From the Mouths of Babes: Lessons in Making a Joyful Noise unto the Lord

Abstract

How do infants praise the Lord? While we cannot say definitively how this is so, exploring this idea—particularly in the context of intergenerational worship and formation—offers rich theological insights. Scripture declares, “Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants, you have perfected praise” (Matthew 21:16; Psalm 8:2, NKJV), suggesting that (1) infants indeed praise God, and (2) their praise is perfected by Him. Rather than dismissing this as purely metaphorical, this article draws on St. Augustine’s concept of the jubilus, a song with no intelligible words, to explore how infants’ babbling might be seen as a form of praise and worship, and what we might learn from it if it is thus seen. The article concludes by demonstrating how this reflection on infants’ praise might challenge us to reevaluate and enrich our approaches to Contemporary Praise & Worship and intergenerational formation.

1. Introduction

How do infants praise the Lord?

Such a question may at first seem silly, a futile attempt to unveil a mystery that we will only understand on the other side of eternity. While it is true that we cannot definitively say how this is possible (though neuroscientists continue to learn more about infant cognition),1 I think it is a question worth exploring, especially in the context of intergenerational worship and formation. Scripture proclaims, “Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants, you have perfected praise” (Matthew 21:16, quoting Psalm 8:2, NKJV).2 Unless we write this off as purely metaphorical (and even then, the interpretation is not immediately obvious), what this verse suggests is that (1) infants praise the Lord, and (2) their praise has been perfected by the Lord.

If we take these two statements to be true, our attempts to understand them can yield some theological insights that might inform discussions about Contemporary Praise & Worship3 and intergenerational formation. As I acknowledged at the start, we cannot develop a technical explanation of how infants praise the Lord, so this endeavor necessarily invites the use of our theological imagination. The hope is that this thought experiment will lead to a deeper understanding of existing theological commitments, particularly concerning their implications for Contemporary Praise & Worship and intergenerational formation. As Johnson and Thiessen (2023) have argued, Contemporary Praise & Worship music has become an ecumenical tradition with its own particular theology (heavily influenced by Pentecostalism) embedded in the music. However, each denomination also has its own theological particularities and needs to negotiate how their theological distinctives interact with the theology embedded in the music of Contemporary Praise & Worship. This article thus aims not to promote a singular interpretation, but to invite reflection from readers within their own ecclesial traditions.

I begin by expounding on some of the reasons we might find it difficult to imagine that infants, in their babbling, are offering praise to the Lord. Next, with the help of St. Augustine, I explore the case of the jubilus, a song containing no intelligible words, as a paradigm for reading infants’ gurgles as praise. As we will see, Augustine comes to equate praise with joy. Following recent scientific research (Aktar and Pérez-Edgar 2020), this article assumes that infants are capable of both feeling and expressing joy. Finally, I consider what we might learn from reflecting on infants’ offering of praise and how Contemporary Praise & Worship lends itself well to the possibility of infants engaged in praise and thus of intergenerational worship that includes all ages.

2. Infants in Worship

When I picture a worship service, I envision people who might fall into the categories of seniors, middle-aged individuals, young adults, teenagers, and children moving their bodies and singing songs in praise to God. I do not tend to picture infants. The omission is not because I do not imagine them present in the service (although it is often the case that infants are not actually in the service, but in the church nursery); rather, it is because I have no conception of them adopting any posture or engaging in any activity that I might immediately read as praise. I suspect that I am not alone in this. Infants are an overlooked demographic when it comes to worship and formation ministries. This is the case in both an intergenerational approach and one that segregates the congregation by generation.

As Allen et al. (2023, p. 15) point out, in most churches, worship is not intergenerational. Instead, many churches adopt what these authors describe as the “essentially unquestioned paradigm of age-and-stage Christian education and formation” in which worship and formation ministries are segregated by age, life stage, or generation. As it relates to children’s ministry, the thinking behind this approach is that children are not yet able to participate fully in the types of things that grownups can, such as sitting through a twenty-minute sermon or singing hymns with big and unfamiliar words.4 Thus, children are sent out of the adult worship service to a separate kid-oriented space where they engage in developmentally appropriate activities. However, even in this model that aims to address the unique needs of different ages and life stages, little to nothing is said about infants. As older children head off to their own Sunday school classrooms or kids’ worship experiences, infants and nursing babies are sent to the cry room or to childcare. The implication is that until infants are older, they cannot actively engage in any sort of liturgical or formational activity.

It is at this point that we must ask the following question: is there such a practice that is appropriate to the age and development of infants? The Scripture verse we read earlier suggests that there is: praise. And thus, we return to our original question: what could it possibly mean for an infant to praise the Lord? Before we answer this, however, it is worth exploring possible reasons that infants tend to be overlooked in both generationally focused and intergenerationally focused worship and formation.

The Perceived Problem of Infants Praising the Lord

Since the Second Vatican Council (1963) produced the Sacrosanctum Concilium (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), both Catholic and Protestant liturgists alike have adopted the language of “full, conscious, and active participation” to describe the way in which Christians ought to engage in praising God in worship. The vision put forth by this phrase seeks to discourage worshipers from simply “going through the motions” and mindlessly observing liturgical rites, and instead to encourage thoughtful, intentional, and mindful engagement in the liturgy. According to the Constitution, the “proper disposition” (article 11) of “full, conscious, and active participation” (article 14) is required not just of the priests but of the laity “in order that the liturgy may be able to produce its full effects” (article 11). Without such a disposition, one cannot receive the full gifts of the liturgy.

This vision has guided much liturgical reform in the decades since the Constitution and, following its recommendation, a crucial emphasis of that reform has been on promoting understanding and instruction about what it is we are doing when we worship. Article 11 describes the “proper disposition” in worshipers as having “their minds…attuned to their voices”. In other words, as our mouths (with our voices) proclaim God’s praise, our minds ought also to convey that praise, so that it might not be said of us that we “draw near with [our] mouths and honor [God] with our lips, while [our] hearts are far from [God]”, and of our worship that it is merely “a human commandment learned by rote” (Isaiah 29:13; Matthew 15:8-9, NRSV).

What is implied in both the language of the Sacrosanctum Concilium and the “age-and-stage” approach is that true praise and meaningful formation require a certain capacity of the mind to understand that which our voices proclaim. This invites the following question: is it possible for babes and nursing infants (as well as children who have not yet reached the “age of reason”) to have this proper disposition for worship in which “their minds [are] attuned to their voices”? Is it possible for them to engage in “full, conscious, and active participation” if they do not yet have the cognitive faculties to understand teaching about what the liturgy means?

A second and even more basic problem with the idea of infants offering praise to God stems from our assumptions about the necessity of words for praise. The vocal proclamation assumed in the Sacrosanctum Concilium takes the form of words—whether read, chanted, or sung, worshipers are directed to proclaim intelligible words. When a child reaches the “age of reason”, they, too, will learn to proclaim these words as a means of worship. Beyond the Catholic church, children’s programming and curriculum reflect this assumption as well. Songs for children aim at using simple words to teach Biblical truths.5 None of this is surprising, of course. Words are how humans communicate ideas and communicate with each other. Why would our communication with God be any different? When it comes to infants communicating with God in praise, then, we have an obvious problem: in my experience, the only things that come out of the mouths of the babes apart from spit and food are unintelligible babbles and cries. Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of this verse vividly describes nursing infants “gurgl[ing] choruses about [the Lord]” (Matthew 21:16, MSG). Most often, however, the gurgles of infants are seen at best as cute but mostly unintelligible sounds, at worst as distractions from the rest of the congregation’s praise, and almost never as expressions of praise.

Is there any basis on which to consider that at least some of infants’ seemingly unintelligible gurgles might in fact be vocal expressions of praise?6 Let us turn to consider another instance in which sounds that appear to have no intelligible meaning are explained as sounds of praise: the jubilus.

3. Joyful Gurgles as Wordless Praise

The jubilus, a word that comes to us from medieval Latin, refers to a cry or shout of joy. Throughout the Psalms, the Scriptures exhort us to “shout for joy” or “make a joyful noise to the Lord” (e.g., Psalm 100:1)—to sing the jubilus. But what does the jubilus sound like? St. Augustine describes the jubilus as follows, in his exposition of Psalm 33:3 (“Sing to [God] a new song; play skillfully with a shout of joy”, NKJV):

…[God] provides you with a technique for singing. Do not go seeking lyrics, as though you could spell out in words anything that will give God pleasure. Sing to him in jubilation. This is what acceptable singing to God means: to sing jubilantly. But what is that? It is to grasp the fact that what is sung in the heart cannot be articulated in words. Think of people who sing at harvest time, or in the vineyard, or at any work that goes with a swing. They begin by caroling their joy in words, but after a while they seem to be so full of gladness that they find words no longer adequate to express it, so they abandon distinct syllables and words, and resort to a single cry of jubilant happiness. Jubilation is a shout of joy; it indicates that the heart is bringing forth what defies speech. To whom, then, is this jubilation more fittingly offered than to God who surpasses all utterance? You cannot speak of him because he transcends our speech; and if you cannot speak of him, yet may not remain silent, what else can you do but cry out in jubilation, so that your heart may tell its joy without words, and the unbounded rush of gladness not be cramped by syllables?

(EP 32(33)[2].8)7

The jubilus is a song, but it is a song without words.8 One who hears a jubilus being sung would not be able to make out any “distinct syllables” or “words” from which they could extract any meaning; yet, the jubilus is not devoid of meaning. In fact, it is bursting with meaning, wordlessly communicating to God and all who hear it the immense joy and gladness that an understanding of God evokes. It is a wordless offering of praise to the “God who surpasses all utterance”.

The parallel I am trying to draw with the unintelligible gurgles of babies ought to be clear (the focus here is on those gurgles that are objectively read as joyful, rather than unhappy, though those certainly occur). Like the jubilus described, babies’ vocal expressions of praise contain no distinct syllables or words—indeed, they cannot contain any distinct syllables or words because such verbal capacities are not yet available to them. However, the astute reader might at this point object to this comparison, pointing out that in Augustine’s description, though the jubilus itself contains no words, it arises out of an attempt to use words to convey one’s joy. The jubilus overflows from an attempt to use words to express praise for God that finds words to be “no longer adequate to express [that joy]” and thus abandons “distinct syllables and words” in favor of “a single cry of jubilant happiness”. Certainly, words provide a context which grounds the wordless cry, guiding a listener’s interpretation of its meaning. Augustine is not suggesting that we do not ever need words, but that when words reach their limit of expression, they overflow into a wordless cry that is a fitting offering for a God who cannot be fully contained by words. But must the jubilus always begin with words?

Elsewhere, in his exposition of Psalm 100, Augustine describes a different scenario in which one who jubilates skips completely over the attempt to use words:

A person who is shouting with gladness does not bother to articulate words. The shout is a wordless sound of joy; it is the cry of a mind expanded with gladness, expressing its feelings as best it can rather than comprehending the sense. When someone is exulting and happy he passes beyond words that can be spoken and understood, and bursts forth into a wordless cry of exultation. Such a person is clearly rejoicing vocally, but he is so full of intense joy that he is unable to explain what makes him happy.

(EP 99.4)

This description resonates with my own experience and observations. When one is delighted, oftentimes what emerges first is a sound—a squeal of delight. This wordless cry is then followed by an attempt to express that delight in words and to explain the delight expressed in the sound. In this scenario, the jubilus does not arise out of an attempt to verbalize one’s gladness; it simply arises out of the gladness itself, as a wordless vocalization of the gladness. Whether one recognizes that the joy and the reason for one’s joy cannot be expressed in words, or one literally does not possess the ability to use words to make that attempt (as with infants and other non-verbal persons), the jubilus fulfills the desire for joyful expression.

Christ in Us: The Means of Praise

If we follow Augustine’s explanation of the jubilus in understanding praise as an expression of delight, it is not difficult to accept that infants are capable of such delight and of expressing that delight in cries and shouts of joy. Anyone who has been around an infant for a length of time has witnessed this. But how do we know what the object of their delight is? This brings us back to the first problem we named earlier: the question of infants’ cognitive capacities. It is one thing to shout for joy in response to a funny expression made, but praise requires that the object of joy is the Almighty God. In order for us to say that infants are offering praise, that their gurgles of delight are in fact an expression of delight in God rather than anything else, surely, we must be able to say that they have the ability to first contemplate who God is, since praise is a response to the revelation of God.

One way to explain this is as Augustine did when he addressed a similar question in his argument for infant baptism: how is it that infants can fulfill the requirement for baptism that one must affirm belief in Christian teachings if they cannot communicate this to us with words? Augustine argues that the faith of the Church stands in for infants in order to render their baptism valid. Commenting on the power of the profession of faith for the effectiveness of baptism, Augustine writes, “This word of faith has so much power in the Church of God that, through the very one who believes, offers, blesses, immerses, it cleanses even the tiny infant, not yet having the capacity with its heart to believe to justice and with its mouth to make a profession of faith to salvation” (Augustine 2011, 1.25). Elsewhere, arguing for the validity and necessity of infant baptism, Augustine writes that baptized infants are “correctly called believers, because they in some sense profess the faith by the words of their parents” (Augustine 1994, 80.3.3). He goes on to explain that “all of this takes place in hope by the power of the sacrament and of the divine grace given to the Church” (Augustine 2011, 1.25). We might thus say that infants born into the Church are able, in some sense, through the faith of the Church and their parents, to grasp something of who God is.9

A second, and I think more compelling, way to explain infants’ ability to know God is simply to say that we can conceivably believe that God, in the way of the mystery of grace, reveals himself to infants in a manner we might never understand. In the case of baptized infants in whom we say that Christ dwells, why should it not be that these infants can be said to know Christ, even if they cannot articulate that with words? This line of thinking invites us to a point of theological reflection that is relevant to us all, in every age and generation: praise does not begin with us. In many ways, of course, praise is a choice that we make. We participate fully, consciously, and actively in worship by being intentional in offering our praise to God. It may thus seem from the way we talk about praise that it begins with us, with our choice to offer that praise. However, the often unnamed foundation of that praise is the praise that precedes ours and persists even when ours may cease: the eternal, ongoing praise within the Trinity. When we offer praise, we are not initiating something new. We are simply joining the ongoing song of heaven, and it is through Christ in us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that we do so.10

Earlier in his exposition on Psalm 33, before he expounds on the jubilus, Augustine explains that praising God means uniting our will to his (EP 32(33)[2].1). If we are honest, we often exercise our will in a manner contrary to God’s. In so doing, Augustine says, we fail to praise God. But there is one who does not fail in this, who consistently and perfectly unites his will to God. It is through Christ’s perfect obedience to God that we, too, are able to unite our will to God’s. Augustine explains that by taking on our human nature, Christ identified us with himself. He “displayed the will proper to a human being” when he prayed in Gethsemane, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me”; but when he prayed, “Yet not my will, but yours be done”, he straightened out what is warped in us, the inward bending of our will against the will of God (EP 32(33)[2].2). Thus, in and through Christ, we, too, are able to delight in God’s will and thus to praise God.

Augustine explains our dependence on Christ when it comes to prayer in this succinct way: “[Christ] prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our head, and he is prayed to by us as our God. Accordingly we must recognize our voices in him, and his accents in ourselves… We pray, then, to him, through him and in him; we speak with him and he speaks with us. We utter in him, and he utters in us” (EP 85(86).1). We might just as easily substitute the word “praise” for “pray”, understanding that Christ offers praise to God on our behalf as our priest, he praises God in us, and he is praised by us as our God. It is the second phrase that most concerns us here: Christ prays [praises] in us. Because Christ identified us with himself, we are one with him, and our praise is joined to Christ’s praise. We praise, as we pray, “to him, through him and in him”.

If we accept, then, that Christ can dwell in infants as well, why should it not be that infants, too, can join their voices to Christ’s in praise with the only utterances they can manage: joyful gurgling choruses.

4. Perfected Praise: Lessons from Infant Gurgling

In this penultimate section, I return to the second half of the Scripture verse that prompted this exploration: that God has perfected the praise that comes out of the mouths of infants. In other translations, the verse states that out of the mouths of infants and children, God has “prepared” or “brought forth” praise. Whether or not this praise is “perfect”, Jesus points to this praise as the proper response to his healing miracles and uses it to reprimand the chief priests and scribes who are indignant at the praise Jesus is receiving for these miracles. Thus, it would seem that we might have something to learn from the praise offered by babes. How can it be that the praise offered by babes, expressed not in intelligible words but in gurgles, is to be for us the model of praise? Let me offer a couple of ideas.

4.1. The Language of Praise: Joy, Not Words

Perfect praise, according to Augustine, is nothing less than pure joy and delight in God. There is an innocence and purity to infants’ delight and thus to their offering of praise that I think allows their praise to be rendered perfect. This purity of praise is not impossible for adults, but it becomes arguably more difficult as our egos grow and we are misled to think that it is our actions rather than God’s that determines the quality of praise (as we saw in the previous section), or that true praise depends on our ability to sing with great skill or to beautifully articulate all that renders God worthy of worship.

In the first passage from Augustine that we looked at, he talks about the jubilus as a “technique for singing” skillfully, as the psalmist exhorts. Addressing those who are worried about their inability to sing with great technical skill, Augustine suggests that the sort of singing God desires does not require technical skills or vocal prowess, but simply jubilation of the heart. If you cannot hold a tune, have a limited vocal range, or would be laughed off the stage of American Idol, you can still offer perfect praise to God because the type of singing—of praise—that brings God pleasure is simply that which emerges from and expresses joy in the Lord. True praise stems from true joy.

A song of praise is often judged to be good or bad on the basis of its words. Contemporary Praise & Worship music, in particular, is frequently disparaged for having what critics consider to be a lack of theological substance in its lyrics (e.g., Dawn 1995; Frankforter 2001; Hustad 1998; Williams 2011). However, Augustine’s reflections on the jubilus as praise suggest that this is not the benchmark for praise. He argues that singing in jubilation with a wordless cry of joy is more pleasing to God than attempts to “spell out in words” our praise for God.11 Augustine suggests that God is not pleased so much by the proclamation of words about God but by the “unbounded” expression of praise from the heart, the fullness of which can sometimes only be brought forth in wordless shouts of joy. According to Augustine, even the most theologically rich and beautiful lyrics fail to reach the height of praise if they do not burst forth into wordless cries of exultation. In this way, Carol Harrison (2019, p. 143) notes that “the jubilus is a democratic song which does not require education, literacy or any musical expertise but simply the compulsion to sing and, in a Christian context, to thereby express the ineffable mysteries of the faith by giving sound to them”. Thus, even infants who are incapable of both verbalizing and comprehending words about God are yet able to offer praise—and in their praise, we see an example of praise perfected.

4.2. Understanding God Through Wordless Praise

The shift away from a focus on words also helps us to avoid the prideful thinking that we might be able to capture God in words. Augustine describes how the recognition that words fail to articulate all that God is ought to lead us to the wordless praise of the jubilus:

Before you became so vividly aware of Him you thought yourself qualified to speak about God; but now you begin to feel what He is, and you realize that what you perceive is something that cannot be spoken. But if you have discovered that the reality you encounter is beyond utterance, will you therefore fall silent and not praise Him? Will you be struck dumb and cease to praise God, and no longer give thanks to Him who has willed to make Himself known to you? Listen to the Psalm: “Shout with joy to the Lord, all the earth”.

(EP 99(100).6)

Augustine is not saying that we ought never to attempt to speak about God with words. However, he suggests that our efforts to know God are best fulfilled not through articulate words but through praise. In Book One of the Confessions, Augustine (1997) wrestles with the apparent conundrum of how one can begin to praise God without first knowing God. Drawing together Psalm 22:26 and Matthew 7:7, Augustine concludes that “those who seek the Lord will praise him, for as they seek they find him, and on finding him they will praise him” (Augustine 1997, 1.1.1). It is through praising God that we come to know God and praise God all the more, and, as we have seen, this praise is most fully expressed in wordless shouts of joy.

Citing Psalm 88:16 (“Blessed the people that understands how to shout with joy”), Augustine writes that “the heart’s cry of joy is its understanding” (EP 99(100).3). He then cautions his listeners that shouting for joy in the manner called for by Scripture is not simply making “a witless noise”. It is not only with our voices that we must shout for joy, but with our hearts. Harrison (2019, p. 139) takes Augustine to mean that “it is only when the song of praise which human beings offer back to the Creator breaks into wordless joy that we can be truly said to ‘understand’ God. …[I]t is only when we become aware that God cannot be captured by words but can only be expressed in spontaneous, involuntary shouts of joy, that we truly ‘understand’ Him”. Augustine writes that to be blessed is to “know how to rejoice in something that you cannot put into words” (EP 88(89)[1].16–17). Shouting for joy is evidence that we have grasped that the greatness of God exceeds our ability to articulate it in words:

He alone is inexpressible, he who spoke and all things were made. He spoke, and we came to be, but we have no power to utter him. The Word in whom we were spoken is His Son, and to enable us weaklings to utter him in some degree, the Word became weak. We can shout in exultation (jubilationem) over the Word, but we can find no words to articulate the Word. “Shout with joy to the Lord, all the earth”.

(EP 99(100).6)

When we realize we cannot speak of God, we sing to God with shouts of joy. As Harrison (2019, p. 139) summarizes, “To know God, then, is to know that he can never be known, but only praised-in the wordless sound of jubilation”. Perhaps infants, who by necessity are spared from the danger of thinking that they can capture God in words, grasp this most easily. Perhaps that is why the psalmist says that it is in the praise expressed by infants that God’s praise is perfected.

5. Conclusion: Infants, Contemporary Praise & Worship, and Intergenerational Formation

Finally, let me more directly address the focus of this special issue: what does any of this have to do with Contemporary Praise & Worship music and intergenerational formation? The main suggestion I want to make is that Contemporary Praise & Worship and its musicking12 practices are particularly well suited for implementing a vision of intergenerational worship that includes all ages. I will briefly name just a few features of Contemporary Praise & Worship that I believe serve this vision.

First, Contemporary Praise & Worship is primarily concerned not with the intellectual edification of the worshipers singing the songs, but with facilitating an encounter with the living God.13 Pete Ward (2005, p. 198) helpfully describes this difference in function between what he calls the “charismatic worship songs” of Contemporary Praise & Worship and hymns (ancient or modern). Unlike hymns, Ward says, “the charismatic worship song is not primarily a means to teach doctrine”. Rather, “it is the means to a personal encounter with God”. While Ward and other critics see this as a weakness of Contemporary Praise & Worship, suggesting that the emphasis on experience leads to a misplaced focus on the worshiper and the worshiper’s experience rather than on God and the Gospel, it is through an experience of God that one realizes, as Augustine did, that “the reality [of God] you encounter is beyond utterance” (EP 99(100).6).14 It is this realization that then leads one to join infants in praising God through wordless shouts of joy. In this way, the liturgical theology of Contemporary Praise & Worship naturally accommodates the possibility that infants, too, might be included in the worship and praise of God.

Second, the musicking practices of Contemporary Praise & Worship make room for these wordless expressions of jubilation. While some have criticized the tendency for Contemporary Praise & Worship songs to contain long instrumental (read: wordless) interludes, suggesting that they serve no benefit to the congregation and no purpose other than to draw attention to the musical talents of the musicians, these interludes in fact create space within songs to allow worshipers’ singing of words to turn to shouts of joy as their hearts “[bring] forth what defies speech.” Elsewhere, I (Wong 2023) have suggested that the singing of what Zac Hicks (2010) calls the “congregational whoa”, a common feature in many Contemporary Praise & Worship songs since the 2000s, can be likened to these jubilant shouts of praise.15

At the same time, our consideration of infants’ gurgling of praise also suggests a couple points of caution for Contemporary Praise & Worship. As mentioned earlier, taking seriously the ways that infants might offer true, fully, conscious, and active praise to God serves to remind us that our own praise does not begin with us but depends on the praise that Christ offers to God in us. This provides a helpful counterbalance to the theological idea in Contemporary Praise & Worship that it is our praise that invites God’s presence into the service, ensuring that we do not eclipse God’s role in enabling our praise.16 Instead, God is already present through Christ in us, who both receives our praise as God and enables us to offer praise, with and without words, no matter how young or old we are.

A second area for exercising caution involves Contemporary Praise & Worship’s emphasis on music. Contemporary Praise & Worship songs are sometimes criticized for being inaccessible to those with less vocal skill. As we were reminded in our exploration of praiseful infant gurgling, true praise depends neither on eloquent words nor on technical skill. This can serve as a reminder that even the simplest choruses can allow for the perfect praise of God. Where Contemporary Praise & Worship leaders might become caught up in putting forth the most technically excellent music, this invites leaders to embrace the simplicity of musical praise. It should also encourage those in churches with smaller and perhaps less capable musicians that a song sung from the heart with the sparsest instrumentation can be just as worshipful as a song accompanied by a huge team of professional musicians.

Worship is formational. If the Church wants to ensure that our worship is forming worshipers of every generation, it must consider how worship pertains to the smallest, the youngest, and the least of these: the infants in our midst. What if, instead of viewing babies with wariness, afraid that their cries will interrupt the service, we view them with humility, welcoming the possibility that they may cry out not only because of unhappiness but with joy? What if we recognized that in their joyful gurgles, they might be modeling for us a way of praising God that we will spend our lives perfecting, until that day when “we shall dwell in God’s house, and our whole life will be nothing but praise of God”, (EP 141.19) an eternal jubilus in which “[we] shall exult for ever and ever and [God] will dwell in [us]” (Psalm 6:12, cf. EP 5.16)?