What I Learned from Andrew Root About Evangelism—and the Psalms

This week I had the opportunity to attend the Church Now Cafe in Holland, Michigan, hosted by the Center for Church Renewal. Andrew Root was the main speaker for our two days together, and he essentially walked us through the argument of his recent book, Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness. I found his argument compelling, but as I listened I kept making connections to something that has occupied so much of my own attention in recent years: the Psalms.

Root begins with a diagnosis of our culture that I think is basically right. We have come to believe that the goal of life is to be happy, and much of modern life is organized around that pursuit. We choose careers, relationships, experiences, possessions, and even identities with the hope that if we can get the pieces arranged correctly, we will finally have a life that makes us happy.

The problem is that it doesn’t seem to be working. For all our pursuit of happiness, ours is increasingly an age of anxiety, loneliness, depression, and despair. Even when we succeed in constructing a life we enjoy, we eventually discover how fragile it is. People we love die. Children grow up. Careers end. Bodies age. Relationships disappoint us. Dreams disappear. Things we thought would last forever don’t.

Root’s point is not that happiness is bad. His point, as I understood it, is that happiness cannot carry the weight we have placed upon it. We were made for something more.

Evangelism as Consolation

We normally think of evangelism as telling someone something. We explain the gospel, make an argument, invite someone to church, or help them make a decision. Sometimes, perhaps without realizing it, we even present Christianity as another means of achieving the happy life: Jesus will give you purpose, improve your relationships, help you raise your children, and make your life better.

Root asked us to consider evangelism instead through the ancient Christian idea of consolation.

Suppose someone’s life falls apart. Someone they love dies, a marriage ends, a child wanders away, or a future they had imagined suddenly disappears. Our instinct is often to try to make things better, and Christians can be especially quick to offer explanations or assurances. Root suggested that perhaps the more Christian response is simply to enter the sorrow with them. We listen. We grieve. We remain present. We refuse to leave when there is nothing we can do to fix the situation.

This is not merely a strategy for being nicer to hurting people. Root’s argument is rooted in Christ himself. Christianity proclaims a God who did not remain distant from human suffering but entered it. Jesus wept. He grieved. He suffered. He cried out in anguish from the cross. He died. The Christian answer to suffering, therefore, is not ultimately an explanation but a person. God has entered our suffering in Jesus Christ, and it is precisely there, in the place of suffering and death, that resurrection comes.

As I listened to Root develop this argument over the course of two days, I kept thinking about the Psalms.

Helping Souls Learn to Pray

One of the things Root said during the conference has especially stayed with me. In speaking about the care of souls, he emphasized that our goal is to teach people how to pray.

That struck me.

If our task is merely to help people become happier, then we will naturally try to solve their problems. We will give advice, suggest strategies, or help them rearrange the circumstances of their lives. Sometimes those things are helpful and necessary. But the care of a soul must finally go deeper. We are trying to help a person live his or her life before God.

And that means learning to pray.

The difficulty is that prayer becomes especially hard precisely when we need it most. What do you pray when someone you love has died? What do you say when the future you expected has disappeared? How do you pray when you are angry with God, or when God seems absent, or when you have prayed the same prayer for years and nothing seems to have changed?

As Root spoke about teaching souls to pray, it occurred to me that the church already possesses an extraordinary resource for doing exactly that.

We have the Psalms.

The Psalms Know What to Do with Sorrow

One of the things I have come to appreciate more deeply as I have prayed through the Psalter is how little interest the Psalms have in pretending that life is better than it actually is. There is tremendous joy in the Psalms, of course. People sing, shout, dance, play instruments, celebrate God’s wonderful deeds, and summon the whole creation to join them in praise. But that is not the only voice we hear.

We also hear people who are frightened, lonely, angry, confused, and heartbroken. We hear people wondering where God is and why he has not acted. Sometimes they even wonder whether God has forgotten them.

Psalm 77, which I preached from recently, gives us six questions in rapid succession:

Those are remarkable words to find in the Bible. The Psalmist is not scolded for asking them. They become part of the prayer book of Israel.

Psalm 88 goes even further. Most laments eventually turn toward some expression of confidence or praise, but Psalm 88 never really gets there. The Psalm ends with the terrible words, “darkness is my closest friend.” There is no resolution before the Psalm ends. Apparently there are moments in life when God’s people need a prayer that simply tells the truth about the darkness.

Perhaps this is part of what it means to teach people how to pray. We don’t simply teach them the proper things to say to God. We help them learn that their whole lives can be brought into his presence. The Psalms give us a language for doing exactly that.

The Psalms Give Us Consolation

The Psalms themselves are a form of consolation because they come alongside us and give us words when we don’t have words of our own. They don’t require us to escape our sorrow before we come into God’s presence. They teach us how to bring our sorrow with us.

When we are frightened, the Psalms teach us how to be frightened before God. When we are angry, they give us words for our anger. When we are grieving, they allow us to grieve. When God seems absent, they even give us words with which to speak honestly about his absence.

That seems enormously important to me. The Psalms do not always take our sorrow away. They teach us how to bring our sorrow into the presence of God. In that sense, perhaps the Psalter is not merely a collection of prayers. It is a school of prayer. By praying these words again and again, we are learning how a human soul speaks to God.

Perhaps that helps explain why the Psalms have remained the prayer book of God’s people for thousands of years. Every generation eventually discovers that it needs them because every human life eventually enters territory where happiness is no longer enough. At some point we need more than another strategy for improving our circumstances. We need consolation. We need to know that we are not alone in the darkness and, most importantly, that God has not abandoned us there.

Jesus Prayed These Psalms Too

For Christians, however, there is an even deeper dimension to all of this. Jesus himself prayed the Psalms. Most famously, on the cross he takes the opening words of Psalm 22 onto his own lips: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

That means something important when we pray the Psalms in our own suffering. We are not simply crying upward toward a distant God, hoping he understands what we are going through. We are praying words that Jesus himself has prayed. The God to whom we bring our grief is the God who has entered grief. The God to whom we bring our suffering is the God who has suffered. The God we seek in the darkness is the God who, in Jesus Christ, entered the darkness of death itself.

But the story does not end there. The crucified Christ is also the risen Christ. Christianity does not deny the reality of sorrow and death, but neither does it allow them to have the final word. Resurrection is not an escape from suffering; it is God’s victory on the other side of it.

This is where I think Root’s idea of consolation becomes particularly powerful when placed alongside the Psalms. The Psalms give us permission to enter sorrow honestly, and Jesus shows us that God has entered that sorrow with us. We do not have to pretend that the darkness is light. We can tell the truth about the darkness while trusting that the darkness will not ultimately overcome the light.

Could the Psalms Be Evangelistic?

All of this left me wondering about something I had not really considered before. Could the recovery of the Psalms actually have something to do with evangelism?

Our culture already has plenty of people promising happiness. Almost everything being sold to us comes with some version of that promise: buy this, experience this, achieve this, become this person, and you will finally have the life you want. The church does not need to offer another version of the same promise with Jesus attached to it.

We have something much deeper to offer. We have a God who can be found in the valley of the shadow of death. We have a Savior who knows what it is to weep. We have a prayer book that refuses to look away from the darkest parts of human experience. And we have a resurrection that tells us that sorrow, suffering, and death are real, but they are not final.

Maybe evangelism in an age of despair sometimes looks less like having the right argument and more like sitting beside someone who is hurting and refusing to leave. But Root’s comment about teaching people to pray pushes the thought one step further. We don’t simply sit with people in their sorrow. We help them discover how to bring that sorrow before God.

And this may be one of the great evangelistic gifts of the Psalms.

When someone doesn’t know how to pray, we don’t have to begin by teaching them to manufacture the right words. We can give them words that God’s people have been praying for thousands of years. We can pray those words beside them until, perhaps, they become their own.

The Psalms will not always make everything better. They were never intended to do that. They do something better. They teach us to bring what is actually happening in our lives into the presence of God.

Perhaps this is what it means to care for a soul: to sit beside someone in their sorrow, to console them with the consolation of Christ, and eventually to help them pray.

The Psalms give us a place to begin.