Shout to the Lord

Making Worship Music in Evangelical America

Ari Y. Kelman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479810307
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

How music makes worship and how worship makes music in Evangelical churches Music is a nearly universal feature of congregational worship in American churches. Congregational singing is so ingrained in the experience of being at church that it is often misunderstood to be synonymous with worship. For those who assume responsibility for making music for congregational use, the relationship between music and worship is both promising and perilous – promise in the power of musical style and collective singing to facilitate worship, peril in the possibility that the experience of the music might eclipse the worship it was written to facilitate. As a result, those committed to making music for worship are constantly reminded of the paradox that they are writing songs for people who wish to express themselves, as directly as possible, to God. This book shines a new light on how people who make music for worship also make worship from music. Based on interviews with more than 75 songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry executives, Shout to the Lord maps the social dimensions of sacred practice, illuminating how the producers of worship music understand the role of songs as both vehicles for, and practices of, faith and identity. This book accounts for the human qualities of religious experience and the practice of worship, and it makes a compelling case for how – sometimes – faith comes by hearing.

1

Making Worship and Music

Expression, Experience, and Education

My mouth is filled with your praise, declaring your splendor all day long.

—Psalm 71:8

Good worship shouldn’t be a question of style. . . . When someone is up there doing the best they can and you still don’t like what you’re hearing because it’s not your style, then you’ve got a golden opportunity to enter into a worshipful attitude. . . . That’s when you know you’re really worshipping and not just getting carried away with the music. You’re making [a] conscious choice to overlook the style and focus on the content.

—Twila Paris1

One Sunday, I was in church outside of Nashville. I arrived a little later than I normally do on ethnographic outings because I planned to attend the second worship service at this particular church after going to the early service at another and I had misjudged the time it would take to get there. I had not originally planned to go to this church. I had not even heard of this congregation until earlier in the week, when two or three professionals in the worship music industry told me that this is where they go on Sundays. I figured that if they recommended it, it was probably worth seeing for myself. When I asked why they went there, and not to any other church, they all reminded me that this is Nashville. World-class musicians were everywhere, including in church, and they had little tolerance for musicians who seemed like they were trying too hard. This particular congregation, they told me, did not feature flashing lights and hyperanimated worship leaders. It did not even usually sing the most popular worship songs.

I slid into my row, right next to one of the people I’d spoken with earlier that week. We nodded a “good morning,” and she kept singing. Glancing across the room, I noticed two other people I’d interviewed. The crowd was modest—maybe 500 people—and the music was more muted than I’d been expecting. The mix was clean but minimal, and the voices in the congregation nearly rose above those of the worship leaders at the front of the room. The worship leaders did not sit on an elevated stage, so I had to peer around those sitting in front of me to get a good view and look for cues that might help me to follow along. Unlike almost everywhere else I had been, they did not have a projection screen with lyrics. Instead, I tried following along on a handout that contained the lyrics of the morning’s songs. Despite having become pretty familiar with the music of worship, I was at a bit of a loss because I did not know any of the songs we were singing. They were not hard to learn, but not knowing any of them was a little disorienting, even to me. We sat down and the pastor delivered a sermon before we sang one more song that brought the morning’s worship to a close.

Sitting in my car a few minutes later, jotting down field notes, I found myself wondering: How did we get here? Here I was in Nashville, the center of the Christian music industry, and the very people whose insights shaped my understanding of worship music were here, too, trying to avoid the crowds, the projection screens, and the dramatic swoop and swell that characterized so much of the music they helped to make. Their choice of congregation seemed to speak less to the music itself, and more to the culture of musical creation in which they figure so centrally. They spend their weeks making worship music, and on Sundays they still make worship music, but they do it differently, as members of congregations who sing along with everyone else. Although they are both worshippers and producers of the phenomenon known as “worship music,” their explanations of where they worship on Sundays and why they worship where they do suggests some tension between their different roles in the culture of music making. What these music executives wanted from their own worship did not perfectly align with the music they made for the congregational music marketplace. Importantly, they neither disavowed nor discounted the music they make as professionals; they believe their work to be sincere and even possibly sacred. They believe in the music they make and they appreciate its resonance with the millions of worshippers who sing it in church. Yet, when it comes to musical expressions that capture or enable their own expressions of worship, their desires move them in a different direction.

“I listen to worship music all week long,” one told me. “I don’t want to think about work while I’m trying to pray.” The desire to distance one’s self from work and focus on prayer is both a spiritual and a material concern. It is a claim about what one wants from worship and what one expects from it. It is also an acknowledgement of how difficult it is to focus on worshipping with music when one makes music for a living. The choice of where to worship and the conditions that inform it emerge from an ongoing engagement with three themes that are central to the discursive production of worship music: worship music is supposed to allow people to express themselves in worship, to create occasions for profound experiences, and to educate worshippers about their practice and their faith. This chapter explores each of these three themes and establishes them as discursive frameworks for the production of worship music. These themes are less descriptive of worship music than they are constitutive of it, and understanding them will establish a set of cultural, conceptual, and theological issues at play in the production of worship music without even playing a note.

Defining Worship Music

Following Peterson and Becker, it takes more than musicians to make music. As music scholar Simon Frith has written, “Part of the pleasure of popular culture is talking about it; part of its meaning is this talk, talk which is run through with value judgements.”2 This is as true for fans and critics as it is for musicians and clergy, and it is as true for popular forms as it is for sacred ones. Talking about music is part of making music. Because of the high stakes of worship, the tone and tenor of these discussions takes on a greater significance as people disagree about style but are often arguing about worship itself. How people talk about worship music is an important mode of cultural production in its own right, as discussions of the music help frame the ways in which it ought to be heard, circulated, presented, and understood.

As Eric Porter has argued with respect to jazz, musicians should be understood for their intellectual as well as their creative contributions.3 Approaching their nonmusical contributions as evidence of an “intellectual history” of jazz, Porter situates his work in relation to that of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who distinguished between intellectuals and intellectual work, writing, “All men are intellectual but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”4 The function of an intellectual is “directive and organisational, i.e. educative, i.e. intellectual”5 Their efforts provide their social groups a sense of “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.”6 Gramsci identifies two classes of intellectuals: the traditional and the organic, and he strongly favors the latter for its ability to contribute to the self-awareness of their community and, ultimately, to the transformation of social conditions. For Porter, talking or writing about jazz amounts to far more than a self-reflexive habit of jazz musicians explaining their own music for themselves and their fans. Instead, he argues, jazz musicians who write about music should be understood as part of a multidimensional effort to both make music and to make sense of that music by drawing on questions of culture, history, race, nation, migration, religion, and class. As a result, jazz can be understood as the product of both creative and intellectual efforts, and the cultural labor of jazz musicians should be understood similarly and specifically in terms of their contributions to an antihegemonic cultural narrative.

The intellectual work of the producers of worship music is not dissimilar, as they both make music and talk about making music. In the process of explaining worship and its relationship to music, they attempt to situate the community of evangelicals for whom they write in relation to what they see as the corrosive elements of secular American culture. In this way, they see themselves as antihegemonic and understand their efforts to draw people’s attention toward God as part of a critique of the materialism of American culture. Treating makers of worship music as intellectuals also runs counter to historian Mark Noll’s famously scathing critique of American evangelicalism that took the community to task for abandoning intellectual commitments, saying, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”7 Historian Molly Worthen’s history of American evangelicalism in the 20th century offered a counternarrative to Noll’s famously bleak portrait as she explored “how evangelicals have navigated the upheavals in modern American culture and global Christianity.” For Worthen, those most influential in this effort were those whose contributions have been most legibly “intellectual”: theologians, philosophers, or historians, often working within churches or in higher education.8 Within American evangelicalism, these would count as Gramsci’s “traditional” intellectuals who marshal the forces of institutions and other sources of traditional authority to maintain the status quo. Working as organic intellectuals within American evangelicalism means that certain actors make music that can threaten the status quo by empowering people to assert their own accounts of worshipful expression or by offering songs that teach people about faith outside of classrooms, Bible studies, or other formal educational settings. The power and possibility of people working outside those institutions is central, Worthen concludes, to the larger struggle over defining evangelicalism in the late 20th century. Adding songwriters, musicians, and music industry professionals to Worthen’s list of intellectuals mitigates this tension while expanding the range of people and places from which influential ideas and knowledge emerge and where they take root.

Although songs might be the most recognizable products of this intellectual effort, writing and talking about what those songs mean plays a critical role in how the music is made and how it circulates. Songwriters who describe their music in terms of theology or church history or popular culture or pedagogy take their ideas about music as seriously as they do their songs, recordings, and live performances, and they are quite self-conscious of their roles as creators and as theologians, critics, and teachers. They are formulating visions not only of worship music but of the place of the church and Christians in the world. Their intellectual efforts both make and make sense of the music, its place in the lives of people who use it in worship, and the place of those people in relation to the church and the world at large.

One dimension of this formulation of worship music is the construction of its relationship to the genre known as contemporary Christian music (usually referred to by its initials, CCM).9 CCM refers to a wide range of musical styles that share only one element in common: lyrics with explicit Christian content.10 Defining a musical style according to its lyrics is unusual, but it speaks to the ways in which differences among forms of Christian music have been muted in the service of a generic title that serves the logics of the music industry, even if it does not adequately describe the different sonic qualities of the music it subsumes. CCM includes hip-hop and country, heavy metal and pop, made by and for Christians with lyrics that tend to reflect or refer to religious ideas or themes. If CCM has been defined as Christian music for recreational listening, then worship music can be understood as a subcategory of CCM that is produced explicitly for use by congregations in worship. Although they sound similar and songs and artists cross over with some frequency, the intention behind the music generates some significant differences between them. The discursive production of one as distinct from the other aids in defining what worship is and how music might figure within it.

Their sonic similarities often result in the two forms being mistaken for one another. In 2007, Ben Ratliff, a music journalist for the New York Times, blurred these distinctions in a story about music in church. “This was Sunday night worship for the young-adult subset of the church’s congregation,” he wrote, “but it was also very much a rock show, one that has helped create a vibrant social world in this otherwise quiet desert town.” Despite his attention to the performance and sounds of the church, Ratliff nevertheless failed to attend to the differences between CCM and worship music writing: “Church-based Christian rock—often referred to as C.C.M., for contemporary Christian music—does not exist primarily to compete in mainstream culture; it exists first to bring together a community.”11 Descriptions like these are pervasive, even among scholars, although they obscure the different roles that music plays within American evangelical culture. William T. Romanowski, one of the first scholars to write about CCM, explained that worship music “is best defined as evangelical popular music that co-opted existing popular musical styles with religious lyrics added for ecclesiastical purposes, specifically, worship and evangelism.”12 Music historian David Stowe, who devoted an entire book to exploring the thematic give and take between “Christian rock” and mainstream popular musical culture during the early 1970s, also failed to note the difference between the more popular genre and the practice of worship. On the first page of his book, Stowe erroneously referred to “Christian rock” as the “default music of worship, sounding forth on Sunday mornings and evenings in thousands of churches across North America.”13 Worthen also observed that “CCM . . . now plays a dominant role in evangelical worship across most denominations.”14

Lumping all Christian music together under a single generic label creates the impression that all music with lyrics about God or Christ functions similarly within evangelical communities. In so doing, it silences different ways of engaging with music and it ignores the fact that those differences matter, particularly where worship is concerned. In spite of a growing number of crossover artists and songs (discussed in detail in chapter 4), the confusion of CCM and worship music mistakes audience and market for function and form. CCM and worship music cater to the same community but they perform different roles within it, and the ways in which those differences are constructed draw on different understandings of music’s role in Christian culture and on the place of music in worship, more narrowly construed. Some songs might be sung on Sundays in worship and also played on the radio, and some artists might be popular in both domains, but the production of a particular song as a “worship song” relies on a larger discursive and intellectual apparatus that frames it as a song with certain expressive, experiential, and educational features.

As a result, definitions of worship music tend to focus on the purpose and practice for which it was initially created. In his dissertation about the independent Christian music industry, Andrew Mall defined worship music as “music . . . intended mainly for use in intentional worship, both formal and informal.”15 Writing for a popular audience, journalist Deborah Evans Price, who covered Christian music extensively for Billboard magazine during the 1990s and early 2000s, offered a narrower definition that emphasized its role in worship. In an article called “Praise and Worship: A Primer,” she twice claimed that “it is music sung directly to God.”16 If music is used for worship, she explained, then it should orient the worshipper’s efforts “vertically,” toward God, rather than “horizontally,” among worshippers.17 The long-serving worship pastor of Saddleback Church, Rick Muchow, defined worship music almost purely with respect to its function: “T...