Field Notes: Ryan Lang

Tell me about your immediate family and your birthplace.

My immediate family is Mum and Dad, a younger brother Jeff, and a younger sister Shana. My parents met in Pakistan when they were both working with Afghan refugees. Dad is from the US, and Mum is from New Zealand. I was born in Pakistan and lived there for the first four years of my life. We moved to New Zealand in 1988, and I went to primary school here. In 1995, we moved back to Pakistan for three more years, where I went to a Pakistani school which was taught in English—with a bit of Pashtu in the playground! I was one of three foreign students there, which wasn’t easy at first, but I’ve ended up being grateful for the friendships that formed in that time. We returned to Tāmaki Makaurau for my high school years and I went to school in Avondale. That was cool; I made some lifelong friends there.

What happened post-school?

I did my undergraduate degree in Auckland, studying Politics and English. Part of the history to that decision is that when I was 17, my Mum and Dad noticed that I always cared a lot about what was and wasn’t fair—for me, mostly! I was mainly just complaining about injustices in my own life. So, they’re very wise, and they put a book in my life that was about God’s heart for justice. And that really captured me. It redirected the energy that I had for justice towards others. After I finished high school, I went to Idaho in the US, where my Dad’s family live, and worked in construction for a year. Then when I came back, I enrolled in every class that I could get that was about justice, human rights, authoritarian regimes—all that kind of stuff. And I ended up with a degree in politics. That got quite heavy at times. And I just love beauty, and art, and literature, so together with a friend of mine I did one class in English each semester. We both ended up with minors in English.

What was happening with faith for you during these university years?

I was baptised when I was 14 after an Easter camp. I think that season was when my personal faith really took hold. I ended up in and out of church through the rest of high school. But when I was in the US, attending church regularly with my uncle and his family, that was really when I decided that I want to be at church; I wanted to jump in. Discipleship and worship and all those things just became part of my life again. Back in New Zealand, the same friend who I did the English classes with invited me to the local Baptist church, and that became my community. Around that time, another friend invited me to play guitar and sing in the worship team. Eventually I moved from singing into leading. I almost fainted the first time I did that!

But this community really became important, particularly the mixture of worship and justice there. For me, I had a growing sense of worship, encountering God in communion with others. At the same time there were my studies at university, and there was a really beautiful group of young adults at that church who were hugely passionate about mission. So those things were going hand in hand through those years. That heart for mission and for working with people who are going through hard stuff kind of poured out of the church and into the communities that later became the Urban Vision communities in Auckland. It was quite a special season.

How did worship relate to questions of social justice for you around that time? Not everyone ties these two together!

They were just organically growing together, side by side. I went to India just after that season to work with a group of people who were trying to end slavery in their country, and, years later, someone asked me what it was that that drew me to go there and continued to draw me to that kind of work. I ended up saying, “I actually think that there’s something almost aesthetic about it.” Because when you’re in situations where hard things are happening—the metaphor that comes to mind is a dark place—the glory of God shines the most strongly. I actually think my passion for justice flowed out of the love of God that I was encountering in worship. Those dark places became another place of worship, encountering God and worshipping God in places where his glory shines all the more strongly.

After you finished your degree, what did you do next?

After finishing my degree at the end of 2006, I just wanted to get out there and roll my sleeves up; being “the hands and feet of Jesus” was the language I had for it. I looked at a lot of different internships in different places. When I was in my last year of uni, I had come across some stories about human trafficking that hit deep for me. I came across an internship in India that was with the same organisation whose founder wrote the book that my parents had given me when I was a teenager. I applied and was accepted, and I spent a year there. I just did anything that was needed. I ended up doing a lot of IT work on dusty computers, writing stories, comms work—anything that was needed. The people there are incredible. It was really a transformative year for me.

I went with two prayers, and I asked people to pray this for me too. The first one was: I want to see your glory, God. Moses’s prayer: Show me your glory. The second prayer was a line out of a Brooke Fraser song: “break my heart with what breaks yours.” That line really resonated with me. It’s a prayer by the founder of World Vision. It’s a really dangerous prayer to pray! But I did pray it. What happened, I think, in that first year, was that my heart was really broken by the things that break God’s heart. That healed in beautiful ways over the following years. So, I did encounter God’s glory in that year, but when I left, I was grieving.

Where did you go next?

I went to the UK and did a master’s degree in international relations. That was another opportunity to go deep. For some of the issues, particularly human trafficking in India, I really wanted to understand more of the context—who was working on it, how things had been changing, those sorts of things. After the UK, I went on something of a nomadic journey for about eight years, living and working in a number of different locations. I spent time in Afghanistan and New York, then Los Angeles to study some theology, and then to Washington DC, to work with the same organisation I had in India. A short season in New Zealand, and then up to Delhi. So the last season before I moved home to New Zealand was in Delhi, working with another organisation who were focused on bonded labour slavery in North India.

I came back to Aotearoa in 2015, ended up at a church where one of my best friends was a pastor, and met Ashleigh. We got to know each other washing dishes at home group, and got married at Te Mīhina Māori, Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 2019. A beautiful day!

What was the pathway into PhD study for you?

The short version is that prior to this season of theological study, I had been about to go back to India for another three to five years. I was praying a lot about that move and, essentially, I felt stopped in my tracks. The word that came in that time was that I needed to be drawing from deeper wells to be able to do that kind of work and to journey over the long run. So I decided to stay in New Zealand, and I enrolled in a one-year programme in theology at Otago. That was really to give myself a framework of a year to learn, to spend time praying, and to be digging those wells.

That year, I did a dissertation on Isaiah Chapters 60-62. Jesus quotes a piece of this [in Luke 4:18-19]: “the Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” This has been quite close to my heart for a long time. There are also many verses here that are about the glory of God dawning in a people’s “darkness”. I soaked in these chapters for a year, and it really changed my life. This study helped me to process a lot of the stuff that I’d been encountering over the last eight years: What is “darkness” in Scripture and in that poetry? What is “light”? What happens when the glory of God comes into that place? So, at the end of it I decided that I really wanted to lean further into this. I wrote a PhD proposal about glimpsing the beauty of God in a place of darkness. So, that was the project at the start.

How did your project take shape from this point?

I continued reading in the prophets, because I had been reading Isaiah, and I loved how the prophets speak God’s word into places of grief and of hope. Six months in, I was speaking with my good friend—who is now my pastor—and he said, “You’re reading the prophets. Why don’t you read the Psalms? The Psalms are the songs of the people—the people who are going through those times of grief and of hope.” So, I started to read the Psalms, and about the Psalms. It was during that time when the questions came: Why were the Psalms sung? What is it about singing that’s different from ordinary speech? Why do we sing, and what happens when we do?

I can see that the structure of your thesis is very expansive. It’s a broad sweep—very compelling and inviting. You discuss the question of why the church sings with chapter headings: The Song of Israel, The Song of the Lamb, The Song of the Church, The Song in the Prison, The Song in the Harbor. How did you come up with this approach?

I started with this really ambitious structure with ten chapters in it! I was planning to go quite quickly through Scripture and tradition, and then focus on contemporary music and song. I started into my study of Scripture and very quickly discovered that it was going to take at least one chapter to talk about song and Scripture. One of the early things that I realised was that prophecy would have been sung originally, which means between a third and a half of the Old Testament was originally sung material! So I realised there was a lot more to think about there.

Then I got to the New Testament, and asked, “What’s new about singing in the church?” And that poured into a third chapter about the early church. It was important to me at that point to go deep into what was going on in the early church because it’s so crucial to the development of Christian theology and because something so beautiful is happening when those Christians write about song and music. There are passages just full of love for Christ as they encounter him in worship. So, that ended up being a chapter.

I ended up making this huge map on my wall of all these key movements in Christian music through history. There were some things that were popping out, and you could tell that an explosion of life happened at that time—for example, Martin Luther, and then all of the music that came out of the spirituals. So, those raised little flags that I wanted to explore. I had another key conversation with a close friend where I was asking how we even get from the early church to be able to focus on more recent history. It was his idea to focus on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, because Bonhoeffer inherits from Martin Luther, but he also looks back over church history and gathers up a lot of the church’s wisdom about song and about music. So, that became the chapter, The Song in the Prison. I had also always wanted to spend some time with the spirituals. They are an archetypal “song in the night”, so to speak, but, at that point, it also just made sense within the context of the thesis. That chapter goes much deeper into some themes that were developing through the study.

It sounds like you had some key conversations along the way that were very important in your decisions around the structure of your work.

Yeah, certain conversations were really important. But also, the thesis doesn’t claim to be “the history of song in the church.” Or a full systematic theology. It’s really about testimony, about listening as deeply as I could to the witness of certain voices and reflecting on what was happening when they were singing or speaking about song. Those particular voices emerged out of a journey. So, it’s not saying, “these are the key moments in Christian history.” It’s just some examples, or some “soundings” if you like; and there are threads that bring them together.

What were a couple of memorable moments of discovery for you in terms of the answering the question of why the church sings?

There were a lot of…I’m just going to call them tearful moments—moments when something really, really resonated deeply. I’ll just give you a few examples. One of them was when I was in the New Testament chapter, and I got to sit with the “hymn” in Matthew and Mark, the one that Jesus and his disciples sang at the Last Supper before they went to Gethsemane. This is actually the only time that musical language is used in all four gospels. We don’t know what that song was for certain, and that’s a big caveat! But there’s a good possibility that it was Psalms 115 to 118. I think sitting with that passage of Scripture, reading those words and imagining Jesus singing to God before he stepped into the night to go to the cross, has really impacted me.

There was another moment when I was studying the life of Saint Antony, who was a monk in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century. Antony talks to his monks, who have gathered around him, about spiritual warfare. He just encourages them, saying when you’re under spiritual attack, don’t face the enemy—face the Lord. Lift your voice in praise and rejoice in the Lord and in the things that are to come. When the enemy sees that, those weapons of deception and fear will vanish like smoke, because you’re filled with the truth.

The last one I’ll mention is when I was studying the songs of the slaves in the American South. They “stole away” from slaveholders at night to worship God in the forests. The language they often used was that they went “to talk with Jesus.” There are so many testimonies of people saying Jesus was with them there, the Spirit was moving in the community, healing them, filling them with joy. There were moments like that throughout the course of the thesis, actually. I think one thing that struck me through the study was the consistency of what was happening, community to community. Clearly, context is really important, and people’s songs grow out of a context. But there’s also this sense of common things that are happening in the history of the church. So for me, that’s more of a realisation about the work of the Spirit in the life of the church.

Were there things that grieved you as you looked at the history of song in the church?

The first thing that comes to mind for me is that when you’re listening to a community’s song, you’re listening to more than the song itself. A song is so much more than music. It’s an expression of a people’s life, and to really hear it well it helps to learn something about the life that it came from. And it was there where I hit those places of deep sadness. That happened when I was spending a year with the story of Nazi Germany. It was not just the violence but the idolatry that was that was happening at that time. I listened to some of the songs of the Nazis that compared Hitler to Christ and I was saddened—and angered, really—by reading that stuff.

That just goes deeper in chapter five. Chapter five was sitting with the story of American slavery for a year and what’s referred to in the spirituals as “trouble”—“nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows but Jesus.” It’s impossible to find words for what the slaves went through. There’s a former slave, Linda Brent, who said that it would take an abler pen than hers to write about that trouble. But the flip side of that is that again, it’s in those places—when you’re sitting in the song with the people of God—that you’re encountering glory. It’s like this beautiful light in that place. So there was always this tension. I tried to enter as deeply as I could into the story, which involved deep grief that was always held hand in hand with beautiful hope and joy that happened in that place of worship.

In terms of the song itself, something that did stick with me is just that recurring thing through history where our song as the church hasn’t always matched with our life. That’s most graphically seen for me in slaveholding society and in slaveholders who would sing hymns, sometimes even by Isaac Watts, in a chapel. Then they’d get up and abuse their brothers or sisters in Christ. That’s hard. So that grieves me and echoes the words from Amos and other prophets, “take away from me the noise of your songs”—just do what’s right, do justice. But it all points back to ourselves: if I’m listening to that challenge, it should be a challenge to me when I’m singing a song in church. Like, where’s my life at?

You’re talking about things that have grieved you, but then right in the middle of that is the glory of the Lord—it’s very striking. In our whole interview in fact, speaking of the time since you were a young adult, these things have gone hand in hand: both the worship of the Lord and also questions of justice. Is that something that has excited you throughout your study, coming back to the glory of the Lord that is sustained and upheld in these different scenarios of worship? Has this been encouraging?

Oh, yeah. Joseph Ratzinger, the former Pope Benedict, has this beautiful phrase. He talks about the communion that is our life. So, when we taste communion with God, what we’re tasting is a life that is stronger than death, that will carry through death. So we will pass through—like the spirituals say—we’ll pass through death into the arms of Jesus. Jesus is with us, Jesus is waiting for us, Jesus will meet us on the other side of the Jordan. The slaves in America sang that to be with Jesus is heaven, even in the valley and in the night. This is a theme that runs through all of it—entering into the dark places, the struggles and the doubts, and encountering Jesus, even in the silence. He’s there with us, and he’s the glory of God. So, when we encounter him, we come to know that indestructible life. It’s sustaining. It gives us what we need to keep living and taking each step forward. And I think that encounter happens in a special way when we’re singing.

It’s a communal expression of hope, right? And I guess, really, it’s the steadfast love of the Lord, expressed in Jesus. There’s nowhere that his love is not, where his love doesn’t sustain us.

And you can always sing that song. I love that that’s the refrain for Israel all the way through the Old Testament. You can sing that in any place in life where you are; you can be in the deepest grief but that’s still true—the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. And Jesus is that.

In terms of your own background in music and song, did you do a lot of music when you were growing up, or did that come later?

Yeah, there was always music around the house. Mum and Dad are musical—they sang together and played guitar and wrote songs. So, there was usually music in the house. My brother and sister and I would sing while we were washing the dishes, and make harmonies together. I guess I just love music. When I was old enough and had my own money, I bought everything that I could from the local cassette tape store in Pakistan. I remember starting to realise that I loved singing when I was 12 in Pakistan. I think my first really personal encounter with God, or knowing his love, was in a time of singing.

When I came back to New Zealand, two guys called Rob and Sam became my best friends at high school. We taught ourselves how to play guitar and sing U2 songs, and that’s really when the leaning into music started to happen. I still sing and I play guitar. I don’t know how much better I’ve gotten over the years! But it’s more something that I do to worship, and with people.

How do you think your experience of doing this work has affected your understanding of sung worship now?

There have been a lot of moments over the years of quite profound experiences of communion with God while playing guitar and singing in my bedroom, and with other people in church. I think what’s happened in the last few years is that I’ve sensed more of what it is to be joining in one voice with the people around me—the one voice of the church. I feel similarly about communion, the Eucharist. My experience of that has shifted to really getting a sense that we’re doing this as one body. We’re a community. So that’s happened with me in sung worship as well.

It’s also extended out to the communion of saints—we’re all singing one song! Ultimately, and theologically, I believe that we are singing in Christ by the Spirit. There’s a theologian called Alan Torrance, and I remember him saying that quite often in church we will say “Thank you, Jesus, we’ll take it from here.” And then we worship God. But he just makes the point—no, our worship is participating in Christ’s worship, Christ’s adoration of the Father. That might sound a bit abstract, but, maybe, at some level, that’s sinking in—that I’m participating in the song of Christ.

The last thing is that in Revelation 15, there’s this picture of the song of the church through all history. John describes this as the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb. Jean-Louis Chrétien talks about the Lamb as the wounded Word. That image has been really helpful for me. The song of the Lamb, the song of Jesus Christ in the church through history, is the song of one who was wounded. It gathers up the sorrows and joys of the body of Christ. Coming back to Sunday morning at church, what that means is that when I sing in church I’m joining in a song of suffering praise that goes through the whole of history and actually gathers up my faltering voice, and my silences and sorrows, as well as my joys. So I don’t have to be on top of my game to worship in church—it’s actually something bigger that gathers me up into it.

One last question: thinking about some of the conflicts in contemporary worship music, there are a lot of accusations of banality, and lack of beauty, and self-focus. Looking at what you’ve learned, what would you say to contemporary worship musicians?

Can I answer a slightly different question first? So, contemporary worship didn’t end up being the focus of the thesis. I’m quite grateful for that because I got to stand outside of this for a little bit. But, I have heard that feeling—and I want to acknowledge it. A lot of people through the course of the study have said things like, I like singing, but I don’t like singing in church. And the same people might enjoy singing on a marae. So there’s something to listen to there.

Having said that, I’d want to start by saying that there’s actually a lot of songs from the contemporary western worship tradition that have really held me over the last few years. It can be easy to write off a whole tradition, but there are so many songs. Audrey Assad, some songs by Maverick City and Matt Boswell, Bifrost Arts—there are some real treasures in this tradition.

Maybe I just want to start by being attentive to what’s happening in me when I’m feeling frustrated in a time of sung worship. Sometimes I’ve stood at the back of a church service and thought the music’s too loud or soft, or the lyrics are bland, or I disagree theologically with that one word, or the leader has too much ego or all that kind of stuff. But recently, we had a service just down the road, and the pastor came in wearing a stethoscope and he called all the kids up to the front. He said, “Today, we’re going to do a heart check.” And he got each kid to come up, and he held a stethoscope to their heart, and said, “You have a heart of wonder; you have a heart of joy….” Yeah. And it’s a bit like that for me. Sometimes I need a heart check. I feel like that’s where I need to start my thinking if the singing isn’t working for me on a given day.

It might be that we do have some things to talk about as the contemporary church in the west, but I think we’ll be able to see those things a lot more clearly if we look at our own hearts first.

I don’t feel like I’m in a place to critique anybody. But I’d like to offer some encouragement and exhortation to the work of song-writing. An author called Robin Leaver says that even though the Reformation started in 1517, it was actually five years later when the hymns began to be written that it really took off. Martin Luther essentially sent out a letter to all of his friends who could write, saying, “Calling all poets! Please write a song for us. Write a song for the church.” He took that calling seriously—he actually discarded a lot of what came back to him. But what he kept became the first Lutheran hymnal.

So through the thesis, I’ve come to see that song-writing is a huge ministry in the church. I just want to encourage songwriters to keep writing songs. And calling all poets: please put your words to music because song engages our depths, and it’s how a lot of truth soaks into us over time. It’s a high and noble calling to write songs for the church. The church used to commission people to do that. It’s quite a different culture now, but that doesn’t matter. Just put your hand to it!