In the Current Issue: “Finding and Forgetting Oneself: The Formative Power of Congregational Song" (Part 2)
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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For fourteen years, I have served as the worship pastor at Resurrection Covenant Church (colloquially known as ResCov), a small faith community in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. It is made up of mostly Millennials (aged 30s to early 40s) who grew up in more conservative evangelical settings and desired to find a church that better reflected their evolving theological and social values and helped them raise their children in a more expansive and inclusive tradition. While no two stories are the same, one reason repeatedly given for people’s attraction to ResCov was some variation on, “You preach, sing, and pray about all the topics and emotions that my church never would.” In the realm of worship music, many had only experienced churches whose songs were largely upbeat expressions of a positive, assured, and victorious faith, or slower tempo expressions of an intimate relationship with Jesus.
. . . The issue for many of these songs is not that they are sung at all, but that that they are too often sung exclusively. To use a helpful metaphor employed by liturgist John Witvliet, we need a balanced diet of the songs we sing in worship. There is absolutely a time for songs of assurance and intimacy, it is just not all the time. For a mature spirituality does not only inhabit the well-lit pastures of assurance and intimacy, but also the shadowed valleys of doubt and despair.
But for many of my congregants, when they began traveling these shrouded paths and needed a heartier fare of honest songs, they continued to be fed a steady diet of uplifting ones that bore little resemblance to their lived experience and no longer nourished them. They discovered that they were singing almost exclusively prescriptive songs of aspiration without any description of their current spiritual reality. Aspirational songs can serve as a powerful means of singing ourselves toward the assurance or faith we seek. We may sing “It Is Well with My Soul” through gritted teeth when it is still very much not well as part of the movement toward wellness. . .
As the original hymnbook of the Hebrew people, Christ, and the church, no other collection of writings can teach us more about the connection between spiritual formation and congregational song than the Psalms. And if this collection of 150 hymns does teach us anything, it is the necessity of bringing the whole of human experience and emotions, even the most difficult or troubling, before God in prayer and worship that they may be transformed. . .
For it is only when we lose our life that we can save it (Luke 9:24), only when we die with Christ that we can be raised with Christ (Rom. 6:3–5), only when we no longer live that Christ can live in us (Gal. 2:20). This process of emptying the self or dying to self in order to be filled or raised by Christ helps to reinterpret these passages. No longer are they misinterpreted as texts that lead the follower of Christ to self-hatred or a dour asceticism; they are instead formational roadmaps to freedom.
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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.