The ministry of sound

Every week, more than a million people attend a religious service in one of England’s 16,000 Anglican parish churches. In doing so, almost all will participate in communal singing as a member of the dynamic ensemble that is a parish church congregation. What are the functions of these ensembles? What are their social dynamics? How do their members regard them? And how do these ensembles mediate, become mediated by, and manifest in the music itself? Building on the growing body of Christian congregational music literature, this chapter discusses the findings of an empirical study of one church, and explores how music-making can impact on the individuals and ensembles who participate in it, and on the music they, collectively, produce.

We’re all “Bananas and Coconuts”: Congregational Song in the Global South

This essay presents the grassroots’ common practice of congregational music making seen through an embedded long-term participant-observer’s perspective. Through this approach, it argues for a realistic means of “closing the loop” in the goal of self-determination for Global South churches by proposing a thoughtful worship renewal process guided by an enlightened theological ethos that privileges local expressions.

Finding the Church’s Voice

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.

Singing the Congregation

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.