This month’s column is a bit different.
It’s an interview with Matt Searles, pastor and Director of Training for the South Central Gospel Partnership, based in Oxford, about his new album of Psalms set to original music.
AL: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to start writing songs?
MS: I never really planned to write songs, I felt my calling was to be a church pastor, which is what I’ve been doing for the last ten years or more.
Part of the role of a pastor is to teach and equip people to engage rightly with God, and it’s from this that the songs have come. I fell into songwriting after my mum was sick. I was meditating regularly on Psalm 30 and I found myself humming a tune to it. The resulting song was sung at my mum’s funeral, and after that I thought I’d try setting other Psalms to music, initially to help me engage further with them, and it grew from there.
AL: The new album, your third, is called Tumbling Sky – Psalms for Weary Souls. How did you land on that title?
MS: Over the last few years I’ve been recovering from an illness that meant I was unable to work for about a year. I had been wrestling with God and finding that my own spirituality was a little too thin to help me engage with God rightly and richly in this time. Walking with a friend through some dark valleys made us realise that we, and perhaps the wider church, were not always well equipped to walk through times of broken-ness. I felt the Lord lay on my heart a burden to try to help others who might be struggling in similar ways.
The name Tumbling Sky reflects a desire for the album that if life is falling apart and it feels like the very sky is falling, this might be an album people to turn to, not for easy answers, but for words to use to cry out to God.
The album starts out from a place of questioning and brutal honesty with God, and moves to a place of greater trust, I hope never in a trite way. My prayer is that people are able to sing along and give voice to their struggles, knowing that doubt isn’t the same as unbelief and that sadness might be the right response to our circumstances. My prayer is that, even in the sorrow, people are reminded of the truths of God and so come to be ‘sorrowful yet always rejoicing’.
AL: How do you think our culture generally deals with things like death, grief and brokenness?
MS: Our culture is uncomfortable with bro-kenness. We don’t know what to do with it, and so often we try to distract ourselves from it. This sometimes involves pretending that things aren’t really so bad, but in Scripture we see that death is an intruder, and not part of how God initially made the world. Because of this, we should be able to be honest about our brokenness. As Christians, with a hope of future resurrection, we are better equipped to face situations which, from a worldly point of view, seem hopeless.
We need to be careful as we proclaim our hope in Christ. At times we may be heard by some as saying ‘as a Christian you should never have any doubts’ or ‘as a Christian you should-n’t struggle from depression’. This is profoundly wrong and can make church a very intimidating place for those who are struggling.
AL: Music can be very important in this. Do we have space in our corporate worship for grief, doubt and lament?
MS: What we sing both expresses and shapes our emotions. Often music has the power to get past our defences and help us engage emotionally with truth. We learn of the Christian life through corporate worship, so if our church services have no place for lament, doubt and grief we are unwittingly telling struggling Christians that there is no place for these, which is a tragedy. The Bible has songs a parent who has just lost a child can sing; I want our churches to have songs like this too.
AL: What’s your hope for the role your album could play in the lives of Christians?
MS: That this album might be a blessing to Christians who are walking through dark valleys, that it might be something which helps them express their sorrow and bring it all to God. I also hope it might help those who are accompanying others walking through times of trial, to help us all learn to weep with those who weep and bear one another’s burdens.
Tumbling Sky is out now, available online to hear for free at mattsearles.bandcamp.com, where you can also buy it as a physical CD or digital download.
