A representative of the Student Association (SA) announced in chapel two weeks ago they would be holding a contest for lament poems until Feb. 11.
Junior SA representative Malachi Brown said he came up with the idea for the contest in November after taking a seminar on Psalms with professor of Bible and Ministry Kevin Youngblood.
Brown said after a three-week span of taking submissions, a panel of five judges will read over the poems and pick two or three of the best ones to pair with composers so they can be made into hymns.
“So many of the songs that we sing in church are songs of praise and nothing else,” Brown said. “If we’re saying praise but feeling anger or depression, there’s a discord between what’s going on in our hearts and what we’re saying. We don’t have to lie to God.”
Brown said his biggest goal in doing this project is for it to go beyond Harding.
“This isn’t just a Harding problem,” Brown said. “One of the problems with our corner of the church is that we don’t know how to express things. If we get one more lament in our hymn book, or just a common way of expressing how we feel, that’ll be worth it to me.”
Youngblood, who is part of the panel of judges, said it is a dream come true to have one of his students implement a semester project into a campus-wide undertaking.
“The reason why I talk about this imbalance in contemporary worship in class is because I hope to plant a seed in students that they will at some point address it and try to bring things back into a better balance so that broken and hurting people feel like they should come to worship,” Youngblood said. “It’s really exciting to see how quickly he jumped on that need and thought of a way to start addressing it.”
Senior Haylie Douglas, who also took the Psalms class with Youngblood and is part of the SA, said she was glad Brown pitched the idea at one of the SA’s spiritual life meetings.
“A lot of times, the songs we sing in church are all very upbeat and happy, and that’s just not what life is, and that’s not even what the biblical writers seem to suggest for our lives,” Douglas said. “I’m hoping that we can just embrace lament and learn the importance of it yet still glorify God in the process of it.”
