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Welcome: Worship Forms What We Learn to Feel

Most of us know worship matters. What I keep wondering is quieter, and maybe more consequential: what is worship doing to the way we feel?

We sing. We pray. We confess. We listen. We come to the Table. Then we do it again the next week, and the week after that, until the words and gestures begin to live in us. They teach us what to love, how to grieve, what to hope for, and what we are allowed to bring into the presence of God.

That slow work is what I want to pay attention to here.

What I write about

This Substack circles around Christian worship and emotional formation: congregational song, trauma-informed theology, lament, contemporary worship music, and the strange way repeated words and melodies settle into the body.

At times I’ll read hymns, praise songs, and worship trends closely. At times I’ll take academic research and ask what it might mean for pastors, worship leaders, and people trying to pray faithfully in ordinary churches. And often I’ll stay with grief, sadness, longing, joy, attention, and hope—not as side issues, but as places where faith is being formed.

The questions are persistent ones for me. How do our songs teach us to feel? When does worship make room for sorrow, and when does it hurry us past it? What kind of hope are we practicing together? What happens when a church learns to tell the truth before God without turning pain into performance?

Why this matters

Worship is never emotionally neutral. I believe that more deeply all the time.

The songs we repeat, the prayers we inherit, the silences we keep, and the stories we tell shape what we imagine the Christian life is supposed to feel like. They teach us whether sadness belongs in church, whether anger can become prayer, whether joy has to be bright and uncomplicated, whether hope means honesty or avoidance.

And people do not come to worship as blank slates. We come carrying grief, fatigue, desire, anxiety, memory, numbness, gratitude, and longing. Worship meets us there. Sometimes it gives us words when we have none. Sometimes it trains patience into us. Sometimes it widens our capacity for joy. But it can also teach us to hide, perform, or baptize avoidance as faith.

So this is the question I keep carrying: what kind of emotional life is our worship making possible?

Why subscribe?

If you subscribe, you’ll get essays that try to be theological without floating above real life, pastoral without smoothing over pain, and hopeful without asking anyone to pretend.

I’ll keep returning to questions like these:

· What are our worship songs training us to expect from God?

· Why does lament belong near the center of Christian prayer?

· How can churches become more honest places for people carrying pain?

· What can Augustine teach us about love, grief, desire, and joy?

· How might trauma-informed theology reshape the way we plan and lead worship?

· What can empirical research teach us about singing, belonging, memory, and formation?

I’m writing for pastors, worship leaders, theologians, musicians, caregivers, and ordinary Christians who have sensed that a song, a prayer, or a silence was doing more than filling space. It was forming something in them.

If you care about worship that tells the truth—worship that can hold sorrow without surrendering to despair, worship that can cultivate joy without requiring pretense—I’d be glad to have you here.

Subscribe, and let’s keep asking what worship is doing to what we love, how we grieve, what we hope for, and who we are becoming before God.

I also do not push paying for a subscription, as I do not have anything extra to offer due to time restrictions, but I’d be grateful if you wanted to support my work!