'Worship' songs

I wouldn't have blogged this were it not for a conversation with a significant other in my life. They had just been to a Eucharist where the theme had been Job's comforters and the music had mostly been triumphal, upbeat stuff. We talked about the mismatch, but most of all we talked about the way that when we feel not in the happiest place emotionally it can be really hard to enter into much of the contemporary worship-songs. They require us to make statements of how we feel that we can't get behind properly and they seem intent on making statments about God and faith that, at that particular time, we can't line up with fully. Yes we believe but... "help thou my unbelief". Actually what we want to do is to be able to own our grief or bewilderment before God. The Psalmists do it and Job does it but can we?

The referenced webpage is worth checking out especially point 5 which asks for songwriters to write laments for worship. I agree. However I also ask myself why there is a reluctance to do so?

I have a couple of starting reflections and would love to see some further ideas.

One is that it is hard, as a worship leader/orchestrator, to work out how to do it. I think there are a number of reasons for this: we have not experienced models; we consciously or otherwise believe that we should help people to leave feeling good. Indeed, for the most part this latter factor becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in embryo since if people 'know' that this is what a service is for then they will come expecting that and there will be difficulties if we deliberately counter-fulfill the expectation. So we design uplifting worship for consumption [!] by people who come to be uplifted. We thus marginalise those who are not in an emotional-place or of a temperament to find 'uplifting' comfortable

The second reason might be that worry that we sould sink people in gloom or worse -find that there is a mismatch of mood of congregation and the content we put before them to use. Of course, ironically, this is the mirror image of what actually goes on, but since our culture values happiness so highly we will tend to go for the upbeat.

To me, assuming these observation-musings are correct, it is clear that we need to manage expectations to some degree if we are going to use lament as a tone and mood in corporate worship. Some of that can come through actually doing it and explaining it and working with it. Some of it could come from using the liturgical year -Lent and Advent are times which probably lend themselves to an exploration of lament and the darker sides of human experience as worship. Maybe you know some other ways?