In the Current Issue: “Finding and Forgetting Oneself: The Formative Power of Congregational Song" (Part 1)
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Worship and Formation,” guest-edited by E. Byron Anderson, explores how the liturgy “schools” the assembly through language, ritual, music, shaping of time, and distortion of its intention. In this excerpt from David Bjorlin’s essay, “Finding and Forgetting Oneself: The Formative Power of Congregational Song,” Bjorlin, a widely respected hymnwriter, shows us the role of music in worship to move the participants toward God. –– Melinda Quivik
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I have come to two tentative conclusions about congregational song’s formative power, one long-standing and the other a more recent development. The first is that for congregational song to be formative it must allow the singer to bring all of themselves to worship. Too often the emotions that are considered unseemly—grief, anger, doubt, despair—are still absent from our church’s song and, save pastoral prayers, the liturgy. Yet, if we can assume that worship is spiritually formative (which is hopefully a safe assumption in the pages of Liturgy), this liturgical lack suggests that these emotions are outside of the purview of formation. If we do not bring the fullness of ourselves and our world to God, we cut off those very parts from the Spirit’s transformative power in and through worship. In short, what cannot be brought before God in worship cannot be transformed by God through worship.
However, there arises an equal but opposite problem, which often occurs when congregations take these critiques seriously. Here, songs become so focused on expressing the long-unexpressed emotions of people that they lose their doxological character and are in danger of becoming little more than a musical form of group psychotherapy or, at the very least, becoming solely self-referential. In my own hymn writing, this temptation is the strongest, in part because these are also the types of hymns that people tend to respond to most positively. Hymns that speak directly to emotions like doubt or anger, for example, are often the ones that strike a chord with people precisely because they are so rare and poignant, and thus garner the most responses and shares on social media. Clearly, part of the reason for the popularity of these hymns in certain quarters is because they are fulfilling a real pastoral need, but there is always the danger of the hymn becoming little more than a metrical form of the hymnwriter’s psychological state.
The growing realization of this temptation in my own writing along with my continued study of spiritual formation has led me to a second, still developing, conclusion: for congregational song to be spiritually formative, its focal point must move beyond the interior state of the singers to the God we worship, helping us forget, or even die to, ourselves in the process. This language of forgetting the self, let alone dying to self, might seem antithetical to many popular understandings of spiritual formation that tend to highlight the importance of self-knowledge, self-awareness, and doing one’s own inner work. . .
In Christian thought, this is demonstrated most clearly in Christ’s call to die to self so we can live in God. What often forms us most spiritually is not a hyperfocus on the self, but a forgetting of the self; not an invitation for God to come into our full lives, but an invitation to empty ourselves so to join God’s divine life. Both movements, then, become essential: naming what is true in our self that we might lose the self and be filled with God.
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David Bjorlin is the assistant professor of worship at North Park Theological Seminary and a widely published hymnwriter. His latest collection, Hope Will Not Fail, was published by GIA in 2024.