We are a gathered assembly here, gathered in order to worship the Lord. But we have gathered out of a community, a group of people who live together, serving the Lord in various capacities, throughout the rest of the week. What we do there is what we bring here. We see this in everything.
The Lord blesses us financially on Wednesday, and so we bring our tithes and offerings here on the Lord’s day. Our children are receiving a biblical education, and so when I am preaching I can assume a certain amount of biblical literacy. We are building the Temple here, but the sound of the chisel is not heard here.
The same principle applies to music and music education. As Christians we value words highly because we are people of the Word. We teach our children to read because we want Bible reading to be at the center of their lives. But a large portion of our worship service is musical. We sing a lot. Coming to this offering prepared is far better than coming to it unprepared. And preparing for musical worship involves far more than a simple heads up on what songs will be sung, although that is a small part of it. Musical education is like the rest of education; it is cumulative, and it takes years.
This means that parents should be as interested in musical education for their children as they are in basic literacy. This may be chorus at school, individual training in singing, or private piano lessons, or violin lessons, or any number of other options. Far more is involved than individual self-improvement. Over the course of the next generation, this will be a major contribution to the reformation of worship in the Church.