Recovering the “Lost Art of Lament” in Worship

“What does it look like for lament to be a normal, faithful part of corporate worship—not just something we do at funerals, rare or occasional services, or in private?” That was the foundational question for Emily Snider Andrews when she co-led a 2022 Teacher-Scholar Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. 

“Our main goal was to help local churches reclaim the lost art of lament—to comfort those who suffer and to stir empathy in those who are comfortable,” Andrews says. She teaches music and worship at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, and is executive director of its Center for Worship and the Arts (CWA).

The grant gathered pastors and worship leaders from eight congregations in metro Birmingham to learn about biblical lament and practicing lament in worship. Participants also shared how they use lament in their church contexts. 

A few years on, grant participants have stayed in touch through CWA events and in other ways. “Most churches developed one-off services. Others produced especially concrete reflections on what they tried and noticed in their congregations,” Andrews says. She uses case studies from that grant to help her current students see what lament can look like in evangelical, mainline, and charismatic worship services. 

Andrews says that the first step to help churches lament is to show that lament is biblical and that they can identify and deepen how they already are lamenting. Starting simply is the best way to make lament a worship habit.

Lament is a biblical worship practice 

The grant gathered pastors and worship leaders for workshops in October and April to look at how lament shows up across scripture. Andrews notes a few examples: “The Israelites understood themselves to be those who wrestle with God (Gen 32:28). Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Job, and the prophets argued with God. Laments are the most common psalm type, and even Jesus cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Psalm 22:1). “We explained that lament in worship is not ‘performing sadness.’ It’s a biblical form of truthful prayer,” Andrews says. “The Bible invites us to bring real suffering to God with honesty, protest, petition, and trust. Lament is a worship practice, not a detour from worship. It can happen through prayers, sung texts, silence, testimony, and preaching.” 

Between workshops, project directors met with each church. “We found that many churches have been formed by a ‘positivity’ assumption,” Andrews says. “They believe that worship must be uplifting, joyful, and celebratory.” One church “rarely, if ever” included lament. In churches that do include lament, people said new members often mention they’d never seen it in their previous churches. And few of Andrews’ Samford students know about lament. “People are often relieved to find that lament is in the Bible,” Andrews says.

She notes that many churches find it easiest to introduce lament in worship after a tragedy, disaster, or shared loss. However, it helps if the church already has language to bring their pain to God.

After agreeing to be in the grant cohort but before the first workshop, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church lost three members in a 2022 church potluck shooting. Rector John Burruss says that the practice of lament before, during, and after the grant helped St. Stephen’s “handle the tragedy with grace and hope.”

“Lament is a normative worship practice in traditional Episcopal worship,” he says. “We follow the three-year lectionary. This means we hear psalms and other scripture 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.”

Identify and deepen current practices

Grieving together feels natural after sad events. “But occasional lament practices leave little space for the everyday grieving that worshipers need to voice,” Andrews says. That’s why it’s important to identify and deepen current lament practices. Churches can build on practices they already use, like opening words, prayers, following the church calendar, and expressing the congregation’s theological streams.

Chris Jones, senior pastor of Meadow Brook Baptist Church, reported that he or David Vaughan, the worship pastor, sometimes open worship by “acknowledging the pain some bring each week to our congregational gathering.” Next, they use a psalm text to call people to worship and then voice that pain in the invocation. These short corporate prayers of lament sometimes replace the normal prayer of confession used early in the service.

Bart Box, senior pastor of Christ Fellowship Church, told the cohort that he often includes sentences of lament in the weekly pastoral prayer of intercession. “We regularly lament conditions in our church, nation, and world. We confess our confusion and struggle with gun violence, racism, poverty, hurting the weak, and ignoring people in need,” he says. Sometimes the entire five- to seven-minute prayer is a lament about subjects such as abortion, fatherlessness, and foster care or members’ physical and emotional suffering.

Vestavia Hills Baptist Church created two distinct services for remembrance and grief. Both have continued since the grant ended. Its All Saints Sunday service, on the first Sunday of November, allows congregants to remember together all church members or loved ones who have died in the last year. During Advent, the church holds an afternoon Service of Consolation, a more intimate gathering to support people dealing with any kind of loss.

Shades Valley Community Church is an Evangelical Free Church that embraces three streams of worship: evangelical, liturgical, and charismatic. Senior pastor Jonathan Haefs reported to the grant cohort that all three streams help worshipers respond to tornadoes, shootings, and other tragedies. Pastors teach straight through books of the Bible (evangelical) and talk about sadness and grief when those topics come up. After one tragedy, the worship pastor led a structured prayer of grief (liturgical). This moved some people to come to an open mic and share freeform prayers of lament, while others gathered in prayer around an on-stage singer particularly affected by the tragedy (charismatic).

Start simply

Andrews says churches don’t have to create an entire lament service right away. Instead, she suggests some low-barrier first steps that consistently worked for churches in the cohort. Meadow Brook Baptist, for example, added a brief lament petition to the prayers of the people for four weeks. Other churches make room for silence after confession, scripture readings, or during prayers. “Even sixty to ninety seconds of silent reflection can be powerful,” Andrews says. 

Call and response is a simple form for introducing lament. Andrews suggests using scripture passages such as a lament psalm to pray responsively. After the 2023 school shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Homewood Community Church used a call-and-response written prayer that included scripture and prescribed words of response by the congregation.

Many Homewood members know people in Nashville’s Covenant Presbyterian Church and The Covenant School because both churches belong to the Presbyterian Church in America. Homewood’s pastor led a corporate responsive prayer that honestly laid people’s pain, anger, and grief before God. “We instructed the congregation to pray words that they probably weren’t familiar praying in response,” Homewood leaders reported. “This act of lamenting in prayer brought the reality of the world to bear into the worship space, and many were impacted by it.”

This act of lamenting in prayer brought the reality of the world to bear into the worship space.

At regular points during a prayer or litany, the leader can say, “Lord, in your mercy,” and the people can respond, “Hear our prayers.” The psalms provide responses such as “I am poor and needy; come quickly to me, O God” (Psalm 70:5, NIV) and ”Do not be far from me, my God; come quickly, God, to help me” (Psalm 71:12, NIV).

“Advent and Holy Week are natural spaces to practice longing and grief without it feeling random,” Andrews observes. During the grant, Homewood Community experimented with a midday prayer service during Holy Week. It included readings from the Old and New testaments, reflective silence, and prayer. The point was to help people enter into Jesus’s anguish and, in the words of C. S. Lewis, “lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”

Make it a habit

One of the biggest takeaways of the grant, Andrews says, was that “lament becomes more sustainable when it’s treated as an ongoing pastoral tool and a discipleship practice, not just a one-off response to tragedy.” 

“In-between words” and preaching are the ways that Dawson Family of Faith regularly addresses suffering, says John S. Woods, music and worship pastor. He often frames songs with sentences such as:

• “Even through the joy found in this hymn, we join in the chorus of all creation as we lament the brokenness of our world and long for the fullness of God’s kingdom."
• “In the midst of a world that often seems to have lost its way, this song declares the truth that our hope and salvation are found in the unchanging character of our God.”
• “As you sing these words today, sing it for your sisters and brothers who are living within the rubble of pain and loss today. You’ll be their voice of hope.”

“Although the use of the term ‘lament’ may not always be explicitly employed,” Woods says, “our preaching serves as the primary vehicle for lament in worship at Dawson. Our preaching draws from the scriptures as its source, contextualized by current events and real-life circumstances. This allows us to address the suffering that permeates the world around us.”

Woods explains that the preacher often invites worshipers to help ease suffering “through acts of kindness and lifestyle changes.” Sometimes the preacher recognizes how deeply a natural disaster hurts people and communities. Then he encourages the congregation to be part of the healing—by praying, serving, or giving to help those in need. “These moments often carry eschatological themes, pointing to the absence of lament in heaven,” Woods adds.

David Vaughan, Meadow Brook Baptist’s worship pastor, says, “For most in our congregation, lament has become a regular part of our routine. In 2025, our Maundy Thursday services centered on the betrayal of Jesus as we walked through the story of the upper room to the garden of Gethsemane with his disciples and his arrest. We incorporated Psalm 22 along with the gospel readings. We planned something similar for 2026.

“Even though our congregation is familiar with and used to lament being part of our gatherings,” he says, “it is still a bit uncomfortable for people. I think that is just fine. We lament because we are uncomfortable.”