Question for you:
Out of CCLI's top 100 used Christian songs in North America, which songs are songs of Lament?
Answer:
3 (and this is being VERY liberal)
When Soong-Chan Rah shared this fact at Missions Fest, I was completely floored. If 40% of the Bible focuses on lamenting, why are we, as a North American Christian movement, only focusing 3% of our worship on lament?
The whole first half of the Gospel of Mark focuses on Jesus as good news and the coming messiah and is worth following. Jesus is the healer, provider, care giver, listener. He is indeed exciting to follow. However, when you get into the second half, it talks all about the cost of following Jesus. Denying yourself, leaving family, leaving households, servant of all, death. When we get to this, we start to realize that following Jesus is not at all easy, but it is HARD and we don't like hard. Part of counting the cost of Jesus is learning and knowing how to lament well.
This loss that we experience in following Jesus is indeed great and if we don't actually take the time to acknowledge it, we fail to see the reason why we follow Jesus in the first place. We are then, only but shallow soil that receives the word, receives it with joy, but when trials and persecutions come, we fall away.
This 3% disturbs me quite a bit. I feel that because of our inability to experience and navigate suffering well, it is stifling our passion and followship of Jesus. I've been seeing this a lot and have noticed that this generation of SFU IVCF students are starting to experience the cost of following Jesus. Most however, have not been equipped to deal with the cost and the loss associated with it. So Anika and I started to spend some time in how to lament well with our community. To our surprise, the passion of these students started to blossom and their followship of Jesus was starting to become more real to them. As they continue to count the cost of following Jesus and as they lament well along the way, the joy associated with it has been growing and increasing.
The whole first half of the Gospel of Mark focuses on Jesus as good news and the coming messiah and is worth following. Jesus is the healer, provider, care giver, listener. He is indeed exciting to follow. However, when you get into the second half, it talks all about the cost of following Jesus. Denying yourself, leaving family, leaving households, servant of all, death. When we get to this, we start to realize that following Jesus is not at all easy, but it is HARD and we don't like hard. Part of counting the cost of Jesus is learning and knowing how to lament well.
This loss that we experience in following Jesus is indeed great and if we don't actually take the time to acknowledge it, we fail to see the reason why we follow Jesus in the first place. We are then, only but shallow soil that receives the word, receives it with joy, but when trials and persecutions come, we fall away.
This 3% disturbs me quite a bit. I feel that because of our inability to experience and navigate suffering well, it is stifling our passion and followship of Jesus. I've been seeing this a lot and have noticed that this generation of SFU IVCF students are starting to experience the cost of following Jesus. Most however, have not been equipped to deal with the cost and the loss associated with it. So Anika and I started to spend some time in how to lament well with our community. To our surprise, the passion of these students started to blossom and their followship of Jesus was starting to become more real to them. As they continue to count the cost of following Jesus and as they lament well along the way, the joy associated with it has been growing and increasing.
Core Witness Team, songwriter, singer, student, Grace Swain shared some interesting thoughts on lament.
the heart of our father.
At IVCF @ SFU, we have had the privilege of sharing in a short season of lamenting and mourning together. We lament the brokenness we see on our campus. We lament our inadequacies and fears of sharing this faith that we hold so dear with those who so desperately crave Him. We lament our own brokenness which reveals our vulnerabilities that we shelter so fiercely.
Yet even in our season of lamenting, we rejoice because God is faithful to heal, save and restore. We rejoice in the stories we have heard of God softening the hearts of those around us. We rejoice in the healing of our weaknesses for we have made the inner parts of our hearts open to our Father, Who longs to lavish his love upon us.
As a singer and songwriter, I have written many songs of lament. I personally have lamented our children's loss of innocence, inequality and injustice towards the marginalized, and the celebration and glorification of lascivious living. I often have questioned why it is that I write these songs — largely rooted in the fact that songs of lament are not usually celebrated within societies and church communities. Many times this is done on my own and often remains between me and God. Yet it has truly been a privilege to lament with the IVCF community. It has been a privilege to hear each other's hearts and to be let into the innermost thoughts of my fellow students and brothers and sisters in Christ. I have rejoiced when others have rejoiced and I have mourned when others have mourned. I have able to come to know such a tender part of my Father's heart — and that brings me joy.
Exec Team, prayer warrior, puddle jumper, Anika Barlow also has some insightful thoughts on lament.
“It’s all good.” This is our collective mantra. This is what we say to each other, what we try to convince ourselves of...even when the evidence is stacked up on the contrary.
As part of the collective Church, I believe we are especially guilty of this. It’s apparent in the truncated scope of our conversations, our sermons, and our gospel. We are happy to talk openly about the goodness of God and the grace of God, but our doubts in that same grace and that same goodness are better left unspoken. We’ve got a ‘GMO gospel’, as I heard someone say recently; in our words and our actions we’ve stripped the gospel of some of its core DNA - sacrifice, repentance, long-suffering, obedience - and replaced it with something a little more marketable and a little more palatable.
I long for a true taste of the gospel - as rich in joy as it is in lament. David, stringed instrument in hand, writes “cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you”, but not before crying out “my heart is in anguish within me”. I wonder if we’re doing ourselves a real disservice by neglecting the call to lament - if by circumventing the dark places we’re also sidestepping the heights of joy. Maybe our hallelujah choruses are drowning out that voice of one calling in the desert.
These are some thoughts that have come out of my experience with our little community of IVCF at SFU in the past few months. In our practices of prayer Jesus has been inviting us to take an honest inventory of our surroundings - to really get a handle on the burdens of our friends, to mourn over the lifelessness of our campus and the extent of our own sinfulness. Full stop.
When we allow ourselves to be in this place we give the Spirit freedom to be our one source of joy, and not the joy we conjure up with “it’s all good”. And how much more powerful, how much more hopeful, how much more credible of a witness to see a Church with eyes open, with hearts broken and yet...somehow…despite all the odds...hopeful.
On lament? ...lament on.
