By Brian Hehn

I've met many people lately who have shared the struggle of figuring out what and how to do this year. Which cause should we support when there are so many needs? Should our ministries change focus or direction in response to the latest news? Should we add things to our plate to compensate for the growing needs of the people around us? How do we keep our congregations unified while addressing increasingly political and polarizing injustices? I won't pretend to have answers to these questions. What I can do is offer three considerations, each with some practical liturgical/musical ideas and applications. I pray that they help you, as faith leaders, navigate these times faithfully.

1. Advocate for the Vulnerable & Celebrate the Bigness of God's Love

For the past three years, I've been utilizing a relatively small number of songs as our congregation's go-to communion hymns. One example is the simple but beautiful corito "Santo, Santo, Santo" (listen to a version here), led with guitar and alternating between the original Spanish and the English translation. If my memory serves correctly, this was the very first non-English song I introduced to the congregation soon after beginning my position. This foreign-language hymn came with many teaching moments about why we would sing a song like that when those people don't worship in this space. Fast forward to Sunday, January 26th, 2025, when we chose the song as a natural part of our rotation for communion songs. Suddenly, the song no longer felt like a beautiful little song but one of resistance and solidarity with people who once again feared for their family's safety.

I share that story to illustrate the first thing we can do in our local congregations during this current political climate: keep expanding our understanding of who God is and how big God's love is. Double down on those ministries you've been doing to feed people experiencing hunger, advocate for people experiencing poverty, visit the imprisoned, welcome the stranger - you know, the Jesus stuff. When the government seems especially bent on forsaking or actively harming the most vulnerable, those ministries and how they are upheld and prayed for in our worship services are much more critical.

(side note: if your church hasn't been doing ministries of some kind that serve populations outside of its own membership, I invite you to take that first step to do so as soon as possible. It's never too late to start.)

Some go-to songs and liturgical practices that I believe are especially important to use for the next four years are:

• Songs in non-English languages. These help us remember that God is way bigger than ourselves and that we're called to be a global body of disciples, not a body of disciples within one nation-state.

— Find songs that connect to your congregation and its current people and ministries. Two examples of songs we sing are "Alabaré" to connect with our ministry partners in the Dominican Republic and "Kwake Yesu" to sing with a Kenyan family who recently joined our congregation.

— Find songs that connect to current events. Two examples are "Yarabba Ssalami," a Palestinian song for peace, and "I Am Standing Waiting," a justice song to a children's melody by Shirley Erena Murray.

— Check out these free collections from The Hymn Society for other ideas and connections to your local context: Hymns In Times of Crisis, Singing Welcome: Hospitality to Refugees and Immigrants, & Songs for the Holy Other: Affirming the LGBTQIA2S+ Community.

• Consistently pray for specific vulnerable and/or persecuted populations. It's not enough to mention "the vulnerable" in passing. Take the time to name those who need our prayers and our service. In the same way, we might pray for "Nancy, our choir member who is having surgery this week," name immigrant populations in your neighborhoods each week. Name the unhoused person who often asks for money at the intersection near your church.

2. Connect Worship to your Congregants' Weekly Work

When people's day-to-day lives become more stressful, chaotic, difficult - more anything - it increases the chances that our liturgies feel all the more or all the less important. While the liturgy can often serve as a respite away from our daily grind, if it is entirely detached from our congregants' day-to-day lives, it can feel irrelevant, as if God only cares or shows up on Sundays. Connecting our liturgies to the congregation's lives is essential in helping them understand that their ministries and mission are mainly outside the walls of the church building and include the other six days of the week. It helps them understand that God is calling them and working with and through them on the assembly line just as much as in the pew. A few ways to acknowledge our congregants' lived experiences in our weekly worship services are:

• Offer a time of story-telling or "giving witness" in your services. Week in and week out, our congregants live in the real world. Take time to find stories from their lived experiences to share the small but often vital ways they encounter God and/or do God's work. By simply soliciting these stories in your weekly newsletter or bulletin, you might uncover some powerful service opportunities and blessings that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. Those stories and opportunities can then influence your weekly worship.
• Check out this wonderful project from Fuller Seminary called "Worship For Workers," which has tons of great ideas, songs, and liturgical resources on this topic.
• Utilize the psalms to help name the lament, angst, and turmoil many people feel. Walter Brueggemann's psalm categories of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation are helpful here. The Psalms of disorientation are a good place to start when trying to help a collective group of people name their anger, confusion, angst, and conflict: Psalms 12, 44, and 74 are a good place to start.

— The best complete modern psalter out there is Psalms for All Seasons if you're looking for multiple musical settings of each Psalm. (Also found in the back of the New Century Hymnal)

— Consider simply reading these psalms responsively with the leader on odd verses and the congregation on even verses.

— Also, for a lovely reflection on the Psalms helping to bridge times of strife, transition, and anxiety, check out this blog by Laura Jean Truman: Deconstruction, Disorientation, and Brueggemann's Psalms.

3. Balance the Pastoral & Prophetic

Liturgies can do a lot of things and move in a lot of different directions. Sometimes, a worship service can unite people, helping them form a new or renewed sense of unity and connection. At other times, worship services can serve to "afflict the comfortable," rousing people into action by God's call for justice. What a liturgy does is sometimes carefully chosen or designed, and the Spirit affirms that vision. At other times, what is planned is not what the Spirit had in mind, and She moves people in unintended or unexpected ways. Regardless, where two or more gather in Jesus' name, we are promised that the Spirit is with us. So, never knowing what the Spirit might do, we are called to carefully discern and plan weekly services to the best of our abilities. I have found that weekly activity to be a constant discernment process between the pastoral and the prophetic. Let me give you two examples within my context:

I recently served as a substitute musician at a downtown Baltimore church with whom my congregation is in a long-term ministry partnership. The congregation is nestled in a poor, historically Black, but now primarily Hispanic, neighborhood that is underprivileged mostly due to the city's history of redlining and racism. The congregation fiercely advocates for things like fair housing and feeding people experiencing hunger. On any Sunday morning, they do not need to be reminded of the need for justice because most congregants live within and/or surrounded by families living through daily struggle. They need a weekly reminder that God loves them and is with them. They sing songs that are familiar, and they take their time during the passing of the peace to make sure everyone is greeted. They never pass up an opportunity to sing happy birthday to someone in the pew, celebrate a graduation, or even tell a funny story about something that happened at work. Their Sunday morning hour together is a time of reunion and connection, which is essential for them to access the hope and strength they need to face the coming week. Their need on Sunday morning is pastoral.

In contrast, the congregation I currently serve is one generally of privilege. On a Sunday morning, the majority of people you'll meet are white upper-middle-class folks living in suburban or rural areas. While still needing reminders of God's love and care for them, it's more important for this group to regularly be reminded of God's call for justice and action so that they don't slip into lives of apathy. I am constantly looking for opportunities for this congregation to include prophetic words, music, and actions in our Sunday morning liturgies. How is God calling us to make changes in our own lives and the lives of others? Who needs a kick in the pants to get motivated to enact God's love in their community?

Of course, these two examples are broad strokes, and many individuals in both cases are exceptions to the circumstances I just described. However, I hope you hear the call to discernment. When planning for your congregation's worship services, what do you discern God is trying to tell them? Have many of them recently been laid off? Consider songs of reassurance and reliance on God (It Is Well With My Soul). Do many of your congregants fear that their loved ones will be deported or their Social Security checks won't arrive on time? Consider songs of lament or community (Pues si vivimos or "Once We Sang and Danced"). Is your community ambivalent or apathetic to the fear and suffering of others? Consider songs of justice that might rouse them into action (Lord, Whose Love in Humble Service, or When the Poor Ones). Listen to God on behalf of your congregation and choose liturgy faithfully to represent what you hear God saying.

"I thank my God for every remembrance of you, always in every one of my prayers for all of you, praying with joy for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Jesus Christ." – Paul's Letter to the Philippians, Chapter 1

Brian Hehn is the Director of The Center for Congregational Song, the outreach arm of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada. He also serves as the Director of Liturgical Worship and Adult Discipleship for St. John's Sweet Air Lutheran Church in Phoenix, MD. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with his beautiful family: Eve, Jakob, and Clara.

Contact us by email: ccs@thehymnsociety.org

2025 SUMMER

2025 Summer Issue

Navigating Liturgies in Times of Political Turmoil and Injustice

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What is the Future of Worship Music?

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New Year, New Hymns - A New Hymn Resource Focusing on Women

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