Learning to Lament: Complaining to God about the Decline of the Church

How Terrible that…

Lamentations begins with a shriek, ekh or ekhah in Hebrew, a word that lacks sensible translation, a word that conveys in animal cry what is inarticulate and unspeakable. ¹ It is a sound made in an individual rather than by an individual, a sound ripped from the lungs on a rush of wind. Translated roughly ‘How terrible that. . .’ it is the first word of the book spoken by one looking at desolate Jerusalem, a city ruined by the conquering Babylonian invader. The shriek is involuntary and impossible to withhold from anyone who once knew Jerusalem, now an unspeakable ruin. But it is also a sound that rises in the back of my throat every Sunday morning with our call to worship and it is stifled only at great cost. This shriek is an inarticulate wailing over the slow demise of a once proud and populous congregation, now deprived of its children, its members, its money and much of its hope, a church known more for its absence than by its presence, by its losses rather than by its gains. Gone are the children, gone are the vital young, gone are the able-bodied and gone are many of the once faithful elderly. It is a shriek borne of institutional grief and the creeping feeling of pastoral and congregational failure. As a church we are living with death, witnessed by the many empty pews once filled not only by those who have now departed this life, but also by those who have simply departed, drifted away, disillusioned and distracted in a world that no longer accounts the church worthy of its attention. The terrible ache comes with the memory of the same pews once filled, the empty halls once bustling with children, the membership rolls once accounted in four digits. It is cause for lament, this grief.

Some will resonate with this heart-cry more than others and some may argue the contrary by pointing to many encouraging examples of church growth and revival. These notwithstanding, decline is a lamentable fact for thousands of churches now inhabiting the smoking ruins of former Western Christendom and this paper is for those who grieve over the church that once was. This is not a study or a commentary on the book itself, so much as it is a reflection on the metaphor of corporate grief to which the book stands as witness. In what follows I will first highlight some of the themes of Lamentations with the intent of drawing lines of comparison between the desolation of Jerusalem and the desolation of the contemporary Western church. I will argue that the one illustrates the other and that there is much to commend the use of Lamentations as a metaphor for the corporate grief of the church. Several themes from Lamentations are pertinent, including: the loss of property, loss of population, loss of children, the question of sin and judgment and loss of ecclesial identity. Secondly, and more importantly, I will argue that lament is urgently needed in the church and that our corporate worship and faith life is woefully impoverished in its absence. We cannot sing and pray and preach what is good and praiseworthy about God without first being honest about what is deeply disappointing about the God whose faithfulness has for many become a matter of doubt. In contrast to assumption, lament is not just ‘having a moan’ or complaining for the sake of complaining. The practice of lament may well serve to deepen and enrich our faith rather than make less of it. Lament is as integral to genuine piety as weeping is to genuine recovery from loss and only by travelling through the darkness of lamentation can we rediscover the light of Christ that stubbornly refuses to surrender to the dark.

What is Lament?

Before addressing that question, it’s important to begin with a definition of lament, which can be thought of in two ways: one, a passionate expression of grief or sorrow and two, quite simply, a complaint. ² The first is a simple, though heart-rending cry of pain at what is lost, a statement that articulates the source and cause of the hurt. It gives form to the disorienting loss of place in public and personal life experienced by the one lamenting. Lament is the cry of the widow in the night, the heartache of the man whose marriage has died, the tears of those left standing when all is washed away. Heart-cry is the first stage of lament which then moves to complaint in which the writer lays out a case for redress and resolution. It is angry and dangerously explicit and pushes the bounds of the covenantal relationship, but it is nonetheless an expression of hope that the terrible circumstance might somehow be reversed or redeemed in a way that leads to new life. Those who complain still retain hope that while things are not presently as they ought to be, they may well improve in the future. To direct complaint to God is to call God into account with the expectation that God will provide the sought-after redress and resolution. Lament is not a cry to an empty universe but a call to a covenant partner who will both hear and respond. A passionate expression of grief and sorrow is needful and like admitting the fact of any death, the act of doing so is potentially cathartic and transforming. Lament is a critical interim step on the road towards genuine renewal and a revived hope in God’s providential care for the church. Heart-cry and complaint, I will say more about these two definitions in what follows, but first a few lines of comparison between the destruction of Jerusalem and the withering decline of the church.

What’s Happened to the Building?

The story of the fall of Jerusalem is provided not in Lamentations itself, but in 2 Kings 25:8–12 which records the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 bce by the invading hordes of Babylon under the kingship of Nebuchadnezzar. Lamentations records these events poetically, giving voice to the beleaguered remnant, crying out, ‘How deserted lies the city, once so full of people. . .all her gateways are desolate. . .all the splendour has departed from Daughter Zion. . .the enemy has laid hands on all her treasures’ (Lamentations 1:1, 4, 6, 10). ³ The destruction of property and the loss of material wealth is the most obvious sign of the city’s destruction and dissolution; the carnage is undeniable, and the once proud city now lies in ruins.

The church has also seen its once proud buildings defaced with closure, neglect and ruin. For centuries the landscape of Britain has been adorned with elaborate cathedrals, behemoth sanctuaries and tall spires that punctuate the cityscape like exclamation marks. But how many are now deserted? How many are derelict and consumed by vegetation that sprouts from those same spires like hairs from the ears of a giant? How many foundation stones are laid bare beneath walls long crumbled? How many roofs have collapsed from want of resource? And how many more church buildings have been ‘converted’ into homes or flats or playhouses or nightclubs or climbing gyms or pubs or even byres? It is debatable which is worse: dereliction or the mockery of once proud sacred spaces abandoned and reclaimed for secular purposes. The former at least remains as evidence of a worshipping body, but the latter bears the insult of its own failure and stands witness to an incoming tide of the irreligious. And then how many more congregations worship beneath roofs and fellowship within halls that go begging for repairs ill-afforded by their elderly members? And amongst those that do make effort to ensure maintenance and repair one is left breathless at the sums of money and the congregational energy needed to do so. An outside observer might easily wonder ‘Does the building serve the people or do the people serve the building?’ If we do not lament over churches that peer out from behind walls of vegetation like ghosts from the Indian jungles of a Rudyard Kipling novel, then we must surely stand behind a wall of profound denial.

Where are the People?

With the loss of property comes the loss of population, or perhaps vice versa? The two are inextricably linked. The numbers accounting and forecasting church decline make for difficult reading and are by now so well-documented that they hardly bear repeating, but what has become of church membership? Without delving into the complex web of meaning associated with church membership, attendance, beliefs and religious practice, the bare statistics of membership decline tell their own story. Between the years 1980–2015, church attendance for Britain as a whole fell from 6,484,300 to 3,081,500, a reduction of over half in a span of 35 years. In the Church of England, for example, membership dropped from 1.44 million in 2008 to 1.36 million in 2013 and is forecast to fall to 1.24 by 2020. The Church of Scotland fares worse and has fallen from 810,000 in 2008 to 650,000 in 2013, a decline of 20%. It is forecast to drop to 450,000 by 2020. The Roman Catholic Church similarly has fallen from 1.61 million to 1.4 million in the same space of time and is forecast to fall to 1.13 million by 2020. ⁴ While there is encouraging growth amongst immigrant, Orthodox and Pentecostal churches and within numerous ‘Fresh Expressions’ of church, when measured in attendance and membership, the overall picture is one of staggering decline. Sadly, these figures are not restricted to membership and attendance but include rates of baptism, marriage, congregational giving, Sunday school attendance, etc. Callum Brown writes, ‘All the figures for Christian affiliation are at their lowest point in history.’ ⁵ Jerusalem was sent into exile, so it seems, has the church.

Where are the Children?

Most painful though is the loss of children in the church and such was the case for Jerusalem as well. Lamentations uses a variety of metaphors in which to couch its story of devastation but nothing conjures the pitiable state of the nation more so than the plight of its children, especially when the author depicts the horror of women whose children are either lost or consumed by their once doting mothers. ‘. . .her children have gone away, captives before the foe’ (1:5). ‘The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children; they became their food in the destruction of my people’ (4:10). Kathleen O’Connor writes,

As a poetic image, the sight of mothers watching their babies die is the most heart-wrenching of disasters. . . (loss of children as most heart-wrenching of all, even more so than rape and personal violation) without children we cannot imagine a future. ⁶

The church might easily look at the loss of its own children in the same light, for measured by Sunday school attendance the church is similarly bereft of its children. It is not difficult to find anecdotal tales of formerly populous Sunday schools, youth groups and children’s organisations in the church. Elderly members recall fleets of buses hired for Sunday school trips, Sunday school registers with ‘hundreds of children’, Boys’ Brigades with scores of young men, etc. Nostalgia may account for some of these stories, but statistical details bear them out as reliable accounts. In 1950 the Church of England recorded a Sunday school register of 1,342,000 children. 1980 saw that number fall to 468,000 and by 2010 to 141,000, just over 10% of the 1950 figure. The Church of Scotland fell further from 290,000 in 1950 to 27,000 in 2010, a decrease of over 90%. ⁷ One cannot help but see these stark realities played out in church after church where the Sunday school has all but vanished from the ecclesial landscape. Without children we cannot imagine a future. Where then is our lament?

Who Sinned?

Church decline is but one feature of a complex web of societal transformation and the finger of blame could be pointed in a number of directions. Secularisation, materialism, liberal humanism, religious pluralism, individualism are all worthy candidates, but these are ultimately secular explanations of what the church must reflect upon theologically. In contemporary thought, Godself is not considered as an active participant in those changes nor critiqued as the directing agent of those transforming beliefs, but such a divide would have been inconceivable in the ancient world. Attempting to separate current events from the will and ways of God would have been quite impossible; the two were one in the same. Faithfulness, or the lack of it, was not a private matter as it has become today, instead faith was a public, political matter inseparably tied to the welfare of the nation, leaving the people to wonder aloud how their own sin may have been a contributing factor in their destruction. Recognising guilt before a righteous God is the first point to which the writer turns to create a context for understanding the suffering of the exiles who credit the success of their enemies not to superior numbers or to military prowess but to the hand of God that has turned against them. They feel helpless against the violence of the Almighty and are humiliated because their sins have justified the horrors they encounter. ‘Her enemies have become the masters, her enemies prosper, because the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions. . .’ (1:5) ‘Jerusalem sinned grievously, so she has become a mockery. . .(1:8). And, ‘My transgressions were bound into a yoke; by his hand they were fastened together. . .the Lord handed me over to those whom I cannot withstand. . .the Lord is in the right for I have rebelled against his word. . .’ (1:14, 18). But even amidst the sickening awareness of their failings, there is another, deeper agony at work that prompts a far more disturbing question. Sin is undoubtedly part of the problem and the people willingly confess it, but it is only part of the problem.

Although Lamentations never denies human sin, mirroring back that sin is only a marginal concern of this book. . .The mere accumulation of violent deeds here and elsewhere implies that, if this is punishment, it exceeds all bounds, all proportionality to the sin. The God who should protect and cherish her has battered and harmed her in every way short of killing her. ⁸

Or, as Morrow puts it succinctly, Lamentations ‘mixes admission of guilt with the nation’s complaints of excess suffering’. ⁹ Throughout the larger portion of the book the people simply stare in horror at the savage extent of the suffering and the words convey their heart-cry, but also their astonished disbelief at what God has done to them. Lamentations strips away reason and confounds the logical economy of sin and punishment. ‘The Lord has destroyed without mercy all the dwellings of Judah. . .he has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel. . .the Lord has become like an enemy; he has destroyed Israel. . .he has demolished without pity’ (2:1,3,5,17). The people struggle with the old formula of sin, judgement and repentance, but the severity of the judgment is irreconcilable with the conscious extent of their sin. Boase writes, ‘The sin of the city, while perhaps lying behind God’s decision to wreak havoc, is not specified in Lamentations, making it difficult to support the argument of the sin/judgement correlation.’ ¹⁰ The destruction of Jerusalem destroys the familiar narrative and leaves another in its place. ‘God is represented as both violence and absence in Lamentations rather than sin and judgement.’ ¹¹ As painful as is the violence, it is the absence and the silence of God in Lamentations that wrings despair from the hearts of the people. The scorned woman of chapter one has already turned to the arms of her former lovers and found them empty (v. 19), but aggravating her distress is the realisation that there is no one to comfort her for all have turned away (v. 2), apparently even Godself. She begs, ‘See, O Lord, how distressed I am. . .’ (v. 20), but the Lord does not see, or refuses to see or has turned away from seeing. The absence of God makes the violence of God all the more unspeakable. ‘She asks only that God will look, see, take into consciousness what the enemy has done to her. She wants God to see her pain. God does not reply.’ ¹²

It would take a bold writer to look at his predecessors and point out blame or name their sin and failings, but as the church looks at itself and its destitution it must surely wonder if it has been complicit in its own demise? How did our parents fail? Were they too complacent, too self-satisfied, too proud of the work of their own hands? Did they honour God with their lips but not their hearts? Did they pursue the gods of their ancestors, worshipping and sacrificing at the high places? Did they fail to instruct their children in the way they should go? Did they worship a golden calf? Were the priests and ministers unfaithful, allowing the sheep to go astray? I cannot level those accusations without tarring myself with the same brush nor can I presume to see where they were blind or to labour where they were idle or to worship with greater singleness of heart. They too were well aware that the church was in steep decline and, as Gay argues, ‘Some of the ministers retiring now. . .have spent their whole ministries with declining congregations.’ ¹³ Perhaps lament was fermenting in their hearts as well? All I can say with certainty is that I lament, and it is me who stands amidst the ruined city of the contemporary church. I lament and God’s hand of destruction seems too heavy to bear.

Narrative Wreckage

With Jerusalem in exile, their property gone, the people gone, the children gone, their status gone and with these former markers of identity stripped away, the binding narrative of election and divine favor is also gone and the people reel from the destruction of their story. Judah underwent what Frank describes as ‘narrative wreckage.’ ¹⁴ That is, the old story of their unique identity as the chosen and favoured people of God had been wrecked. As Hillers writes, ‘For the ancient people chosen by Yahweh it meant destruction of every cherished symbol of their election by God[. . .]. Every sign that had once provided assurance and confidence in God was gone.’ ¹⁵ Thus, the destruction of the city had profound theological implications that ripped a wound far deeper than the loss of mere property. Instead there was a bewildering loss of identity, an ontological change in the people who were no longer what they once were. The former narrative of election and divine favour that had created and sustained them for generations was irretrievably gone, ¹⁶ for God had acted with devastating consequence. The fact of the destruction needed no words, but Lamentations gave meaning to the facts, providing a script to the people and focusing their minds on the God who had called them and who now seemingly had abandoned them, revealing an aspect of God’s character previously unknown, at once awesome and terrible. The destruction was material and local, but the effect was psychological and global: the whole people of God had been destroyed. When ‘Judah went into captivity away from her land’ (2 Kings 25:21) it was a loss measured not in degree, but in kind. They had become something altogether different, and so has the church.

Complaining to God

Lamentations is not offered as an historical record of the event surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem. What Lamentations offers instead is a poetic description of an otherwise indescribable event. Like the clean-up after the devastation of a tsunami or a hurricane, the details lack their former context and no longer serve as meaningful guides. All points of reference have been obliterated. What replaces the detail is the inarticulate heart-cry of agonizing loss, the lament. Because it offers what might be considered an ahistorical view of the events the words can more easily be used in liturgical settings outside the community of ancient Israel. It is this use I am proposing for the church today. The losses are of a different sort and magnitude than those referenced in Lamentations, but the withering decline of the last sixty-plus years has led the church to a very similar place: the loss of identity. In order to recognize that loss and to articulate the shock and bewilderment that has come with it the church needs lament as heart-cry, but also as complaint and specifically, complaint against God.

Lament is a form of speech that empowers the speaker by enabling him/her to clarify to God, or to others, their sense of aggrieved injustice and to advocate for change, specifically calling upon God to affect those changes. ¹⁷ The speaker gives full vent to his sense of alienation and outrage over what has happened to him and recalls a sense of divine prerogative over circumstance. God is blamed as the one who has disappointed in the covenant promise of care and provision. God is not rejected, nor is the speaker embittered by God’s apparent absence, nor inclined to abandon faith. Quite the opposite, it is like the disciples crying out to Jesus, asleep in the boat in the middle of the storm (Luke 8:22–24). It is an urgent call to action in which God is impugned as the agent who has yet to engage with the crisis. Lament as complaint is not a rejection of God but a deep engagement with God in the covenant relationship; it is not a lack of faith but rather a profound statement of faith. With the absence of lament comes the loss of responsible power both from the speaker and from the deity.

The second party to the covenant (the petitioner) has become voiceless or has a voice that is permitted to speak only praise and doxology[. . .] covenant minus lament is finally a practice of denial, cover-up, and pretence, which sanctions social control. ¹⁸

Without lament the second party must simply acquiesce to circumstance burying her feelings as if they didn’t matter. When those feelings are expressed as lament the covenant relationship is enlarged rather than diminished. Gordon writes, ‘Lament, therefore, essentially enlarges the playing field in which conversation with God can take place. It gives words for the moments of life when we are left speechless and dumbfounded.’ ¹⁹

How can the church praise God when it is ‘speechless and dumbfounded’? ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?’ (Psalm 137:4). How can we sing the Lord’s song in the far country of grief, disillusionment and disappointment? How can we praise God when we are angry with God? How can we offer doxology when the former context of that doxology has been destroyed? How can the church go on praising God when the pews are empty and the Sunday school has vanished and the roof is leaking and whole generations have walked away from the church? I do not for once suggest that God has promised me that my church would be full on Sunday morning, but I have inherited a church that once was full, but is now fast approaching emptiness. In consequence, our praise seems hollow and groundless. There are no prayers we can pray or hymns we can sing with integrity when God is silent and the context of our faith has collapsed. Why should we praise God when it seems that God has left the building? I want to sing but what comes out is a shriek and I suspect that I am not alone in stifling that shriek.

Lament as Hope

What matters at this stage is not fixing things nor is it about trying to find our way back to some former state of glory by ‘making the church great again’. Nor, importantly, is it about wringing our hands in despair and walking away. Lament is not an ecclesiology of fatalism or an eschatology of decline, it is not about hopelessness, but is rather a determined conviction that things are not as they ought to be and ought to be better. ‘The role of the lament then is one of protest, not resignation or submission, nor the stoical ataraxia which has infiltrated Christian piety.’ ²⁰ Lament is at the end of the day a liturgy of hope, it is a stubborn conviction that things can and ought to be better than they are and that complaining to God and God’s apparent absence is actually an awakening in our spirit and a deep hunger for righteousness in our own souls. We don’t complain or protest if we don’t honestly believe that things can change and ought to change for something that is better than the present, even if it means the former way of understanding our place in the world is no longer cogent. As Hinze writes,

Lamenters are also challenged to re-examine their most basic convictions about who God is and how God works in the world [. . .] can we be receptive to new ways of reforming the community of faith and envisioning a more just world? ²¹

The most difficult thing for the church today is not to lament, it is to not lament. The church is living with heartache, confusion and bewilderment at its staggering losses and it can no more staunch the haemorrhaging of its members than it can restore the myriad cultural features that inflated the church to its zenith in the late 1950s. It is caught in between two worlds and the longer it clings to one the more difficult it will be to embrace the next. Lament is dangerous because there is no guarantee that it will lead to something better. It is not a fix to an insoluble problem so much as it is an admission of the fact of the problem and an explicit prayer of yearning to the only One who can provide a way forward, but there may well be a deeper reason to lament and, in turn, a deeper reason to celebrate.

Mourning or Dancing?

Bemoaning the decline of the German Church, Bonhoeffer wrote,

The price we are having to pay to-day in the shape of the collapse of the organized church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving. We poured forth unending streams of grace. But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard. ²²

Bonhoeffer critiqued a church that had long accommodated itself to the casual mores of an ostensibly ‘Christian’ populace arguing that it had effectively sold its birth right by dispensing grace on the cheap and asking nothing in return. In consequence, the church lost the ability to critique the culture in which it resided, with devastating effect. Shenk writes similarly,

The church is most at risk where it has been present in a culture for a long period so that it no longer conceives its relation to culture in terms of missionary encounter. The church remains socially and salvifically relevant only as long as it is in tension with culture. ²³

Living in tension with culture is quite the opposite from living with its civic endorsement and the church would do well, as Allan wrote, to recall it is purposed to resist a ‘subservience to a bourgeois culture’ and must never ‘transform the revolutionary ethic of Jesus into an inoffensive prudential morality.’ ²⁴ Allan wrote with missionary zeal in 1950’s Scotland when the church was on the rise in national attendance and membership, but he knew from his own Glasgow ministry that the church had already given in to the same laxity that Bonhoeffer decried from Germany. It had accommodated itself to the times and fallen victim to the idol of worldly acclaim and was no longer ‘salvifically relevant’ as an alternative society ‘in tension with the culture.’ God had been reduced to ‘a manageable reality among the forms of human business.’ ²⁵ Ought not the lament to have begun 70 years ago?

While the numbers and the precipitous and arguably terminal decline are the most obvious and disconcerting features of the contemporary Western church, there is a much deeper lament carried by many of today’s dogged church members, a lament that has not yet found expression. Gay writes poignantly about the painful issue of decline in his own Church of Scotland. ‘Along with the sociology and the statistics have come the spiritual and theological questions for church members. What just happened? Why has this happened? Where is God in this? What is God saying to us through this?’ ²⁶ These are the more troubling questions and the ones most difficult to answer for those who remain actively faithful in the church. In fact, I would argue that these questions have not yet even been properly asked and perhaps it is too early to ask them, for in front of the church is the bewildering pain of its own sense of loss. As Gay writes, ‘Ironically perhaps, for an institution which takes care of so many through death and dying, I am not sure the Kirk has yet done its own grief work over the huge losses is has experienced.’ ²⁷ It is the ‘grief work’ that finds expression in lament, both as heart-cry and as complaint and the hard work of articulating that lament remains before us. At this stage however, the church would do well to consider the subject of its lament. True, the loss of property, people, children and social identity has left the church bewildered and deeply uncertain about its social function in contemporary culture, but is this loss really worthy of lament? I suggest the answer to that question is both ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ The severe decline of the last decades remains a stark reality for many congregations across Britain. There is little doubt that thousands of the faithful look about, as I do, on a Sunday morning and shake their heads in disturbed wonderment over the number of empty pews that were so recently full. The Sunday school, now so enfeebled, bears no resemblance to the one that inhabited the church only a few short decades ago and, when one considers that the generations missing from the church are in large part the children and grandchildren of its current members, one can add another layer of confusion and perhaps embarrassment and even shame at a perceived sense of personal and ecclesial failure. Lament surely begins with, ‘How lonely sits the city [church] that was once so full of people!’ (Lamentations 1:1). But in addition to lamenting the fact of our losses we ought to lament that we lament over these facts, as if faithfulness, both of God and of church, were quantified by membership figures and the Sunday school register. Upon what does the church’s identity rest? By which factors ought it quantify its success or failure? If it be property and people and pride of place, are we not most to be pitied? But, could it be that the church’s losses are actually its gain as it is slowly pushed back into its identity as a marginal culture instead of a mainstream one? Instead of lament, perhaps the church could celebrate the dismantling of its cherished illusion of prosperity and applaud the removal of its former ‘high place’? Hutter argues, I think correctly, that ‘the church must recover a sense of being “pathetic” rather than “poietic” [. . .] suffer[ing] the work of God fashioning its existence beyond its control.’ ²⁸ If the church understands pathetic as lamentably poor in people, property and social power, it is well on the way to recovery.