“It’s Your Breath in Our Lungs”: Sean Feucht’s Praise and Worship Music Protests and the Theological Problem of Pandemic Response in the U.S.

In response to U.S. government restrictions imposed as part of a nationwide response to the COVID-19 pandemic, charismatic worship leader Sean Feucht began a series of worship concerts. Feucht positioned these protests as expressions of Christian religious freedom in opposition to mandated church closings and a perceived double-standard regarding the large gatherings of protesters over police violence against Black and Brown persons. Government restrictions challenged the sine qua non liturgical act of encounter with God for evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Charismatics: congregational singing in Praise and Worship. However, as Feucht’s itinerant worship concerts traversed urban spaces across the U.S. to protest these restrictions, the events gained a double valence. Feucht and event attendees sought to channel God’s power through musical worship to overturn government mandates and, along the way, they invoked longstanding social and racial prejudices toward urban spaces. In this essay, I argue that Feucht’s events reveal complex theological motivations that weave together liturgical-theological, social, and political concerns. Deciphering this complex tapestry requires a review of both the history of evangelical engagement with urban spaces and the theological history of Praise and Worship. Together, these two sets of historical resources generate a useful frame for considering how Feucht, as a charismatic musical worship leader, attempts to wield spiritual power through musical praise to change political situations and the social conditions.

Protestant Congregational Song in the Philippines: Localization through Translation and Hybridization

Historically, the language of Protestant congregational song in the Philippines was English, which was tied to that nation’s twentieth-century colonial history with the United States. The development of Filipino songs since the 1970s is linked to this legacy, but church musicians have found ways to localize their congregational singing through processes of translation and hybridization. Because translation of hymn texts from English has proven difficult for linguistic reasons, Papuri, a music group that produces original Tagalog-language worship music, bypasses these difficulties while relying heavily on American pop music styles. Word for the World is a Pentecostal congregation that embraces English-language songs as a part of their theology of presence, obviating the need for translation by singing in the original language. Day by Day Ministries, the third case study, is a congregation that translates beyond language texts, preparing indigenous Filipino cultural expressions for urban audiences by composing hybridized songs that merge pre-Hispanic and contemporary forms.

CHARLES WESLEY, METHODISM AND NEW ART MUSIC IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

ABSTRACTThis article considers eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Methodism's relationship with art music through the original settings of poetry by Charles Wesley by five notable musicians: John Frederick Lampe, George Frideric Handel, Jonathan Battishill, Charles Wesley junior and Samuel Wesley. It argues that the strong emphasis on congregational singing in popular and scholarly perceptions of Methodism, including within the movement itself, masks a more varied engagement with musical culture. The personal musical preferences of John and Charles Wesley brought them into contact with several leading musical figures in eighteenth-century London and initiated a small corpus of original musical settings of some of the latter's hymns. The article examines the textual and musical characteristics of these the better to understand their relationship with both eighteenth-century Methodism and fashionable musical culture of the period. It argues that Methodism was not, contrary to popular perception, uniformly opposed to or detached from the aesthetic considerations of artistic culture, that eighteenth-century Methodism and John and Charles Wesley cannot be regarded as synonymous and that, in this period, sacred music encompasses rather more than church music and cannot be narrowly defined in opposition to secular music.

The Institutionalization of the Congregational Singing of Metrical Psalms in the Elizabethan Reformation

Previous scholarship has often employed the categories of ‘voluntary’ and ‘established’ religion when studying lay involvement in parish religion; yet these categories do not provide adequate space for the vitality of lay religious initiatives during the English Reformation. Through a study of the singing of metrical psalms, this article argues that the categories of ‘inspiration’ and ‘institution’ provide a more nuanced understanding of lay religious initiatives during the English Reformation. It outlines the ways in which the singing of metrical psalms, taken from the Sternhold and Hopkins Whole Booke of Psalmes, moved from its origins in domestic devotions, through inspirational initiative, to become an institutionalized part of the worship of English congregations. This process developed over many years, coming to the fore during the reign of Elizabeth I, yet even once institutionalization had occurred, inspiration could still arise, providing fresh direction and development.

Vocal Music

Focusing on the popular Christmas carol “Once in Royal David’s City” and its annual performance at the King’s College, Cambridge Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, this chapter looks to recent developments in the theorization of subjectivity to open up new questions about the nature of vocal music in a communal context. The chapter starts by situating the carol in its various cultural-historical contexts (notably nineteenth-century church music, congregational singing, and Anglicanism), with a view to understanding the nested relationships between tradition and national identity. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the carol’s composition, to its arrangement for the festival in 1919, and to the festival’s continued annual broadcast on BBC radio. The chapter ultimately argues that congregational singing as developed in the nineteenth century mobilises what Anahid Kassabian has called “distributed subjectivity,” so extending that concept beyond the recording technologies that form the focus of Kassabian’s own work.

Evangelicals, Authenticity, and Sacrament

This chapter examines evangelical worship music as an environment in which ideals of congregational singing focus particularly strongly on dimensions of affective interaction. Recent evangelical discourse has had a lot to say about ideas of authenticity and sacrament as they are present in musical worship. This chapter examines the potential for these terms to be understood as different varieties of resonant interaction as sound is either expressed outward from the worshiper into their surrounding environment or received inward as something that carries with it something from God. It highlights the limits of understanding these phenomena through a simple inward/outward dichotomy. Rather, it suggests that each relies on a range of different back-and-forth sonic and more-than-sonic interactions.

Introduction

The Introduction to this volume explores the importance of individual–world interactions through the medium of sound in distinguishing between different traditions of Christian worship. I introduce ideas of musicking and resonance and suggest their potential usefulness in exploring the different patterns of interaction present in musical acts of devotion. I draw attention to resonance’s ability to point toward the simultaneous or subsequent sounding of energy in and between multiple actors, entities, and spaces, and to its particular conceptual advantages and strengths in approaching congregational singing. I highlight its ability to foreground the materiality of music while simultaneously giving conceptual space for the overtones latent within and surrounding such materiality. Alongside this, it is able to offer a relatively loose sense of priority that evokes very strongly complex dynamics of interplay back and forth between numerous agents, spaces, things, and materials as energy and vibration are passed between them.

Space, Multiplicity, and De/Reconstructing Resonance

Congregational singing has become problematized within the emerging-church movement. This movement is a self-consciously postmodern expression of Christianity that brings into question not only ideas of group singing but also of the congregation itself, intentionally deconstructing the boundaries, patterns, and norms that have typically served to define the congregational group. Nevertheless, music and sound remain important, if contested, components of emerging-church practices. Through fieldwork undertaken in a number of emerging-church groups, this chapter investigates the ways in which sonic material is deployed in nontraditional settings, and the different patterns of interaction that are set up between agents, spaces, and objects in these environments. In particular, this chapter draws attention to a move away from totalizing patterns of high-intensity resonant union, toward models that, in a variety of different ways, offer space for individuals to experience their own micro-resonant interactions as they engage in a range of different devotional activities.

Martin Luther: music and mission

This article seeks to demonstrate Martin Luther's often-overlooked credentials as a musician. Luther was convinced that music was the viva voce evangelii (living voice of the gospel), and unlike other more radical Reformation movements, he encouraged the use of choral and congregational singing in worship. Some of his familiar hymns – Nun freut euch, Ein’ feste Burg and Aus tiefer Not – offer insights into his ambitions to embed congregational singing into his vision of reformed worship, which went hand in hand with liturgical reform. Luther's Formula Missae and the vernacular Deutsche Messe lay the groundwork for Lutheran worship, which restructured the service around the centrality of the gospel proclamation. Luther's musical tradition reached its zenith in the work of J. S. Bach, which continues to echo in the Western musical canon, leaving Luther with a lasting musical legacy.