The world has changed a lot since eight churches in metro Birmingham, Alabama, took part in a worship renewal grant on lament. Emily Snider Andrews co-led the 2022 Teacher-Scholar Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. She teaches music and worship at Samford University and is executive director of its Center for Worship and the Arts in Birmingham, Alabama.
Many churches in the grant cohort added or deepened existing lament practices in worship. Still, pastors and worship leaders report that Christians often disagree strongly—now more than ever—about whether or how to lament things beyond personal sin or sorrow.
“In a small group discussion, one worship pastor commented that ‘Southern church culture’ doesn’t easily accommodate the ‘messy authenticity’ leaders need to lead well in such an environment,” Andrews observes.
In churches that keep working on the practice of bringing pain to God, leaders describe reasons for reluctance to lament in worship. They suggest tying lament to hope, paying close attention to words, and finding common ground.
Reluctance
Andrews says the grant cohort gave many reasons for reluctance to include lament in worship. “Many churches have been formed by a ‘positivity’ assumption that worship must be uplifting, joyful, and celebratory,” she says. “Lament requires vulnerability, and leaders can worry it will feel uncontrolled, politically volatile, or emotionally too much for the average worshiper.
“Pastors and ministers of worship worry that lament doesn’t speak to the corporate nature of worship.,” she adds. “Since COVID, some churches say they are missing the depth needed for people to feel safe enough to share honest pain and sadness. Participants found church leaders to be either fearful or inept at fostering the authentic vulnerability needed to lament well. And some fear it will dampen evangelistic energy in churches that see evangelism as their core mission. They think lament will confuse people who assume that Christian faith equals feeling OK.”
Grant participants said that political diversity is a significant factor in reluctance. “The question about political diversity is very challenging for us,” says John S. Woods, the music and worship pastor at Dawson Family of Faith (Dawson Memorial Baptist Church). “I’m not sure I have a helpful answer other than attempting to represent both sides, which makes it hard to pray or lead with integrity to your own personal convictions.”.
John Burruss, rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, says that the practice of lament is built into traditional Episcopal worship. “We follow the three-year lectionary,” he explains. “This means we hear psalms and other scriptures that cry out to God for help and salvation as opposed to only readings of joy and gratitude. Except on Easter, we speak a corporate confession of sin every Sunday.
“Yet, although our church continues to grow and thrive, we are lamenting less than before,” he adds. “We should do more. I anticipate we will have some kind of service for peace that laments the challenges of this world in the coming months, but we haven’t put it together. We don’t have as many people participating in our annual Jonathan Daniels pilgrimage,” an event to remember the work of an Episcopalian civil rights hero and to consider how it can inform justice work today.
Tie lament to hope
David Vaughan, worship pastor at Meadow Brook Baptist Church, says that “linking hope with lament has been key” for his congregation. “We acknowledge that there is a time to lament and to allow yourself the freedom to express your true feelings to God,” he says, “but we always emphasize the hope we have in Christ. Sometimes we will sing about this hope, and other times we will offer a corporate prayer of thanksgiving for the hope we have in Christ.”.
At Dawson Family of Faith, Woods says, lament is present in songs, prayers, and sermons. “We recognize that suffering is real, spiritually significant, and ultimately conquered by Christ,” he says. “We often link lament to hope in how we frame songs. For example, I might say, ‘Amidst our sorrow and questions, and even frustration about God’s plan and purposes, this song reminds us of the steadfast love and power of our Savior, who is our rock and refuge, and is always good.’”
Andrews agrees with the practice of linking lament and hope—“but don’t rush to hope,” she says. “Allow people to sit with difficult feelings and situations. Even sixty to ninety seconds of silent reflection can be powerful.”
Vestavia Hills Baptist Church uses tangible symbols and actions to pair lament with hope in its annual All Saints Sunday service and its Advent Service of Consolation. On All Saints Sunday, family members come forward to light a candle in memory of a loved one. Then leaders invite everyone to write a recent loss on dove-shaped paper. While music plays, congregants go forward to pin their loss to a wreath.
The Service of Consolation uses silence so people can sit with sorrows such as death, divorce, job loss, chronic illness, family conflict, and other heavy issues. “We offer opportunity for worshipers to light candles. This physical movement and symbolic gesture acknowledge our lament and the hope we have in Christ,” pastor Eric Spivey reported to the grant cohort.
“We found in both annual services that lament on its own is not enough,” he says. “These expressions must in some way be paired with the promise of hope offered to us through Jesus Christ. We can simultaneously sanctify lament and, without invalidating those expressions, give assurance that our lament is not the end.”
We can simultaneously sanctify lament and, without invalidating those expressions, give assurance that our lament is not the end.
Words matter
Some churches find it works best to find words other than “lament.” Others look for ways to acknowledge suffering in the world without trying to be prophetic or advocating for a particular political position.
In 2023, Woods reported to the grant cohort that lamenting politicized topics can be challenging. That is still the case. “It’s more faithful to who we are to do in-between words that hint at lament rather than saying, ‘And now we are going to have a time of lament,’” Woods says. “At Dawson Family of Faith, we’re good at confession, historic prayers, and naming that we are sinful. We’re good at piety and naming national tragedy or sad things around us. But in our context, it may be that we substitute intercessory prayer for lament. Rather than saying, ‘We lament this,’ we may say, ‘God, we pray for the place that was hit by the hurricane or other weather disaster’ instead of saying, ‘We lament global warming.’
“Lament may be a way of being prophetic, of naming something that isn’t the way we wish it,” Woods adds. “But being prophetic these days is a challenge. Maybe we could zoom out and pray, ‘Lord, we all have different convictions here, but we want for Christ’s will to be done.”
He explains that it works best to rely on preaching to address issues with pastoral sensitivity and nuance that does not lean toward advocacy. “This is a challenge for the evangelical church today, which I believe is too closely tied to conservative Christian politics in a way that isn’t helpful,” Woods says. “Expressing lament is often viewed as advocating for something which people in your congregation might consider progressive. This, in my view, is the defining challenge of expressing lament in a context that is most generally moderate to conservative.”
David Vaughan says that Meadow Brook Baptist Church does use the word “lament,” most often in psalm readings. “We have not mentioned climate change, but we have certainly mentioned immigration, racism, and war—but not from a particular political platform,” he says. “We have a very strong relationship with an African American congregation in our city. We meet multiple times a year to build community, learn from one another, and discuss racism together. We have lamented racism, immigration issues, and war in our worship gatherings.”
Find common ground
In prayers, sermons, and congregational life, church leaders look for ways to express what Christians can agree on.
“We have made it a practice to leave out politics in our corporate gatherings,” Vaughan says. “However, we do lament on the Sanctity of Life Sunday and grieve for the unborn children as well as for women who have walked the difficult road of abortion. This is done in an encouraging way to recognize that each individual circumstance is different. We are not to judge but offer hope and love.”
At St. Stephen’s Episcopal, John Burruss says, “I am honest about the challenges of the world in my preaching without being polarizing.” After protestors Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis during Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Operation Metro Surge in January 2026, for example, Burruss didn’t mention it in his sermon on Matthew 4:12–23. But he did preach about the fear and uncertainty that Peter, Andrew, James, and John may have felt when Jesus called them to become fishers of people, and he told the story of Malala Yousafzai, who found courage to keep working for human rights after a Taliban gunman shot her. “The truth that drives us into this place week in and week out is that the good news of God in Christ is so powerful,” he preached. “It has the power to command us to lay down our nets and follow Jesus, to lay down our security and to entrust our full lives to God.”
Burruss’s choices allowed him to address current events at a slant: “I used imagery of a woman who was attacked essentially by her government. I make parallels to the current climate, addressing the situation that many feel we find ourselves in, without trying to shame the person who supports where we have arrived today,” he says. “I hope that hearts can be broken open to hear the good news.
“Actually, we haven’t been lamenting as much lately as we’ve been working to find common ground,” he adds. The congregation has begun to use Braver Angels training to help people learn how to deescalate conversations and sit with those with whom they disagree. Participants later come together as “Reds” and “Blues” to discuss an issue that requires faith to respond to. Then they create a position that both sides can agree on.
After looking back over what church leaders learned during and since the grant, Andrews said, “By the end, we found some consensus around this: Lament can be a unifying practice when it stays close to shared concrete grief and biblical language. It’s often wiser to lament suffering plainly—what is happening to people—than to offer solutions in those moments.”
