This isn't mine it's my little sisters:
When she was in first grade she was in the school nativity play and they all had to sing 'away in a manger'
She was convinced the words were 'A Wayne in a manger'! Bless her she must have wondered who this wayne person was and what he had to do with jesus. It was around the time of Wayne Rooneys england debut though...

Anna

My mum said that when I used to sing "noahs arc" at school I would sing "who built the arc, no one, no one"

Clare

Up until tonight I used to think Silent Night went "brown young virgin" because Mary was from the Middle East.

When I was a kid we went to a church that had a bad overhead so everything looked blurry on it. It was complicated by my dad's bad eyes so when he would sing this one song he would sing "may it be a sweet, sweet sound in your car" instead of "may it be a sweet, sweet sound in your ear". He would sing it really loud too.

TJ

When i was 7 i heard the hymn in the church. This hymn was about Sain Ann. I am Ann too so i thought that some people love me so much that they sing about me. I even thanked to some people in the church. I didn't know why they were laughing :)

Ann from Europe

There was a song that all the littlel kids sang. Something about "If you want to be hip to the Lord" Me and my sister were CONVINCED that it was really "If you want to HIT by the lord".

We argued about this with my mom for a long time.

Bara Boo

When I was a kid, I went to a Catholic elementary school, and we'd have mass where we all to sing hymns. There was one, I think it went "Go tell it on the mountain", but I always heard it as "Goatillet on the mountain" and imagined a goatillet as a strange goat-like creature standing on a mountain top. I always wondered why anyone would write a song about that, and what it had to do with religeon.

Anon

my mother used to take me to church every sunday. just before all of us kids went to sunday school, we would sing the "gloria patri." i think this is in all presbyterian churches, but i'm not sure. the line goes something like "glory be to the father..."

up until i was maybe 15, i sang "guinea pig to the father..." nobody ever bothered to show me the words, and i sang it loud and proud every sunday.

brian

when I was about 4 or 5, I thought Jesus must have had a fancy-dress policeman's uniform just like mine - "The little law Jesus
Laid down his sweet head"
- and obviously, being God, he was allowed to sleep in it

humpo

When my school sang 'We Three Kings' in our Nativity play I thought the first line was 'We Three Kings of Ori and Tar' and thought that Ori and Tar were countries, and spent hours searching for them on my globe...

Erin

In the carol Ding Dong Merrily On High, I thought that the line hosanna in excelsis after the long "Gloria" was 'and someone has beaten Chelsea'

Helen

We sang without hymnbooks at our school and this was in the 70s when conflict in the Middle East was in the news a lot - we had a hymn with a line which I was sure went "and set the damned Jordan free" - when I finally saw a hymnbook and found out it was "and set the downtrodden free" I was disappointed

still singing it like that now

When they sang "When the roll is called up yonder" I always envisioned a piece of bread. It never occurred to me to wonder why a piece of bread would be called to heaven. I just took it on faith.

Anon

I used to think the song"jesus, oh what a wonderful child so holy, meek and mild" was "so holy, Mickey Mouse"

Stephani

When we were little kids in Alabama, my sisters and I loved to sing our two favorite hymns in church. Eventually we (like so many others) learned that what we called "The Gladly Song" actually wasn't about an unfortunate bear who needed an operation to get his eyes fixed (which was exactly what we could look forward to ourselves, because if we kept crossing our eyes like that, they'd get stuck).

One Sunday morning much later, my mother was totally mystified when we asked whether we'd get to sing our other favorite hymn - the Plastic Thunder song. We had to sing it for her before she understood which song we meant: "I've got a piece of Plastic Thunder standing, down in my heart, down in my heart to stay." She laughed so hard, she cried... the real lyrics? "I've got a peace that passeth understanding down in my heart"...

She'd heard us sing about Plastic Thunder countless times, but never listened closely enough to realize. Of course, to this day we still prefer our version!

Leigh

In the Christmas song silent night, the part that says, "'Round young Virgin..." I used to think that it was, "Round Jonh Virgin." So in Sunday School one morning when the teacher asked us to draw a poicture that rlates to the song I drew a little round man.

Ann

#Dance then, wherever you may be
#I am the Lord of the Dance, said he

I thought it was "Lord of the Dance Settee," and for a very long time I sincerely thought a giant sofa was a focus for early Christian worship...

PK

in "deck the halls", where you say "don we now our gay apparel" (as in "now we put on our brightly colored clothes") i thought it was "dawn we now our day of Harold". My family wasnt very religious, and i figured that another name for christmas was St. Harold's Day.

Bethan

I was a little confused in Sunday School. I used to sing "Jesus loves me Eskimo" instead of "Jesus loves me this I know" and "Goat ate it on the mountain" instead of "Go tell it on the mountain"

KC

There was a hymn we sang at school which had the line "i am the lord of the dance, said he".
I used to dance around my house and jump on the sofa (the settee), and thought the words of the song were "I am the lord of the dance settee", and had a mental image of jesus jumping up and down on the sofa with me!

Anon

I could never get over why everyone would sing such a gentle, sweet church hymn about a bomb. The song lyrics sounded like "There is a bomb in Gilead, to make the wounded body whole... to heal the sin-sick soul." I thought, what kind of a bomb could that be? Only one God could make I suppose. Finally the day of revelation came... "There is a balm in Gilead"

William