“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 which 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 which 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 British
evangelicalism, from the Reformed to the Charismatic, is almost entirely
a comfortable, middle-class phenomenon?”
–Carl R. Trueman, from “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?” in
The Wages of Spin: Critical Writings on Historical and Contemporary Evangelicalism (Christian Focus: 2004) pp. 158-160.
