So I’ll be bold

I just can’t get Mumford & Sons’ earworm of a single, “I Will Wait,” out of my head.

Perhaps you’ve heard this song, too, whether in a shopping mall, on the radio or in your local Anglican parish. Maybe it’s being sung alongside “How Great Thou Art” and “Here I Am, Lord.”

“I Will Wait” calls to me. It reminds me of who I am called to be. It takes seriously the vicissitudes of life. It embraces faithfulness in the midst of life’s pain and heaviness and the dust they leave behind.

This is a bold, passionate, audacious song of faithfulness. It is a song that calls me, that calls us to use our heads alongside our hearts. It’s a song that invokes devotion through the kind of word and melody I long to hear in church.
I can probably count on two hands the number of congregations that would consider this music appropriate for worship.

All the while we laud efforts like Back to Church Sunday as a way of bringing people back into our places of worship. But for what? And to what? We’re willing to hire musicians and soloists who don’t believe the words they’re singing. And yet, we balk at music from the secular canon, even though it, too, contains songs of profound faithfulness and devotion. These songs can also call us back to the table, back to the cross, back to the life we find in Jesus Christ.

Songs such as those written by Mumford may not be a part of your culture, but they’re an integral part of mine.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting the inclusion of this music simply for the sake of relevance or getting people back to church. I don’t much care if the church is seen as cool. If the church is authentically to be the church, it will be extremely uncool. Even so, I have decided to follow Jesus.

And so, as I’m articulating these thoughts, I need you to know that what I’m searching for, yearning for, desperate for, is a church whose liturgy resounds all week long. I crave a liturgy whose prayers and music and homily and sacrament all root me deeply in the stories of God’s coming kingdom, and spur me to live God’s kingdom come in the here and now.

When I hear “I Will Wait” on a Thursday afternoon, will it be in isolation or will it be enmeshed with the previous week’s liturgy? How will such a song inform my understanding of Jesus healing the lepers (Luke 17:11-19)? And how will the story of this miraculous healing and the Samaritan’s response inform what I hear in that song?

So I’ll be bold
As well as strong
And use my head alongside my heart
So take my flesh
And fix my eyes
That tethered mind free from the lies

But I’ll kneel down
Wait for now
I’ll kneel down
Know my ground

Raise my hands
Paint my spirit gold
And bow my head
Keep my heart slow

Cause I will wait, I will wait for you
And I will wait, I will wait for you
And I will wait, I will wait for you
And I will wait, I will wait for you
(Mumford & Sons, “I Will Wait” from the 2012 album, Babel)

Andrew Stephens-Rennie is a member of the national youth initiatives team of the Anglican Church of Canada.