“Blessed Is the One Whose Bowels Can Move: An Essay in Praise of Lament” in Contemporary Worship

Abstract

The CCLI charts may not reflect it, yet one thing many Christian churches discovered as the pandemic raged across the world (and violence at home and abroad) was the need for songs of sacred lament. Unfortunately, many churchgoers, especially those who identify as practitioners of contemporary Christian worship, have cultivated a gap between the biblical give and take of praise and lament revealed most poignantly in the book of Psalms. This chasm between praise and lament is a problem, as a liturgical discourse about disastrous events is weakened. Churches sing congregational songs of praise in the church, the chorus of ‘what ought to be’. Meanwhile, outside the church, artists in genres as diverse as folk and rap sing the chorus of what frankly ‘is’. For the church to be transformative, it must be grounded in what is (lament) and aiming toward what ought to be (praise). This is the value of the cycle of praise and lament in the church’s liturgy. This article explores the impact of CCM (contemporary Christian music) and praise and worship culture as it laments the loss of lament in Christian worship. The essay articulates the missing sense of ‘Truth’ in contemporary congregational music, as defined by Don Saliers’ Worship Come to Its Senses. The article closes by amplifying emerging Christian songwriters reintroducing lament to contemporary worship.

1. Introduction1

• Blest is the one, whose bowels can move,
• And melt with pity to the poor,
• Whose soul, by sympathizing love,
• Feels what the fellow saints endure.

• Her heart contrives, for their relief,
• More good than her own hands can do;
• She, in the time of sighs and grief,
• Shall find the Lord has bowels too.2

You may think that this hymn is the product of the eighteenth-century version of Weird Al—let us call him ‘Odd Albert’, composing parody hymns to the tune of popular hymns amid the Great Awakening. However, this hymn comes to us from one of the most well-known British writers of hymnody, who has authored some 750 hymns in his lifetime, including “Joy to the World” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” This author is Isaac Watts.

If you go looking for a YouTube clip of this forgotten Watts hymn, you will find a performance in a collection from 2012 of worship leaders collaborating with hymnary.org to present forgotten hymns.3 The worship leader sheepishly introduces the hymn, naming how words and their meaning change over time, a smile upon his face as he prepares to deliver the punch line to the joke: Christians used to sing about bowels! Cue laughter from the congregation. Another clip that appears in the search for this hymn on YouTube is a hardcore metal cover of the hymn set to the Hamburg tune of “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”.4 Moreover, I confess that I learned of this Watts hymn in the first place through Facebook, when a friend of mine, who is a theologian and seminary professor, posted the screenshot of the hymn on her wall, referencing God’s concern for her constitutional regularity. I laughed, too, as I imagined singing, “Blessed is the one whose bowels can move”.

However, as I sang these lyrics and sat with the theological meaning behind them, I wondered if Watts was on to something. And I wondered if the intuition to arrange a hardcore metal aesthetic for the hymn contained some wisdom for me to reflect on. There is something to the fact that the gutsy language of Watts’ hymn is better integrated into the stylistic genre of hardcore heavy metal than the usual, dare I say, the softcore aesthetic of contemporary praise music.

Because, if we are honest, how much contemporary praise music has anything to do with guts and faith? How much of contemporary praise and worship music challenges empires of capitalism, nationalism, and white supremacy, empires drenched in sin? It seems that our contemporary praise music and the liturgies that contain it are written to sell a comforting Christianity of sacred glurge rather than choreographing a liturgy with guts.

In my work as a liturgics professor and Director of Chapel for a justice-seeking UM seminary, I use the phrase ‘inclusive language’ regularly. That is, of course, because words matter. Our language about God and sin can either expand or narrow the liturgical horizon of possibility. Not paying attention to words that choreograph us to sing and equate darkness with evil and whiteness with purity threatens any justice work in the world. The words we sing about ourselves create a slippery slope into justifying white supremacy and patriarchal notions that men matter more than women to God. Inclusive language is one way the church can re-choreograph the body of Christ for a courageous dance in pursuit of God’s justice and healing for all. However, inclusive language is the tip of the iceberg. We also need to ask of our contemporary songs and services whether they are more guts than glurge in theological depth, inclusive of the whole of the human experience—from sorrow to joy—as well as the whole of God’s deep, bowel-ed love for us and for our neighbor.5

Throughout this essay, I use the metaphor of choreography to describe what Christian liturgy does to its participants on individual and collective levels. Liturgical scholars engage ritual studies to emphasize the power our regular, patterned, orders for worship have in shaping our worldview and action not only within the church but as human beings in society as well. As Don E. Saliers notes in “Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings”, in and through corporate worship, “Christians engage in activities which articulate and shape how they are to be disposed toward the world” (Saliers 1998, p. 18). The whole of the Sunday service choreographs the Body of Christ for action/inaction the rest of the week. And music plays a particular role in influencing this choreography of the moral self.

In this essay, I propose that recovering lament in worship may re-choreograph the body of Christ out of apathy (which breeds complicity) and into compassion (which generates courage). The argument emerges from twenty years in worship leadership, including five years in a non-denominational church plant of mostly middle-class twenty-something white evangelicals. Now, I direct chapel at a Methodist seminary and teach worship to seminarians, many of whom have not heard of lament before. Though their theology is Wesleyan, most students choose, sing, and share worship songs from the CCLI top 100 charts that have little to do with their distinct theological lineage, let alone offer concerns for justice that biblical laments offer (Hodges 2018).

2. Biblical Lament

It is difficult to define precisely what lament is in a few words or phrases. For one thing, lament in the Bible does not follow one formula. Some laments are individual in nature, whereas others are communal. Some laments deal with grief and others anger. Some are complaints against God, and others are petitions to God for action to take place. Sometimes, one psalm can embody every one of these aspects within one piece. Whatever the case may be, there are three key aspects to keep in mind regarding lament: (1) this complaint and cry out to God is in fact addressed to God; (2) for the most part, the lamenter hopes for an answer from God amid the circumstance grounding the lament; and (3) this response is the lamenter’s hope. True, some Biblical laments seemingly have no hope for God to redeem the situation of despair from which the lament psalm is conceived (Pss 39 and 88 perhaps), but in the context of the Psalter, even these desperate laments are framed by praise and a narrative of life in and out of the pit of despair.

Lament comes in various forms, but many scholars follow Claus Westermann’s three-fold system: ‘I’ laments, ‘Thou/God’ laments, and ‘They/Foe’ laments. I make a slight variation in this system with my following description of lament forms in the Bible based on the aim or goal of the lament itself. Either the lament (1) centers on an individual’s internal conflict (physical, spiritual sufferings, or immanence of death)6, (2) is aimed at mediating against or on behalf of someone else,7 or, lastly, (3) the lamenter is aiming their cry directly at God as the source of conflict (for God either doing a seemingly unjust action or for God being unjustly inactive).8 A particular psalm may be the manifestation of one of these forms, or again the culmination of all three.

Lastly, lament simply cannot be defined without mentioning its relationship with praise. Laments have elements of praise within them, often foreshadowing the deliverance sure to result from the petitions of God’s creation. Praise psalms often contain elements of lament within them, for it is in response to being delivered from the pit of despair that praise erupts in the Bible. Westermann emphasizes the importance of balance between praise and lament, claiming both are part of humanity’s “relationship to God”; thus, “something must be amiss if praise of God has a place in Christian worship but lamentation does not” (Westermann 1981, p. 267).

Lament, according to professor of pastoral theology Keith A. Russell, is a practice that can bring lies into the light to let the truth of our imperfections be known to God and one another. He turns to the psalmist as a model of biblical voicing of “sorrow, anger, doubt, and protest in the face of contemporary life (Russell 2002, p. 10). Russell defines lament as “the means and method of communicating with and to God about how life is” (Russell 2002, p. 10). Russell specifically calls on American churches to expose the American lie that all is well in our land. He argues that this act is in the spirit of biblical lament. He claims that religious leaders have a public role and responsibility to teach the “need for mourning, lament, and sorrow” (Russell 2002, p. 10). He criticizes a perceived need for religious leaders to be optimistic about society instead of being honest about society’s flaws.

Psalms of lament are counter-narratives to God’s story as promised and actualized in past memory, yet they are canonized as Scripture. Because they are negotiations with a God who has done X and has promised Y but has been experienced in the present as absent and outside of X and Y, they remain a faithful practice that does not abandon God’s narrative. Lament refuses to see the narrative and God’s actions in the past as a closed book. Instead, lament demands an active narrative, rendering God as the continual author of our faith as we strive to include the whole of human experience—gains and losses, hopes and complaints—in the memory and action of God. The seemingly unstable narrative experienced in times of suffering and confronting complicity in others’ suffering calls for realignment within God’s covenant, trusting God can handle it in all its inconvenience.

But is the Christian worship hour the place and time for us to curate this messy work of lament? I often find that answers to this question are born again, not in theological depth but in consumerist language. People (consumers rather than the congregation) will not like it. It will not feel good to sing about this stuff. You know, there is a reason that demons screamed when Jesus passed by: they never like to be named and recognized by the holy one. Lament names the evil and exposes the wounds, so healing can begin. From healing emerges praise that is anything but glurge.

In summation, laments are guttural cries of a person of faith to God, sometimes against God, the self, or the enemy and sometimes on behalf of the self or another facing undeserved injustice. The lament is always grounded in the hope that God will lend an ear to the cry and respond in kind.

3. Sacred Glurge—How We Got Hooked to the Sugar Rush

I have used the term glurge twice now without defining it. I came across it when I was teaching my introduction to preaching students. One of our core texts was The Six Deadly Sins of Preaching by Lucy Lind Hogan and Charles Reid. In their chapter on the sin of the preacher as Manipulator, the authors use Urban Dictionary’s definition of glurge as “a syrupy sweet story sent by mass e-mails to often un-willing recipients with the added message ‘Pass this along 2 as many ppl as u can!!!11!!1’” (Reid and Hogan 2012, p. 43).

This material is usually an image or accompanying story sickeningly sweet enough to elicit “ahhs” and “oohs” with a simple moral lesson in disguise. The problem with glurge is that though it is sweet and tasty to the emotions, it does not offer any ‘caloric content’ theologically (Reid and Hogan 2012, p. 43). The authors use the example of the poem “Footprints in the Sand.” Every semester, a well-meaning student finds some way to weave the poem into a sermon in the preaching lab before they have read the Manipulator chapter from Reid and Hogan. As lovely as the poem is, it rarely has anything to do with the biblical text. Nor does it have much to say about the complexity of the Christian situation in a pre-/post-pandemic world. But the glurge is tasty, sweet, and platitudinal. Unfortunately, like many contemporary Christian songs, glurgey stories are written to be pleasing and pleasant. They simplify our complexity and God’s and deprive us of theological nutrients to sustain the church to confront injustice.

Singing and preaching glurge is not just less than ideal. I believe that a slide into pleasing worship palates with a Christological sweet tooth in predominately white contemporary worship services choreographs complicity in the Body of Christ: complicity in systemic racism, oppressive systems of capitalism, and environmental degradation, just to name a few.

We are not the first generation to drown authentic worship in glurge. The last appearance of Watts’ original bowel language occurred in the 1876 compilation of hymns for the Brethren in Christ entitled “A Collection of Spiritual Hymns”. By the mid-20th century, all the published adaptations of Watts’ hymn were free of the original gutsy language of “bowels”.9 Great Britain and American Christian editors objected to the expression of “bowels”, which once was understood to be where the heart’s emotions were housed. As such, they began to clean up the language, using “mercies” and “heart” instead of bowels (Julian 1957, p. 149). Mercies and heart are certainly sweeter and more palatable language to sing in church than bowels.

Furthermore, in time, congregational hymns have become sweeter. And catchier. And more palatable. Shifting from using the whole of the Psalter in our song, with as much or more lamentation as praise content, we lost the theological integrity of the church’s song. So, the church shifted from singing songs of “praise and lament” and began to sing songs of “praise and worship” written for Christians (Everett 2009, p. 9). According to Isaac Everett, editor of The Emergent Psalter, this shift is “a reflection of a wider cultural bias against weakness and vulnerability” (Everett 2009, p. 9). Everett continues:

In the Christian music industry, there is an understanding that Christian music must be uplifting and positive even though biblical poetry, especially the psalms, presents anger, grief, and bitterness alongside joy, hope, and praise. This purging of “negativity” implicitly judges how we worship. It says that if we don’t feel happy in church then we are not truly worshiping. It says that prayers of anger and prayers of sorrow are not authentic prayers. It says that expressions of joy are activities for the whole community, while expressions of sadness are inappropriate for public display.

(Everett 2009, p. 9)

Songs of sorrow, lament, and protest have a way of bubbling up eventually. If the church could not make space, other platforms emerge. Callum G. Brown, in his book The Death of Christian Britain, correlates the death of the British church in tandem with the 1960s popular music scene. According to Brown, the radio and record store made music available expressions of anger and sorrow purged from the church. With discursive power, artists such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, and the Beatles addressed civil rights, war, feminism, and end times. Lament over injustice was more present on the radio than in the chapel in what Brown calls the “The Sixties’ Discourse Revolution” (Brown 2009, p. 170). He attributes this revolutionary shift from discursive power in the church to pop culture to the secularization of Great Britain. According to Brown, secularization and the decline of the British Church could not have happened “until discursive Christianity lost its power” (Brown 2009, p. 175).

It is interesting to note that Swee Hong Lim and Lester Ruth, two of the premier scholars of contemporary worship, associate the 1960s with the birth of contemporary worship (Lim and Ruth 2017, p. 3). The fundamental principles of the genre include “A dedication to relevance regarding contemporary concerns and issues in the lives of worshippers” (Lim and Ruth 2017, p. 2). They cite examples of addressing issues through mime or sermon content. But theologically, the music associated with contemporary worship is scriptural and sacramentally rooted in the notion of enthroning God with praise (Lim and Ruth 2017, p. 122). If the function of music is in service of praise and the presence of God, where is their room for contemporary songs of sorrow and lament?

The musical discourse of the 1960s held space for contemporary protest. It reflected contemporary concerns that were less than praiseworthy. The music and lyrics of secular 1960s song became the outlet for a culture lamenting the loss of some ideal portrait of an age without war, an age without racial divisions, an age of nuclear families (Brown 2009, pp. 178–79). In fact, many of these artists were greatly influenced by the blues tradition out of America, the delta, and so influenced by the legacy of spirituals from enslaved Christian Africans in America. The two genres, spirituals and blues, share a “common theology that is grounded in hope and truth, consciousness of sin, conversion and protest” (Brown 2009, p. 96). They are the liturgical score of the invisible church, meeting in hush harbors and praise houses of the American South, in resistance to the liturgy of white slave masters that choreographed chattel slavery (Allen 2021).

Lament did not leave African American congregations in the manner that it left the predominately white congregations at the center of society. Sorrow spirituals rose in popularity through the twentieth century in an age of oppression of the African American community. These spirituals often contained a mix of petition, grief, and hope so present in the Lament Psalms. African American spirituals and gospel music even today have maintained roots in the Psalm tradition of praise and lament in communal music. Why, then, was there a drift from the balance of praise and lament in many white Protestant congregations?

Pilgrims at Plymouth carried with them the Protestant Psalters into the New World. It was their songbook in worship, the whole of it. This means that the bulk of the songs in worship were laments, for this is the composition of the book of psalms. Additionally, the psalms reflect concern for the poor, the widow, and the orphan as well as justice. Surely these sung words resonated with situations of religious persecution and displacement of America’s first Protestants seeking religious freedom. In fact, the very first book published in English America was the Bay Psalm Book in 1640 (Polman 2001, p. 92). Singing schools were established in the eighteenth century to train people in singing the Protestant metrical Psalters communally. The conversation in worship lyrically remained grounded in both lament and praise.

In the late eighteenth century and up through the nineteenth century, the singing of psalms that had been such a part of Colonial American Christianity began to shift. Singing schools began to promote hymns along with Psalm singing. Thus, hymnody became more popular in the eighteenth century, an era of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and John Newton (Polman 2001, p. 92). As hymnody grew in popularity, lament declined in this musical form, especially in white Protestant contexts. Praising God was the object of worship in a white Protestant community beginning to experience ever-increasing comfort and stability in American society. Into the twentieth century and today, the lament form has been mostly out of disuse in congregational singing in North American churches (Polman 2001, pp. 93–94).

In his research of the lyrics of the top 25 songs in the CCLI Top 100, Michael Rhodes observed “only one passing mention of the word justice in the top 25” (Rhodes 2021). He compares the chart toppers with themes in the psalms specifically, where “justice…shows up 65 times in 33 different psalms” (Rhodes 2021). Additionally, Rhodes notes “zero references to the poor or poverty in the top 25” compared to references “on nearly every page of the psalms” (Rhodes 2021). Finally, Rhodes observes that the chart toppers fail to ask God a single question, a plea of ‘why?’ in the face of trouble. Yet this questioning is the posture of lament in the bible, as a person of faith trusts that their cry to God will not go unheard nor result in punishment.

The good feelings that make for CCLI chart toppers can distract us from the gut feeling that something is wrong. White supremacy and Christian nationalism, at their most tragic and efficient, are not overtly antagonistic. Instead, these oppressive systems are most effective when they render Christians apathetic to events that make God’s bowels move with pity. Too much praise allows the church to retreat into apathy, a state without feeling, without pathos, for those whom God seeks to restore. It may also lead to a departure of Christians when life circumstances that would be healed through lament are not offered in the liturgy.

4. Guts to Glurge—Choreographing Apathy

Apathy is the absence of guts, or at least a denial that we all have them. In our time, it is a state of emotional numbness in reaction to an inundation of tragic, global, and personal losses amplified through our technoculture. In concert with apathy, the white middle-upper-class church has choreographed liturgy to comfort rather than confront the powers within and beyond us that contribute to injustice. So long as apathy dictates liturgical choreography in the church—through glurgey songs we sing, prayers we will not pray, and sermons we will not preach—prophetic proclamation leading to transformation and an ethic of care rooted in the church’s liturgy remains stunted.

A chasm exists between praise and lament in contemporary American worship culture, which is a problem (Rhodes 2021). Though both praise and lament glorify God, neither one does so as well as it could in tandem with the other. Praise in the church sings the chorus of ‘what ought to be’, and the music of our culture sings the chorus of what frankly ‘is’ (Saliers 1996, p. 50). Each chorus sung separately emphasizes cultural conformity. Happiness and blind optimism are qualifiers to the church community, and cynicism and cathartic venting are relegated to the secular music space (Tanner 2001, p. 144). But for the church to be transformative, to participate in the work of God’s Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, it must be grounded in what is and aiming toward what ought to be. This is the value of the cycle of praise and lament in the church’s liturgy.

In her book Suffering, German political theologian Dorothee Soelle directly attends to lament as it relates to liturgy and ethics. In fact, she places lament at the center of a movement from silence to transformation, one that implores Christians to live in solidarity and action. I imagine that writing only a few decades after the fall of Hitler’s reign of terror, Soelle is aware of how apathy in the German church allowed horrible atrocities to occur without being confronted by the body of Christ.

Apathy—that is, lack of suffering or freedom from suffering—isolates Christians from themselves, their reality of suffering, and the cries of humanity in need of empathic address (Soelle 1975, p. 36). Returning to the hymn of Isaac Watts, if the one whose bowels can move in synchronization with God’s is blessed and will experience God’s bowel love in her time of trial, then cursed, cursed is the one whose bowels cannot move when met with the poor, when encountering the suffering of fellow saints in crisis. If we cannot have compassion—suffer with-ness—for those in need, then we cannot love as God loves and feel as God feels for all of creation.

According to Soelle, to be rendered apathetic is to live a life that has “become frozen solid” (Soelle 1975, p. 38). In this numb, desensitized state, nothing can trouble or threaten, but in a like manner, nothing can grow, and nothing can change. The antidote, then, is feeling. Feeling is what leads to movement. And this feeling will not be cozy, one wrapped in the drone of synthesizers and the pulse of lights.

On a primal physical level, for example, if one is numb, one will not pull their hands away from a dangerously hot stove. To not be able to feel angry at how we suffer or others suffer is to apathetically keep our hands on the stove, melting flesh and causing damage to the body whether it registers in our brain or not. Likewise, suppressing ‘negative’ feelings of anger or sadness harms other parts of our feeling spectrum. According to Soelle, “even joy and happiness can no longer be experienced intensely” in the protective state of apathy (Soelle 1975, p. 39). In apathy, Christians lack the hunger and desire to bring about change for the sake of those crying out for justice. And in our North American context, where the cries are especially loud from our Black and Brown siblings, white Christians are rendered impotent in the face of White Supremacy, an idol that challenges our worship of God, and we are incapable of living in a counter-narrative for the sake of God’s Kingdom.

The good news is that once the apathetic Christian begins to melt the ice protecting her senses from the fear of death and pain, she will awaken to her pain in such a way that demands solidarity with suffering humanity. But it will not sound like the good news sold in so many American churches. Nonetheless, according to Soelle, lamentation is the language act that can melt away the deep frost of apathy.

According to Soelle, liturgy once “served to give voice to people in their fears and pain, and in their happiness” (Soelle 1975, p. 72). This is no surprise when we recall the song that sprung forth from the bowels of Mary in the gospel of Luke when she realized who had arrived within her womb:

• 46 And Mary said,
• “My soul magnifies the Lord,
• 47   and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
• 48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
•    Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
• 49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
•    and holy is his name.
• 50 His mercy is for those who fear him
•    from generation to generation.
• 51 He has shown strength with his arm;
•    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
• 52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
•    and lifted up the lowly;
• 53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
•    and sent the rich away empty.
• 54 He has helped his servant Israel,
•    in remembrance of his mercy,
• 55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
•    to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Another argument for how lament split away from Christian worship comes from Richard A. Hughes. Hughes claims that the decline of lament in Christian theology can be pinpointed to how Psalm 22, the words of lament and desertion spoken by Jesus in the Mark and Matthew crucifixion accounts, was appropriated by the early church community. Hughes argues that the gospel accounts depict the fulfillment of Psalm 22. And somehow, the fulfillment of this lament, the fulfillment of the cry of forsakenness toward God when spoken by Jesus on the Cross, was an eschatological moment in which the suffering servant bridged the gap between God once and for all (Hughes 2000, p. 195).

The Psalm then became a praise hymn long before the contemporary praise and worship of the 1960s. Hughes claims that even in the early church, lament’s liturgical function is gone, as all desires for salvation are answered by Jesus. Psalm 22 went from holy verbing liturgical activity by holy people amid strife to being a holy noun, a holy conclusion that we must all land on no matter what our feelings are in the moment. From here, the early Christians entered a season of glorified martyrdom made ideal through the Pauline theology of bearing with suffering for Jesus and like Jesus. This theology replaced the Jewish theology of petition, and a “submissive attitude toward suffering” became a mainstay of The Way (Hughes 2000, p. 196). Gone were the biblical functions of lament from this Christian theology: to critique injustice, to emphasize the primacy of freedom, and to offer hope despite suffering (Hughes 2000, p. 203).

This is problematic, because our mission as Christians is found in the spaces of deep pain, guttural pain, in the world. Hear again the holy tension of praise and lament in the late Fredrick Buechner’s mantra for vocation: “Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need” (Buechner 1993, p. 119). Focusing only on gladness without joy choreographs apathy and immobility. Only promoting pleasure and enjoyment, our liturgy perpetuates sinful systems that we, white Christians, are dangerously comfortable remaining in.

5. Glurge to Guts—Re-Claiming Lament

Re-choreographing the contemporary white Protestant American church out of complicity and into courage requires worship to come to its senses, as liturgical theologian Don E. Saliers briefly and powerfully argued in his book by the same name. Our praise, delight, awe, our hope is not authentic unless we tell the truth in our liturgy. Telling the truth incorporates practices of confession as well as lament. Unfortunately, my experience of contemporary worship in evangelical non-denominational churches as well as mainline trims both out of a liturgy often influenced by the “Willow Creek Force” of attracting seekers (Long 2001, p. 5). According to Saliers, “The gap between what ‘ought to be’ and what ‘is’ sets up a permanent tension for all Christian worship which seeks to be faithful” (Saliers 1996, p. 50).

Sadly, we have avoided what is for so long that we have lost sight of what ought to be now, on earth as it is in heaven, rather than someday in some place far away from here. Saliers challenges us as he argues, “Our avoidance of lament has a strange result—it opens a great gulf between our liturgies and our lives” (Saliers 1996, p. 58). Would that Christian relevance be defined in this way rather than by consumeristic rubrics of butts in seats and aesthetic trends amplified by worship leaders on stage and coffee house architecture in our buildings! Our return to the four senses of Christian worship (awe, delight, truth, and hope) results in the cry of the psalmist when she sings in Psalm 10, verse 14:

• But you do see! Indeed you note trouble and grief,
• that you may take it into your hands;
• the helpless commit themselves to you;
• you have been the helper of the orphan.

Ultimately, choreographed courageous liturgical lament cannot stand alone, nor should it. As Saliers reminds us, “Authentic Christian worship, true to its sources and alert to the present realities of human life, is a school of hope” (Saliers 1996, p. 85). Reflecting the flow of the Psalter, lament leads to praise. Otherwise, there is no hope in a God who hears, loves, and saves. The problem with allowing the discursive power over injustice and anguish to be contained outside of Christian worship is that a fragmented and fragile faith is cultivated. Saliers makes a distinction between the sort of venting that takes place outside of the church and the cry of lament that takes place inside of the church when he writes, “There is a difference between raw screaming in anger or anguish and the kind of lament we need to practice in the context of our worship…to cry out to the God who creates and who promises to sustain us through that terror, ah, that is another matter. That is what is missing in much of Christian liturgy now” (Saliers 1996, p. 59).

The psalmist does not shoegaze and howl at the moon as a liturgical leader and choreographer of YHWH’s people. Instead, the psalmist offers hope to her community that justice will be served based on the memory of God’s action for God’s people in the past. Restoring the biblical balance of praise and lament to contemporary worship leads to praiseworthy praise and holy lamentation. As a scholar of psalms, Claus Westermann reminds us, “Praise can retain its authenticity and naturalness only in polarity with lamentation” (Westermann 1981, p. 267). Without the pole of lament, praise becomes glurge, devoid of theological caloric content that can sustain the church in its journey toward healing and justice in The Way of Jesus.

The liturgical movement of the psalms from praise to lament keeps the story of God’s covenant alive by refusing to leave God’s promises stagnant in the face of the people’s change and loss. And is it not the same for Christian liturgical theology? After all, we worship God-made flesh and given bowels, bowels that moved him to respond to sisters grieving the death of a brother, parents mourning the death of a child, a woman wasting away in a pool of blood, a criminal crying out for mercy. So blest are the bowels of Jesus! Whose soul, by sympathizing love, feels what the fellow saints endure.

6. Emerging Contemporary Lament

A final question the reader may be asking is, where can I find (buy) songs of lament to incorporate into contemporary worship? Shifts are taking place off the radar of contemporary worship charts and leading to a more theologically holistic balance of Praise and Lament. So, you may not find them on CCLI top 100. But contemporary songs of lament do exist. In his work for The Center for Congregational Song, Brian Hehn has provided worship leaders and scholars with a resource for modern justice-centered hymns. Hehn names authors such as Shirley Erena Murray, Adam Tice, Dan Damon, Carolyn Winfrey Gilette, and Ruth Duck. But many of these authors were not composing for praise band-oriented styles, which is the concern of this essay.

In a recent blog post, Hehn does name artists and projects that are bringing guts back into the theological content of praise band-style songs: Common Hymnal, Porter’s Gate, Wendell Kimbrough, Civic Club, and more are listed and linked as resources (Hehn 2022). There is also Marc Miller, who composed a song on the refrain of Eric Garner’s tortured cry in the grip of white supremacy, “I can’t breathe”.

Another band contributing to the catalog of new congregational songs is The Many. The Many formed as a collective of musical artists in Chicago with a shared “commitment to honest expressions of faith, peace-making, economic and social justice and LGBTQ+ inclusion” (About the Many n.d.). The Many understand that for congregations to be choreographed liturgically for participation in justice-making in the world, lament must be voiced. For the church to envision and enact daily that all are loved by God, our failed efforts as a society must be exposed. These artists express the ancient concern of the prophets and psalmists in contemporary musical stylings influenced by “indie pop and gospel” aesthetics (About the Many n.d.).

An example of the turn toward lament in The Many’s music is the song “Remember When” from the album Love > Fear. The lyrics on this track reflect images from the news of police violence against black men and women and the haunting image of toddler Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy who washed up on the shore after drowning in an attempt to seek refuge with his family in Turkey. The chorus of the song is a congregational cry out to God from these scenes of tragedy,

• We want to know where you were.
• We want to know where you are.
• We want to know what you do.
• God, you seem so far away.

The bridge leads the congregation to more profound demand for transformation as we sing,

• Show us your love right now!
• Show us your grace right now!
• Show us your face right now!
• Show us your way right now!

Paul Westermeyer, in his classic textbook for church musicians Te Deum, articulates the connection between pain and song as he writes, “Sorrow…inevitably breaks into song. Speech alone cannot carry its moan. The physical equipment we use to cry is also the physical equipment we use to sing. From mourning to song is but a small step. To cry out to God in lament, the deepest form of sorrow, is to make music” (Westermeyer 1998, p. 28).

Music, especially lament, has the power to make empathic connections. The Psalmist, Jesus, prophets, and The Many understand this. As congregations exercise their lament muscle together, our hearts take on more of the attributes of God’s heart, breaking for those in pain and oppression and weeping with those who weep. And perhaps, with our bowels moved in this state of lament, we can take the steps necessary to repair and/or destroy the systems that perpetuate harm to God’s beloved creation in ways we cannot understand when only singing praise together.