Singing the Congregation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Local Churches ◽  
Congregational Studies ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Congregational Music

Singing the Congregation examines how contemporary worship music shapes the way evangelical Christians understand worship and argues that participatory worship-music performances have brought into being new religious social constellations (“modes of congregating”). Through ethnographic investigation of five of these modes—concert, conference, church, public, and networked congregations—this book seeks to reinvigorate the analytic categories of “congregation” and “congregational music.” Drawing from theoretical models in ethnomusicology, congregational studies, and ecclesiology, Singing the Congregation reconceives the congregation as a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through communal practice—in this case, the musically structured participatory activity known as “worship.” By extension, “congregational music-making” is recast as a participatory religious musical practice capable of weaving together a religious community inside and outside local institutional churches. Congregational music-making is not only a means of expressing local concerns and constituting the local religious community; it is also a potent way to identify with far-flung individuals, institutions, and networks that this global religious community comprises. The unique congregations examined in each chapter include but extend far beyond local churches, revealing widespread conflicts over religious authority and far-ranging implications for how evangelicals position themselves relative to other groups in North America and beyond.

Singing Heaven Down to Earth

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Congregational Music

Chapter 2 examines how two large, interdenominational multi-day conferences for evangelical college students use contemporary worship music. Interpreting these events through the lenses of pilgrimage and eschatology, it demonstrates that conferences like these serve as sacred centers for powerful spiritual experiences mediated by music. When participants sing contemporary worship songs together, they imagine the conference gathering as an embodiment of the heavenly community and their singing as the “sound of heaven.” As conference attendees collectively perform the heavenly community into being, they also imagine their relationships to others both within and outside the conference. Comparing lyrics, musical performance, and social organization of congregational music-making at the two conferences reveals that the two events encourage participants to conceive the heavenly community very differently, resulting in diverging understandings of their relationship to Christians of other gendered, racial and ethnic, and national backgrounds.

Finding the Church’s Voice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Performance Practice ◽  
Local Church ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Church Leader ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Congregation Members ◽  
Congregational Music ◽  
And Performance

Chapter 3 provides a detailed ethnographic portrait of music in a local church congregation in which contemporary worship music serves an important—and often strategic—means of positioning. Examining the choices of congregational music repertory, style, and performance practice at St. Bartholomew’s Church, an “evangelical Episcopal” church in Nashville, Tennessee, reveals how church leaders and congregation members use music to navigate the church’s relationship with other area churches, denominational traditions, and church networks. The church’s choice of worship songs and styles constitutes what one church leader referred to as the church’s unique “voice,” in other words, its identity and position relative to other congregations and within networks. Though the church’s voice is constructed in part from broadly circulating discourses and practices within contemporary worship music, the case study of St. Bartholomew’s shows that this song repertory is also subject to imaginative reinterpretation within local church contexts.

Worship Music on National and Global Stages

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls ◽  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Social Changes ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
The World ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Congregational Music ◽  
The Way ◽  
A Performance

The book’s conclusion draws together the book’s themes by returning to a performance of the contemporary worship song discussed in the introduction. It highlights a source of continued conflict within evangelicalism: the tension between the worship music “mainstream” and its alternatives. It shows the mainstream to be an influential matrix that combines a specific understanding of music, worship, and congregating and sets itself forward as a model for the way these three activities should relate across geographical and cultural space. Understanding how evangelical congregations are sung into being matters for understanding how other religious social formations throughout the world constitute and understand themselves. Thus, remodeling and reinvigorating the analytic categories of “congregation” and “congregational music” may enhance their usefulness for scholars working on religious musical practices among religious groups facing similar social changes and pressures.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Evangelical Churches ◽  
Congregational Worship ◽  
Congregational Music

The introduction sets out the book’s scope, argument, and goals; places the exploration in historical and cultural context; and frames the study in relationship to recent scholarship in ethnomusicology, evangelical studies, and congregational music studies. It first defines contemporary worship music from both North American and global perspectives and discusses that music’s relationship to closely related Christian popular-music genres. The chapter then situates the rise of contemporary worship music in relationship to several important social developments, including the widespread conflicts over music and worship in evangelical churches (the “worship wars”), the development of the Christian-music recording industry, the adoption of new technologies within congregational worship, and the influence of pentecostal-charismatic practices. Finally, in describing the book’s research methods, the introduction identifies several challenges the author faced in navigating distance and proximity in the field as a result of her own religious upbringing as an evangelical and her complex relationship to communities in her study.

Bringing Worship to the Streets

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monique M. Ingalls
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Spiritual Warfare ◽  
Evangelical Christians ◽  
Worship Music ◽  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
The Public ◽  
Regional Community ◽  
Congregational Music ◽  
The City

Chapter 4 examines what happens when congregational music “goes public” through the lens of the praise march, a public procession in which evangelical Christians sing contemporary worship songs in the streets of their cities. It examines two consecutive praise marches in Toronto—the March for Jesus and the Jesus in the City Parade—as public congregations whose participants use contemporary worship music to engage in spiritual warfare, to imagine and embody the global evangelical community while creating new intimacies, and to unify area Christians across ethnic, national, and denominational difference. In examination of the sonic practices and values at these praise marches, two models of the public congregation emerge, characterized by differing performance and ethical ideals. Evangelicals use contemporary worship music in public spaces not only to define their public image, but also to delineate the boundaries of their regional community and manage diversity within those boundaries.

Cultural Understandings of “Religion”: The Hermeneutical Context of Teaching Religious Studies in North America

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Murphy
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Communicative Context ◽  
Comparative Manner

AbstractWhen students come into the classroom, they have a prefigured, albeit deeply implicit, notion of what “religion” is and what it is not. They see religion as private, inner, and personal, as distinct from “politics” and “economics.” This prefigured conception of religion is, in this author's view, one of the principle obstacles to teaching Religious Studies in an empirical, cross-cultural, comparative manner. Given the overall structure of the cultural configuration within which students think about and live out “religion,” i.e., that it is private, utilitarian, and simply an obvious given to them, how can we introduce theory into the Religious Studies classroom? The answer given here is that if we use language-based theoretical models of culture such as structuralism and hermeneutics, we do better, in the main, in applying that theory to the communicative context of the classroom than trying to teach theory directly to our undergraduate students. This paper offers an analysis, using such language-based theories, of those cultural conditions which our students bring into the classroom and which shape their “native” understanding of the category “religion,” as well as some suggestions as to how to cope with it in order to teach Religious Studies more effectively.

“Gotta Moan Sometime”: A Sonic Exploration of Earwitnesses to Early Pentecostal Sound in North America

Pneuma ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Douglas Daniels, III
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Ambient Sound ◽  
Way Of Knowing

AbstractSound as a historical frame provides a new historiographic turn for Pentecostal studies and a complement to spatial and temporal studies of the Pentecostal past. This article explores how sound serves as a primary marker of early Pentecostal identity, as sound blended the sound of prayer, preaching, testifying, singing, music-making, and silence. Embedded in early Pentecostal sound are primal cries, speech, music, and ambient sound which, for early Pentecostals, functioned as a circular continuum that Pentecostal soundways traveled. Encompassing more than orality, early Pentecostal sound generated a way of knowing that challenged the orality-literacy binary, the hierarchy of senses that privileged sight, and the hierarchy of the races.

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