorporated these songs into the Quiet Time website, so that kids can not only listen to the songs, but also practice them using our Scripture Memory module. And we make it freely available to anyone who wants to memorize Awana verses using music. Just like the rest of Quiet Time, the usage of these songs and the memorization tool is free, and has no ads. We even got official permission from the Crossway foundation to use the ESV translation for our AI songs.
You can access the songs on Quiet Time here: https://www.quiettime.today/en/songs.
May the Lord bless you as you and your Awana kids are hiding God's Word in your heart.
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