Kalamazoo, Michigan · Reformed Baptist Church

On the last Sunday of the year, an elder at Jon Hutchins’s church taught from Psalm 13 at an evening prayer meeting. Two things stayed with him: the psalm itself ends in a vow to sing, and a remark the elder made — that Psalm 13’s raw, honest language toward God feels foreign in modern churches. That we don’t really sing songs like this.

Jon went home that night and started writing. The observation had landed on something he’d been carrying for years: a gap between the full emotional range of scripture and the narrower range of feeling in most congregational music. He’d had conversations with fellow believers in seasons of suffering who longed for songs they could bring their grief into — and found nothing in their churches’ repertoire that fit.

He is not a professional musician. He writes code for a living and has three young children. He sings these choruses with his kids. What he has is a conviction that his congregation deserves music for the full range of Christian experience — including lament. That conviction turned a prayer meeting on the last Sunday of the year into a project that is now twelve psalms long and growing.