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Tim Casteel

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Good Clean Fun Music Playlist

August 1, 2019 By Tim Casteel Leave a Comment

If you’ve ever tried to make a playlist for a College Ministry meeting, you’ve found that it’s not easy to find fun songs that are clean and that appeal to an ethnically (and spiritually) diverse college student audience.

Notice any pattern in the Top 50 songs?

According to Newsweek’s article How Songs with Explicit Lyrics Came to Dominate the Charts, more than 2/3 of the Top 100 songs in 2017 featured explicit lyrics (interestingly, Spotify is to blame – previously songs were made for radio broadcast and had to be somewhat appropriate). Even among the “non-explicit” songs, it is reported that 92% of the Top 100 songs were sexual in nature.

As I’ve said before: while cool, upbeat music may be #27 on the list of important things about a Christian meeting, it’s important nonetheless.

What’s the first thing students encounter when they come to your meeting? The music that you’re playing before the meeting.

 

So here’s a playlist I call Good Clean Fun.

Within Spotify, click “Follow” to add it to your sidebar of playlists.

Full of upbeat, fun songs that are clean and that appeal to an ethnically diverse college student audience – it’s a mix of Christian rap, dance, popular music, indie rock, and a handful of songs in Spanish. I looked up lyrics for all of them (even the Spanish songs!) and there’s no sexual stuff, cussing, no taking the Lord’s name in vain (i.e. – “oh my g__d”; I’m looking at you Taylor Swift – Shake it Off), etc.

We use this playlist at our Cru (Fort Worth) Winter Conference, Cookouts, and Weekly Meetings.

Play them in order, just hit shuffle, or drag songs over to new playlists you are making.

Would love to hear if you have upbeat, clean songs that you like that didn’t make the list!

Filed Under: College Ministry, Music Tagged With: Music

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About Tim Casteel

The goal of this blog is to share resources, best practices and strategy. Inspired by others who have taken the time to share their thoughts/learnings/resources, I decided to stop merely consuming and start contributing to the conversation.

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