Singing the Congregation

Abstract

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.