Congregational Music, Conflict and Community

Jonathan Dueck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134786053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Congregational Music, Conflict and Community is the first study of the music of the contemporary 'worship wars' – conflicts over church music that continue to animate and divide Protestants today – to be based on long-term in-person observation and interviews. It tells the story of the musical lives of three Canadian Mennonite congregations, who sang together despite their musical differences at the height of these debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Mennonites are among the most music-centered Christian groups in North America, and each congregation felt deeply about the music they chose as their own. The congregations studied span the spectrum from traditional to blended to contemporary worship styles, and from evangelical to liberal Protestant theologies. At their core, the book argues, worship wars are not fought in order to please congregants' musical tastes nor to satisfy the theological principles held by a denomination. Instead, the relationships and meanings shaped through individuals' experiences singing in the particular ways afforded by each style of worship are most profoundly at stake in the worship wars. As such, this book will be of keen interest to scholars working across the fields of religious studies and ethnomusicology.

1 Introduction

The stakes of the worship wars: musical style, theology or an aesthetics of encounter?

In 1999, historian Michael S. Hamilton wrote an article in the evangelical magazine Christianity Today entitled ‘The Triumph of the Praise Songs: How guitars beat out the organ in the worship wars’. For Hamilton and others in the evangelical press, there has been a sea change in religious identity in the West centred on congregational worship: ‘American churchgoers no longer sort themselves out by denomination so much as by musical preference’.¹ Hamilton traces two histories of change in church music, initiated by the Baby Boomer generation: first, the ‘reformist’ incorporation of contemporary political and social concerns into hymnody, and second, the ‘revolutionary’ adoption of popular music and scrapping of hymnody in church. If the guitars have not yet clearly ‘won’, according to Hamilton, they have at least very successfully divided churches by musical affinity and age, and given that younger church members are most often fans of popular music, guitars are well on their way to ‘winning’ because those churches that appeal to young people are most likely to survive.

As if to confirm this analysis, a layperson in a Canadian Mennonite church told me: ‘[our church music] changed from the traditional hymn singing to the more contemporary singing sometime before we came . . . I think that [these] are good changes. The singing style appeals to our young people who are our future’. In these accounts, the musical style – the sound of the music, its instrumentation, its typical melodic and rhythmic features – appears to be the central issue in Christian conflicts over music. Style’s relationship to a marketplace of churches and their musical practices appears, here, to determine the rightful winner of these ‘worship wars’.

In the same period, evangelical theologian Marva Dawn wrote her broadly influential book, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down. Dawn offered a theological criticism of ‘market-oriented’ moves to ‘dumb down’ music and worship, which aimed to attract and retain members by entertaining them. These aims, Dawn argued, do not express the focus on God that characterises serious theology of worship. In Dawn’s account, then, the worship wars are most centrally about a theology of worship, that is, the normative principles and understandings of God that guide Christian worship, not about musical style.²

But, in the same year that Hamilton wrote his article and only a few years after Dawn wrote her book, another Mennonite in Edmonton, Alberta, made this comment to me:

. . . one of the wonderful offshoots of [choirs at First Mennonite] is the number of times that we have three generations in one choir . . . in September when we [sang] this year, my entire family . . . were all in the choir . . . in fact that time in September there were actually three families like that . . . three entire households that were represented in the choir.

This singer emphasises neither musical style nor a ‘performed’ theology of worship, but rather the social relationships that he experiences when singing church music with others.³ I heard about social relationships nurtured in musical performance from members of churches that practiced popular music, too. One man told me about his long experience as a bassist in secular popular music bands. Having grown up attending a large stone Lutheran church that, he said, ‘was apart from the community . . . you got that feeling’, he visited River West Christian Church (Mennonite Brethren) when friends suggested it. But, it was the invitation to play in the band and the experience of rehearsing and performing regularly with it that made the church most meaningful for him. These two people’s experiences of church music, in other words, are not presented in terms of the pleasure they feel when they hear their preferred musical style. Nor do they couch their experiences of church music in theologies of how the church ought to worship God. Instead, First Mennonite Church’s choir and River West’s worship team – musical ensembles that are also particular social groups – allow these two musicians to continue patterns of musical meaning, which are also patterns of friendship and of community that they have formed over the course of their musical lives.

If, as I have suggested, the stakes of the worship wars have most often been seen in terms of musical style (the sound and form of the music and the way these make up musical genre) or theologies of worship (articulated beliefs about the right ways of worshipping God), in this book, I draw on stories like the two I have just retold to suggest a third way to understand the wars, through the lens of aesthetics.

Though I will return to these ideas throughout this book, I want to offer at least a preliminary discussion of aesthetics here. Beginning to think through the concept here will help me make clear why paying attention to aesthetics, not in itself but in the lives and memories of particular people, is worth doing for ethnomusicologists like myself, for other scholars in the interdisciplinary field of congregational music study and for people engaged in doing and thinking about music in the church.

Perhaps, the most common definition of aesthetics is as the branch of philosophy concerned with the beautiful – an understanding that, as anthropologist Birgit Meyer points out, is Kantian, against which Meyer counterposes the earlier Aristotelian idea of aisthesis, the ensemble of the senses in our bodily experience and their particular capacities to perceive, a valuable understanding to which I will shortly return.⁴ But, with church music particularly in mind, at least two other sets of understandings of the word are important: normative theological and musicological understandings of the aesthetics of pieces of music (or even musical ‘works’) and social-scientific understandings that see aesthetics as a kind of discourse that reveals other commonly held frameworks and social structures for a group.

Among élite churchly insiders weighing in on musical practice, both theologians and church music scholars often present qualitative understandings of what might be ‘better’ music. When they do so, they draw on traditions of aesthetics that have been influential in the discipline of musicology, which explore and evaluate the specific qualities of pieces of music. These traditions understood pieces of music as ‘works’, musical objects with structure that can be traced and understood like a text can and usually also objects that are tied particularly to their creators (composers). Within this tradition of aesthetics, I might locate intellectually rigorous work as widely divergent as that of Jeremy Begbie, whose ontological exploration of music ties ‘being’ and ‘import’ to what can be apprehended through the ‘form’ of music and Kenneth Hull, who draws on cognitive psychology to graft understandings of popular versus art musical styles onto the psychological states that these styles might engender.⁵

Aesthetics are sometimes paired and contrasted with ‘ethics’, which are not concerned with beauty, but with right action. But, the arguments made within this line of thinking – much like the arguments made within the popular debates on the ‘worship wars’ that I introduced in the brief vignettes above – mix and link ethical and aesthetic statements, suggesting that, for many Christians, what is beautiful (or worshipful, or meaningful, etc.) and what is right can be closely related. These élite strands of thought are intertwined with the voices in the popular debate on the worship wars that reference ‘style’ and also ‘theology’ in my view: both make their arguments through reference to the musical ‘objects’ of church music and to the ways those objects position us as ethical subjects in relation to God. (My comments here resonate with ethnomusicologist Timothy Rommen’s notion of the ‘ethics of style’, that is, the linkage between the ways musical style can identify its practitioners and the communal processes of religious discernment that evaluate the ethics of these identity positions.⁶)

Among social scientists writing on religion, aesthetics are more often understood as a field of discourse that informs the way particular groups of people engage with the world through their senses – in other words, aesthetics are sets of beliefs, texts, practices, et cetera that together become the standpoints from which communities experience the world sensorially (feeling, hearing, seeing, touching) and also a place where they debate how to experience the world sensorially. Charles Hirschkind’s writing exploring how Egyptian Muslims learn to listen to recorded sermons, and also the debates within the community on how this might best be done, is one example of this kind of ‘aesthetics’. Birgit Meyer presents aesthetics as a kind of activity through which people make meaning, meaning that subsequently becomes part of how they see. For example, Meyer examines how Ghanaian Christians make meaning when they make images, tracing the way they ascribe particular meanings and sensibilities to images and the ways they then experience those meanings and sensibilities in the images. Meyer’s later writing draws our attention not only to the agency of religious believers, but also to the power dynamics of religion through her notion of ‘sensational forms’, which are particular, relatively stable, powerful and regulated constellations of sensory experience involved in mediating the transcendent and the believer in particular religious contexts. These understandings of aesthetics are one step removed from the popular debates I have outlined, and they are more closely related to my approach here: like these writers, I am presenting the ‘worship wars’ in part as a field of debate on aesthetics.⁷

However, when the Christians I interviewed began to tell me stories rooted not in the qualities of pieces or styles of church music, nor in the ways those qualities felt or were ‘right’, but instead in their memories of singing songs in particular ways with particular others, I began to think of another aspect of aesthetics that can inform, but is rarely explicitly part of the public discussions of aesthetics that scholars such as Meyer and Hirschkind track. That is, I began to think of the most basic stakes of ‘the worship wars’ in terms of aesthetics – an experiential, embodied, practiced feelingful way of encountering the world – rooted in individuals’ contingent and particular life experiences with other people through music.⁸ This is a particular perspective on aesthetics, which, in partial deference to social theorists Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking on identity, I am calling an ‘aesthetics of encounter’, an aesthesis that happens momentarily in and through our interactions with others, shaping our musical bodies and trajectories in the process.⁹

An aesthetics of encounter, then, while invested in history, memory and social experience, is, therefore, less total and stable and more emergent, more contingent, than that articulated by, for example, Meyer – more interested, as Shelemay and Finnegan’s seminal studies were, in the pathways individuals take as they move from one musical context to another and in the ways their memories accompany them.¹⁰ To ground this in my research, because in the Western, secular, and plural contexts in which I did my fieldwork, church music-makers understood their stories in highly individual ways that often did not reflect normative theological understandings or music-industry narratives, and drew on those stories in retelling the moment of musical experiences they felt they shared with others, I began to understand musical experience in church (and what is at stake in debates concerning that experience) as a momentary, partial and sometimes, deep conjunction of individuals musicking together.¹¹ The theological and economic structures, codes and narratives that scholars and practitioners most often think of as ordering worship and its music were part of these moments of aesthetic encounter, but did not entirely determine the practices, meanings or social possibilities of such moments.

Thinking of music in terms of an aesthetics of encounter, then, invokes both the individual histories of musical encounter that accrete in contingent ways (not random, but not entirely determined by power structures) over time, and the simultaneity of moments of musical encounter when this polyphony of meanings inflects the attitudes of our bodies breathing and singing together, shaping the future possibilities of musical encounter that unfurl variously and individually from that moment of musical and religious togetherness.

The two complexities emerging from my above vignettes of Mennonite singers and my subsequent discussion of aesthetics as they might bear on ‘the worship wars’ – the overlap between aesthetics and ethics in discussions of the worship wars and the dearth of discussion of individual experience and memory of musicking in these discussions – suggest, for me, that in order to make sense of the worship wars, we need to rethink the importance of aesthetics in church music and also the place of individual experience and memory in aesthetics.

In this book, then, I ask: what is really at stake in the worship wars (and, more broadly, in the music performed together in worship)? I address this question by exploring the ways church music was practiced in three Mennonite churches in Western Canada in the early 2000s and the ways it had changed in the early 2010s. Mennonites are a group of Christian denominations with roots in the radical sixteenth-century Reformation who share a great deal of common ground with North American protestants and evangelicals. Mennonites span a wide ideological spectrum, from liberal, to evangelical and sometimes politically conservative, to what Judith Klassen rightly calls the ‘conserving’ stance of churches such as Old Order Mennonites (and their religious cousins, the Amish).¹² While North American Mennonites are especially known for choral and hymn singing, Mennonite denominations also sing ‘world music’ of various types, and of course, Christian popular music. The seriousness and, indeed, passion with which many Mennonite churches (and their members) approach music make them an ideal site from which to consider these broad conflicts over church music. Each of the three congregations on which this book centres practices music that represents one of the three positions churches have most often taken in this controversy: traditional music, contemporary music or a blended servic...