What can miserable Christians sing?

I put together the following article for our our church newsletter this month:

Those who are have worshipped at All Saints might see our worship service as a little bit unusual. Such things as our liturgical style, the subject matter of our services, and our weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper might strike some as different than what many other churches do.

Why do we worship as we do? The following article explains a few aspects of our approach to worship, such as the centrality of Scripture in worship and the necessity of being honest with God and each other as we approach His throne.

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What Can Miserable Christians Sing?

Having experienced -- and generally appreciated -- worship across the whole evangelical spectrum, from Charismatic to Reformed -- I am myself less concerned here with the form of worship than I am with its content. Thus, I would like to make just one observation: the psalms, the Bible’s own hymnbook, have almost entirely dropped from view in the contemporary Western evangelical scene. I am not certain about why this should be, but I have an instinctive feel that it has more than a little to do with the fact that a high proportion of the psalter is taken up with lamentation, with feeling sad, unhappy, tormented, and broken.

In modern Western culture, these are simply not emotions which have much credibility: sure, people still feel these things, but to admit that they are a normal part of one’s everyday life is tantamount to admitting that one has failed in today’s health, wealth, and happiness society. And, of course, if one does admit to them, one must neither accept them nor take any personal responsibility for them: one must blame one’s parents, sue one’s employer, pop a pill, or check into a clinic in order to have such dysfunctional emotions soothed and one’s self-image restored.

Now, one would not expect the world to have much time for the weakness of the psalmists’ cries. It is very disturbing, however, when these cries of lamentation disappear from the language and worship of the church. Perhaps the Western church feels no need to lament -- but then it is sadly deluded about how healthy it really is in terms of numbers, influence and spiritual maturity. Perhaps -- and this is more likely -- it has drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries and regards them as little short of embarrassing. Yet the human condition is a poor one -- and Christians who are aware of the deceitfulness of the human heart and are looking for a better country should know this.

A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party -- a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is -- or at least should be -- all about health, wealth, and happiness silently corrupted the content of our worship? Few Christians in areas where the church has been strongest over recent decades -- China, Africa, Eastern Europe -- would regard uninterrupted emotional highs as normal Christian experience.

Indeed, the biblical portraits of believers give no room to such a notion. Look at Abraham, Joseph, David, Jeremiah, and the detailed account of the psalmists’ experiences. Much agony, much lamentation, occasional despair -- and joy, when it manifests itself -- is very different from the frothy triumphalism that has infected so much of our modern Western Christianity. In the psalms, God has given the church a language [that] allows it to express even the deepest agonies of the human soul in the context of worship. Does our contemporary language of worship reflect the horizon of expectation regarding the believer’s experience [that] the psalter proposes as normative? If not, why not? Is it because the comfortable values of Western middle-class consumerism have silently infiltrated the church and made us consider such cries irrelevant, embarrassing, and signs of abject failure?

I did once suggest at a church meeting that the psalms should take a higher priority in evangelical worship than they generally do -- and was told in no uncertain terms by one indignant person that such a view betrayed a heart that had no interest in evangelism. On the contrary, I believe it is the exclusion of the experiences and expectations of the psalmists from our worship -- and thus from our horizons of expectation -- which has in a large part crippled the evangelistic efforts of the church in the West and turned us all into spiritual pixies.

By excluding the cries of loneliness, dispossession, and desolation from its worship, the church has effectively silenced and excluded the voices of those who are themselves lonely, dispossessed, and desolate, both inside and outside the church. By so doing, it has implicitly endorsed the banal aspirations of consumerism, generated an insipid, trivial and unrealistically triumphalist Christianity, and confirmed its impeccable credentials as a club for the complacent. In the last year, I have asked three very different evangelical audiences what miserable Christians can sing in church. On each occasion my question has elicited uproarious laughter, as if the idea of a broken-hearted, lonely, or despairing Christian was so absurd as to be comical -- and yet I posed the question in all seriousness. Is it any wonder that [the church in our culture], from the Reformed to the Charismatic, is almost entirely a comfortable, middle-class phenomenon?

Excerpted from: Carl R. Trueman, “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?”, in The Wages of Spin: Critical Writings on Historic and Contemporary Evangelicalism (Fearn: Mentor, 2004).