Sincere Performance in Pentecostal Megachurch Music

Ibrahim Abraham

doi:10.3390/rel9060192

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Webb Keane and Joel Robbins in the anthropology of Christianity, furnished with the influential work of Charles Hirschkind in the anthropology of Islam, and the ethnographic studies of Tom Wagner and Mark Jennings on Pentecostal worship music, this article critically examines ideas of sincerity in the musical practices of Pentecostal megachurches. Making use of ethnographic data from research on congregational music in South Africa, including interviews with a variety of Pentecostal musicians, this article argues that the question of Protestant sincerity, understood following Keane as emphasizing individual moral autonomy and suspicion of external material religious forms for expressing one’s inner state, is particularly acute in the case of the Hillsong megachurch. Employing the full array of spectacular possibilities made available by the contemporary culture industry, Hillsong churches centralize cultural production and standardize musical performance whilst simultaneously emphasizing individual religious experience. It is argued that Pentecostal megachurches seek to realize a form of sincere mimicry grounded in learned and embodied practices.

Highlights

Music is a key medium through which Pentecostalism has grown; Pentecostal worship music circulates in physical and digital formats through formal and informal networks, laying down the cultural and theological infrastructure for new churches and new individual experiences
A good illustration of this is the digital timer on the mezzanine level at Hillsong’s main Cape Town campus at Century City, visible from the stage, but invisible from most of the congregation. It regulates the conduct of the service, much like a printed liturgy might in a proximate context. This analogy between the standardized Pentecostal megachurch service, epitomized by the hidden timer counting down the end of segments and the end of the service, and the traditional printed liturgy of Catholic and mainline Protestant service, returns us to the basic Christian tensions articulated by Martin (2016) and Wagner (2017b): churches seek to achieve transcendence through worldly practices
Subjective inner states are cultivated through the use of the highest forms of technology and craftsmanship the secular culture industry can offer; these technologies are refined, standardized, and globalized by a centralized corporate megachurch (Sanders 2016) that speaks of its “clients” as a “congregation”

Summary

Introduction

Music is a key medium through which Pentecostalism has grown; Pentecostal worship music circulates in physical and digital formats through formal and informal networks, laying down the cultural and theological infrastructure for new churches and new individual experiences. Drawing on ethnographic research on music in broadly evangelical churches in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2014 and 2015, this article focuses on the particular tension that exists between the intensely subjective nature of Pentecostal experience and the increasingly standardized nature of some of the Pentecostal worship music and worship services designed to facilitate these personal Pentecostal experiences. The central case study of the standardization of worship music within megachurches follows, focusing on observations of Hillsong’s Cape Town campus and making use of the prior studies of Hillsong by Tom Wagner It will be argued, through reference to the work of Charles Hirschkind in the anthropology of Islam, that a particular form of embodied practice that we can think of as sincere mimicry is developed in Pentecostal megachurches, a practice which, in the final substantive section, will be shown to be unsatisfactory from the perspective of some

Pentecostalism and Protestant Sincerity

Pentecostal Megachurches as Sincere Spaces

Standardizing Sincerity

Embodying Sincerity

Critiquing Insincerity

Conclusions