Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America 1479844683, 9781479844685

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Shout to the Lord

N ort h A m e ri c a n Re l i g i on s Series Editors: Tracy Fessenden (Religious Studies, Arizona State University), Laura Levitt (Religious Studies, Temple University), and David Harrington Watt (History, Temple University) In recent years a cadre of industrious, imaginative, and theoretically sophisticated scholars of religion has focused their attention on North America. As a result the field is far more subtle, expansive, and interdisciplinary than it was just two decades ago. The North American Religions series builds on this transformative momentum. Books in the series move among the discourses of ethnography, cultural analysis, and historical study to shed new light on a wide range of religious experiences, practices, and institutions. They explore topics such as lived religion, popular religious movements, religion and social power, religion and cultural reproduction, and the relationship between secular and religious institutions and practices. The series focus primarily, but not exclusively, on religion in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Books in the series: Ava Chamberlain, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards Terry Rey and Alex Stepick, Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith: Haitian Religion in Miami

Annie Blazer, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry Elizabeth Pérez, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions

Kerry Mitchell, Spirituality and the Jodi Eichler-Levine, Suffer the Little State: Managing Nature and ExperiChildren: Uses of the Past in Jewish and ence in America’s National Parks African American Children’s Literature Finbarr Curtis, The Production of Isaac Weiner, Religion Out Loud: American Religious Freedom Religious Sound, Public Space, and M. Cooper Harriss, Ralph Ellison’s American Pluralism Invisible Theology

Hillary Kaell, Walking Where Jesus Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Walked: American Christians and Holy Religion and Mobility in NineteenthLand Pilgrimage Century America Brett Hendrickson, Border Medicine: Ari Y. Kelman, Shout to the Lord: A Transcultural History of Mexican Making Worship Music in Evangelical American Curanderismo America

Shout to the Lord Making Worship Music in Evangelical America

Ari Y. Kelman

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2018 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kelman, Ari Y., 1971– author. Title: Shout to the Lord : making worship music in evangelical America / Ari Y. Kelman. Description: New York : NYU Press, 2018. | Series: North American religions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017038141| ISBN 9781479844685 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479863679 (pb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Music in churches—United States. | Public worship—United States. | Evangelicalism—United States. Classification: LCC BV290 .K45 2018 | DDC 264/.20973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038141 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

To SK and SH For showing me what prayer is and for living lives worthy of praise

Contents

List of Illustrations

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Preface: Like a Prayer

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Introduction: Why Make Music?

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1. Making Worship and Music: Expression, Experience, and Education

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2. Songwriting: Writing Songs Anyone Can Sing

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3. Leading Worship: Making Music in Congregations

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4. Selling the Spirit: Making Worship Music in the Marketplace

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Conclusion: Saved by Songs

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1. “Not Religious? Neither Are We” billboard for C3 Church (renamed Vive Church), Palo Alto, California

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Figure 1.2. “Worship at Full Volume” T-shirt

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Figure 2.1. Myrrh Records promotional flexi-disc (ca. 1977)

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Figure 4.1. Cover of CCM magazine (March 1998)

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Figure 4.2. Delirious? live at Saddleback Worship Conference (2008)

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Preface Like a Prayer May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart / be pleasing in your sight, LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer. —Psalm 19:14

I was initially drawn to the question of how Christians produce prayer because of my own background as an American Jew who has spent a great deal of time in synagogue. I have led worship services countless times both on the Sabbath and the High Holidays, and, for a few years, I worked at a Jewish private school in Manhattan where I taught music and facilitated daily prayer services. I have the liturgical knowledge and the musical skill required to lead prayer, and I have even tried my hand at writing music for worship, but I never found myself to be very good at any of it. I knew that I could keep the congregation on course and on key, but I felt that I lacked some other facility that would turn our collective singing into something greater and more profound. I could recite the prescribed texts and I could encourage the congregation to sing faster or slower, but I never felt that I succeeded in enabling others (or myself for that matter) to turn those texts into prayers. I struggled to understand how to use songs in the context of congregational worship to enable something that might be called a “religious experience.” I tried to figure out which of the key elements were limiting my experience and understanding of prayer: Was it the music? Was it the liturgy? Was it me? These questions led me to ask who really understood how to create congregational prayer in all its complexities. Who was asking the best questions about how to use music to encourage expression or elicit experiences of the sort that seemed more like whatever it was I imagined prayer to be? Where did worship appear to be working? My quest led me deeper into scholarship on congregations, on music, and on worship and xi

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all of the accounts of what it is supposed to do and how it is supposed to feel. It also led me to church. At churches throughout the United States, I found congregations full of people ready to sing at full volume, and with a kind of commitment that I had rarely experienced. I encountered songs I had never heard that were both beautiful popular cultural artifacts and that seemed to be able to draw people both together and upwards, toward whatever they believed to be there. I saw people weep openly, hold their heads in their hands, raise their arms exuberantly, and speak quietly what I understood to be words of prayer. In all my years of synagogue attendance, I don’t believe I ever saw such regular expressions that seemed to break the ritual framework of worship and allowed people to pray on their own terms. I received a few free compact discs (CDs) of worship music, and I bought a few more, so that I could learn the songs and understand what made them work. I enjoyed singing along with them, both in church and on my own. For me, the central experience was that of music that always seemed on the verge of becoming something else, and I wanted to know how people who made music for worship did it. I wanted to know this, in part, because I never felt I ever managed to make music in worship that was anything other than ritual performance. But I observed people who seemed capable of doing so. How did the people responsible for making music understand and approach their work, and how did it play out in practice? I wanted to know how to make music that made worship, so I set about trying to immerse myself in the world of worship music production. Over four years, I interviewed over 75 people, attended six multiday conferences for worship leaders or Christian songwriters, observed a school for worship leaders, spent countless Sundays in church, and listened and read for thousands of hours trying to understand how they made worship out of music and vice versa. Those experiences, conversations, and encounters comprise the majority of the research for this book. They helped reveal the social and cultural considerations that underlie the creation of music for congregational worship that can enable people to express their faith in prayer. Over the course of my research, I was asked two questions more than any others. In church, I was regularly asked, “Are you a believer?” What people really wanted to know is whether or not I am a Christian. I’m not, so I would answer, “I’m Jewish.” While that response does not nec-

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essarily clarify my status as a believer, it led to a number of fascinating discussions about Hebrew tattoos (please check your spelling and the direction of the text), my family (my father is a rabbi), what it feels like to be a member of the “chosen people” (I tend not to think about it), about Israel (which I typically found more complicated a conversation than they did), and other questions about Jews and about Judaism and its relationship to Christianity. The question about my faith usually came from many of the people whom I’ve had the opportunity to interview about their experiences with worship music as songwriters, pastors, worship leaders, and professionals in the music industry. They were all Christians and they know worship music from the inside out, writing, producing and performing songs, organizing marketing efforts, writing about songs and songwriting, leading worship, and living as worshippers and as members of church communities. Some thought it strange that a Jewish scholar would be interested in worship music, while others took the opportunity to talk scripture and still others used the occasion for a little gentle proselytizing. The people who generously gave of their time and shared their insights, experiences, stories, and music inspired me to write this book, and this book is partially for them, though I often wonder whether there is anything that I have to add to a conversation about their faith, their daily work, or the music they make. In addition to the question about my beliefs, the other question I often received came from my academic colleagues, who were not concerned with my faith, as they assumed that I did not have much, if any, to speak of. They usually asked after my soul, as well, though they were more concerned about the withering effects they believed that worship music might have on it. Working primarily in secular, research universities, some of my colleagues are scholars of music and others are scholars of religious studies but most of them are not themselves practitioners of religion, and their inquiries betrayed some shared assumptions about American evangelicals and the quality of their music.1 Frequently, they expressed their condolences for the fact that I must have had to endure hours of listening to what they assumed to be the terrible, cloying sounds of contemporary evangelical worship. Or worse, they assumed that going to church was a chore, as it meant having to listen to bad music and heavy-handed sermonizing, both of which they assumed to be second-rate, baldly utilitarian, and both politically and theologically overdetermined. To them,

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I could offer a far more direct and affirmative answer than I could to my Christian interlocutors: I genuinely liked a lot of the music I heard. I did not find it to be derivative or a poor version of pop music. Much of it was catchy and enjoyable to sing and listen to. I loved singing it in church and I put more than a few songs on a playlist that was the soundtrack to countless morning runs in cities around the world. I came to appreciate the craft and the creativity of worship music, and some of what I heard in it kept me curious enough to continue thinking about what made this music so engaging and so successful at facilitating worship. To be sure, I did not love all of the music that I encountered during the course of this study, but that would be generally true of almost every record and CD that I own, or every radio station I listen to. Similarly, I thoroughly enjoyed singing along in church to songs that did not resonate with me theologically, but this was not so different from my experience of praying in many Jewish contexts. More than mere fascination, I developed a true affinity for the music I was singing and studying, detecting in it the contrapuntal strains of popular music and popular religion, and coming to appreciate the harmonies and dissonances such an encounter made audible. Yet, as much as I enjoyed singing in church and listening to worship music elsewhere, what follows does not dwell on the experience of worship or worshippers. There are loads of books that plumb the phenomenological depths of worship and religious experience, or that try to explain why communal singing is so pleasurable to so many. This book builds on those but takes a different approach to this phenomenon by attending a little more intently to the people, practices, and considerations that shape the music that people eventually sing as worship. Specifically, it focuses on the production and creation of songs for worship that, if they are to succeed, must allow people to use the ritual of congregational worship to transcend the ritual itself. Songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry professionals are keenly aware that they make music for ritualized worship, and they express no small measure of concern about this. They worry that their songs might become the focus, rather than an instrument of worship. They worry that their songs might be so pleasurable to sing that worshippers might mistake the good feelings of communal song for the experience of worship itself. In short, they worry that the forms of musical worship they create might eclipse the ability of people to enter deeply and earnestly into worship itself. With

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this awareness, they invest in making music that, they hope, will allow people to transcend the songs they’ve written. The result are great songs that both enable people to worship however they may and are tethered to deep concerns about the urgency and limitations of human expression. *** There were many people involved in the production of this book, and it is a result of their uncoordinated efforts, though I take full responsibility for its contents, errors, and tone deafness. It began when I was on the faculty of UC Davis, and my colleagues there were beyond supportive. Specifically, I want to thank Caren Kaplan, who invited me to give a talk before I had anything to say; Douglas Kahn, whose insights into sound and sound art helped me through earlier versions of the ideas here; and Carolyn Thomas, who encouraged me to reach out beyond my office and across the campus. Carolyn helped to support the project with some early funding that made some of the fieldwork possible, and she helped kick-start the research that is largely at the heart of the book. Stanford University has been an encouraging environment in which I could see this book to fruition. My colleagues in and beyond the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Religious Studies have introduced me to new literatures and new ways of approaching phenomena like music and religion, and have made this book far richer than I imagined it could have been. Special thanks to Keith D. Eiten of Wheaton College’s Busman Memorial Library for some eleventh hour help with one of the book’s images. Throughout the research and writing, I have been touched and encouraged by the extraordinary trust and openness shown me by many of the people who appear in this book. Over meals and meetings in offices and coffee shops, countless people shared their time and insight, and, in the process, taught me everything I know about worship and music and how they go together. I can only pray that this book is intelligible to them, and that it represents the world that they know, and that it, in some small way, may offer new insights into the work they do. In particular, I want to highlight the generosity of Ross Parsley, Glenn Packiam, Chuck Fromm, Brent Bourgeois, and Bob Kauflin, each of whom not only shared their own stories and insights with me but also connected me to others whose voices were so crucial to this book’s eventual insights.

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To my friends and family, who heard so much about this project along the way, I am grateful for your patience and humor, and to the students in my classes at both UC Davis and Stanford, I appreciate your willingness to learn along with me as I worked out some of these ideas with you. To my colleagues and friends who asked about how the book was going over these many years, I can only say that each conversation helped nudge it toward completion, however gently. This book has been a long time coming, and I’m especially indebted to a few readers who, thanks to the anonymous scholarly review process, I will never be able to thank directly, but who, along the way, gave me gifts that the manuscript did not quite warrant and helped to orient me toward what became the book that you have here. It could not have been written without their collegial and generous help and insights, and for that I am grateful and humbled to work in research and scholarship. Specifically, I want to call out Marc Gidal and Kristen Dombek, who have been collaborators on the ideas in this book in so many ways over the decades we’ve known each other. On the nuts and bolts side of things, I have been fortunate to have had outstanding assistance from Megan McKoy, Joanna Carr, and Elayne Weissler-Martello, each of whom arrived at precisely the right moment to provide exactly the help I needed to get this book to its next stage. Thank you to the wonderful team at NYU, particularly Laura Levitt and David Watt, who encouraged me early on and waited patiently as I dallied and wrote before finally bringing to you the best book that I could for your fine series. Along with Tracy Fessenden, you two have cultivated an exceptionally rich editorial vision and I am beyond happy that you wish to claim this little book as one of your own. Jennifer Hammer has been a great coach and shepherd as well, helping me to navigate all of the parts of bringing a book to published form. Writing a book is always an adventure, and Jennifer is as sure-footed and steady a guide as I could ask for. Thank you for your encouragement, your firm hand, your keen eye, your guidance, and your patience. Thank you to Amy Klopfenstein, for taking care of most of the details and for transforming all of the elements of bringing all the words on the pages that follow into the form of a book. I began this book before I met my wife and before either of our children joined us. Eva, Bella, and Malachi: you are why I do what I do. You make me put my prayers into practice, and my practice into prayers. And, more importantly, you make those prayers possible and worthwhile.

Introduction Why Make Music? Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth. —John 4:23–241 Worship is about the heart and it’s about your life, it’s not about any type of song. The style of worship songs will change, but the heart of it never will. —Chris Tomlin2

On the last night of a Christian songwriters’ retreat in 2008, songwriter Paul Baloche led worship. It was late and I was exhausted, having spent the previous three days doing as many interviews as I could, listening to lectures, going to songwriting workshops, and even trying my hand at a little songwriting (it wasn’t pretty). I had taken too many field notes for my own good and I was looking forward to returning home so I could get some rest and a little distance from all that I’d gathered. Sitting in a covered wooden chapel in the Santa Cruz Mountains, with windows open to the redwoods and a simple stage at the front, it was quiet for a few moments as people chatted with one another before Baloche and his band took the stage. Baloche started in and people sang, and I sang along, too, as best I could. People stood, so I stood. The singing seemed to rise in intensity, and somewhere near the end of the final song Baloche and his band did something. I’m still not sure what it was. Maybe they extended a break or they played a coda of some kind, but the music seemed to open up as the band sat on a single, swirling chord, holding it for some time. People started humming and vocalizing. Someone began 1

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speaking extemporaneously, blessing Baloche and all of us. Someone else quietly spoke in tongues. Other people wept or held their head in their hands or closed their eyes, lips moving and hands extended outward as if they were holding something in their arms. I hummed along, too, enjoying the feeling. The song had almost ceased to be a song, but Baloche and his bandmates held us all together, hovering around a single chord while the rest of us sang or chanted or spoke or simply took in the scene and the sound. I do not know how long it lasted, but I know I was not ready for it to end. I was enjoying this moment and I was moved by whatever it was that was happening. When Baloche and his band brought the song and the evening to a close, we all looked around and nodded. It felt like we’d shared something quite unusual. Two different people asked me if I could feel the Holy Spirit in the room. They could, they told me. I mumbled some kind of response, at that moment not entirely certain what I had experienced. I knew that the music and the singing felt good and right, and it made the air feel thick with promise and challenge, and it seemed as if Baloche had done something extraordinary. It felt both powerful and personal, as if the music brought us together and allowed each one of us to pray in his or her own way. I wanted to ask him again how he did what he did, even though I knew what he would say. How do you take a room of tired people and, over the course of five or six songs, create space for them to pray their own prayers? Part of it was due to Baloche and his band, each of whom is an exceptional musician and a person who holds his or her faith deeply. Part of it could have been that we were in an open-air structure in the redwoods, making music together. Part of it could have been that we were not under the typical time constraints of a Sunday worship service, so Baloche and his band could hold us as long as it felt good and right to do so without arousing the anxiety of a pastor waiting to take the stage or a family trying to get to a soccer game after church. Part of it could have been attributed to the people in the ad-hoc congregation who were songwriters of Christian music, and were both experienced with and predisposed toward this kind of thing. It may have been some combination of all of these things, but it still took Baloche and his band, his songs, and his singing to create the conditions for that encounter. We needed music that would enable us to pray, even

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as Baloche also understood how and when to silence his songs and let us pray on our own. This book is an effort to understand moments like that one by exploring how songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry professionals collaborate to make music that can become prayer. Embedded in this investigation is an understanding that Baloche’s worship session made clear: inasmuch as it is possible to focus on the music itself, the ultimate aim of those responsible for making music is never the music itself. The music, they explain, is only a medium for a more profound and more important message, one that is necessarily more urgent and greater than any song can contain. Understanding that worship is not, fundamentally, about music allows music makers to be agnostic about style and serious about their faith as they adapt popular musical forms for sacred purposes. Focusing on the production of worship music highlights the extent to which social and cultural concerns underwrite forms of congregational worship, and how investments in cultural forms also make it possible to transcend them. Making music that works in this way requires both a great deal of creative effort and an ongoing reckoning with the theology of worship, the power of popular music, the craft of songwriting, the persuasive dimensions of performance, and an understanding of the role of a commodified form in serving the expressive needs of worshippers. Instead of undermining worship music, highlighting its social and cultural elements emphasizes the fact that even the most transcendent examples of human expression require coordinated and sometimes contradictory human efforts.

Music in Worship This book is concerned with understanding how people make the songs that become congregational and individual prayer. How do they turn their own worship into songs, and how do they imagine that others might turn their songs into worship? What considerations shape their output, and how do they manage their commitments to art, to their congregations, and to God? How do they understand their efforts as creators of music in the context of an American religious movement that holds that it is possible for anyone to encounter God directly and without mediation? This theological stance would seem to suggest that

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their music is, at best, unnecessary and at worst a distraction, and it puts worship music makers in a double bind: they write songs that they hope will allow worshippers to sing them for worship, but not as worship. They hope their songs will help others to pray, but they understand that the songs themselves always contain the possibility that they might eclipse the worship they have been created to facilitate. The better their songs are, the more likely they will fall short of worship because they might become too pleasurable to sing and stop people from worshipping directly to God. They write songs that serve as ritualized forms to mediate a relationship that they believe should be unmediated and unritualized. Songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry professionals are all aware of this tension, but nevertheless they invest themselves in music for worship. Scholar of religion Birgit Meyer calls worship songs and other cultural artifacts “sensational forms,” which she understands as a religious convention that allows both for the expression of “content and meaning and ethical norms and values” as well as “a modality or device that allows for repeated . . . action.”3 Sensational forms are thus explicitly ritual in nature. With respect to music, historian of religion Stephen Marini defined “sacred song” as music with “mythic content” that is used for “effective ritual action.”4 Congregations, in particular, thrive on these forms because prayer is not easy. It requires committing one’s self to expressions that may or may not be reciprocated by the divine being to which one is praying. It thrives on repetition and practice, but it can stagnate when it becomes too repetitive. People who make worship music create sensational forms that they hope will provide enough ritual structure and enough expressive opportunity to enable worship to resist becoming merely rote. Worship songs or liturgies, hymnals or projection screens, cantors and worship leaders help; each serves those trying to worship by providing readily available and accessible ritual forms for people to engage with without having to reinvent modes or expressions of prayer each time one feels moved to do so. They can be thought of as devices or shortcuts that serve like ready-made expressions that, on good days, can transport those who engage with them into a space of prayer. Sensational or ritual forms give familiar features to grand questions, and, as a result, they make the ritual of prayer easier. They may also sow the seeds for new orthodoxies, as people grow attached to songs and styles, associating them with prayer itself.

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At worst, these ritual elements privilege form over content. At best, sensational forms mediate content that, in its most successful moments, breaks through the form and allows for something greater, something deeper, something transcendent to take place. The sensational form of musical worship is so pervasive that no other activity figures as prominently as worship in the lives of American congregations. Sociologist Mark Chaves’s national survey of American congregations revealed that “worship services take up more congregational resources and involve more people than anything else congregations do.” Moreover, worship services are the main point of contact between the congregation and the outside world, and as such they constitute a congregation’s most public face, the self-portrait religious congregations offer to the outside world. There is also a sense in which worship events are more truly collective than anything else congregations do. . . . However staid the service, it is more collectively effervescent than any other congregational event.5

With a nod to Émile Durkheim, Chaves argued that worship creates congregations. It brings people together more often than other activities, and it shapes congregational identity (from both inside and out) more than any other function. With all due respect to education and social action, worship is what congregations do. Usually, worship involves music. In his analysis of the “repertoire[s] of available worship elements” in American congregations, Chaves observed that 98 percent of people who attend worship services engage in congregational singing and 96 percent of all congregations feature singing in their worship.6 Songwriter and longtime worship leader and teacher Bob Kauflin explained to me that the reason there is so much singing in evangelical congregations, specifically, is that the biblical command to sing praise is hard to miss: “There are about 400 references to singing, 50 direct commands to sing God’s praise. [Psalm] 47:6 [says], ‘Sing praises to the King, sing praises to God, sing praises to our King, sing praises.’ So, that’s pretty clear. God wants us to give Him praise not just with our lips but with our songs.”7 But the Bible is not as clear with respect to how songs should sound.8 For example, Ephesians 5:18–19 reads, “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit,

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speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord.” Colossians 3:16 offers a similar prescription: “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.” What the Bible means by the repeated use of “psalms, hymns, and songs from the spirit” is the subject of much debate. Differences of interpretation and intention have generated volumes of writing and more than one schism among practitioners, theologians, songwriters, worship leaders, pastors, denominations, and congregations. These arguments are not new. They stretch back at least as far as Martin Luther’s 95 Theses and they wind a circuitous path through the refractions of institutional denominationalism, the exuberance of the First and Second Awakenings in the United States, and the search for spirituality that emerged from the counterculture of the late 1960s.9 They informed Luther’s composition of hymns and influenced those of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, ultimately shaping the work of songwriters and worship leaders who began writing worship music that sounded like rock and roll. Beginning in the 1960s, critics like Bob Larson wrote vociferous arguments condemning the inclusion of rock and roll in worship, and decades later writers like Robb Redman offered spirited arguments in its favor.10 Music is often the register for larger debates about what counts and what does not count as worship, and discussions about the proper place of music in worship continue to shape how music for worship is made and, consequently, the sound and substance of congregational worship itself. For many observers and scholars, the centrality of music in worship has made them sound nearly synonymous. Popular news stories about evangelical churches reinforce this impression by regularly detailing stories about worship that emphasize music.11 The ubiquity of music has led some scholars to conclude that “the term worship means singing.”12 Others observed that “at a church like the Vineyard, music is prayer.”13 But many of those invested in the production of worship are quick to refute this impression with claims that when music attracts too much attention it can become a distraction for worship and worshippers. Songwriter and worship leader David Crowder explained to me that “if worship consists of music, then I feel like we’re kind of in a bad space since the vehicle or container is so limited in terms of what it provides us.”14 Charlie Pea-

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cock, one of Christian music’s greatest champions and fiercest critics, put it more pointedly: “Where the discussion of worship begins and ends with music, there will always be foolishness, error, and strife.”15 Songwriter Sara Groves suggested something similar when she explained that “worship cannot just be this one small passageway of music.”16 Lutheran theologian Marva Dawn also wrote that “music is the outgrowth/consequence (not the antecedent) of worship, the response to God’s presence.” Songs can distract or engage, but, she admonishes, “it is idolatry to think that our work makes the difference.”17 Songs, they all agree, are vehicles—disposable, transposable, dispensable, and ephemeral. Songwriters and critics understand that worship music is supposed to facilitate worship, not become worship, warning against the conclusion that worship is defined by its musical forms. The question, then, for those who make worship music, is how to write, perform, or produce songs that serve the needs of worshippers without falling prey to the false equivalence of music and worship. The answer lies in the efforts of critics, songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry professionals who both invest in and resist music as the focus of their efforts. Music, they assert, is a medium of both collective song and individual expression, and their songs work best as worship when they become the worship of others. This remains true in congregational settings, where a shared repertoire of ritual elements allows a congregation of worshippers to sing together while still enabling individuals to express their own prayers.18 The sensational form of the song and the cultural practice of singing it in a congregation both create the impression that music is worship and, simultaneously, allow expressions of worship to exceed the music provided for it.

The Cultural Production of Worship Music The process by which public practice and mass-produced cultural forms become vehicles for private expression of something transcendent is what religious studies scholar Robert Orsi means when he refers to prayer as a “switching point between the social world and the imagination.”19 For Orsi, prayer is often “misidentified as private and so therefore assumed not to have a history or a politics. But people at prayer are intimately engaged and implicated in their social worlds.”20 Prayer, he argues, is always social, no matter how much emphasis people place on its ability

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to channel an individual directly to the divine. Accounting for the social dimensions of worship, however, does not make private expressions illusions. Rather, Orsi’s insight emphasizes the ways in which private expressions are tethered to social and cultural forms even then they offer the possibility of communion with God. The sense of the Holy Spirit that some described to me on that night in the Santa Cruz Mountains was not a fiction, but it was not purely a result of social forces, either. It was, in a sense, the product of people in their social worlds deploying the practice and form of prayer to transcend them. To make worship music in this context is to produce songs that make “switching points” possible. In that service, it bears a significant responsibility for defining, modeling, and teaching people what worship is, how to do it, and what it ought to sound and feel like. Following Orsi, even the most seemingly subjective examples of worship emerge from social conditions and take social forms. The romantic notion of the singer-songwriter pouring her heart out at the piano or the worship leader standing rapt in front of a congregation masks the much larger network of actions, actors, institutions, practices, and conventions that help to bring songs into congregations and turn them from individual expressions of faith into occasions for corporate worship. Songs need songwriters, of course, and the formulation of something called “worship music” also depends on congregations and music publishers, on pastors and worship leaders, on copyright law, LPs and CDs, and on a host of websites and other resources created to help promote and produce the best possible songs for congregations and worshippers to make their own. As music scholar Tia DeNora has argued about Beethoven, even his apparently singular stature can be understood as the product of a host of institutional actors who collaborated on the construction of the very category of the “modern genius.”21 The music may have come from Beethoven but it needed a constellation of social, cultural, ideological, and material investments that allowed it to circulate in the ways that it did and to assume the stature and meaning that it now holds. The production of worship music is not terribly dissimilar, insofar as its social conditions shape the ways worshippers understand, imagine, and engage in prayer. Sociologists Richard Peterson and Howard Becker have each offered useful frameworks for understanding the social and institutional dimensions of the production of culture, of which worship music is one

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instance.22 Informed by their lifelong interest in music, both scholars understand culture not as a “reflection” of social life, but as the result of collaborations among social actors, institutions, markets, and cultural forms. Both argue that to attend to art or music largely as receptacles of cultural value, in the mode of early cultural studies or in the fashion of the “myth and symbol” school of American Studies, is to focus too narrowly on meanings that inhere in the products themselves.23 Songs or paintings or novels or movies might reveal certain cultural truths about historical moments, but approaching them only or primarily as expressions of culture mutes the effort that created the conditions for their appearance. Interpreting culture as representation, Peterson and Becker argue, abstracts it from the material conditions of its production and reifies cultural expression in ways that distort its relationship to the social and cultural contexts that make it meaningful. These contexts include those in which cultural artifacts are made. Peterson first turned the tools of sociology on the people and structures responsible for the “production of culture.”24 By shifting the locus of cultural investigation away from cultural products and onto their production and producers, he tried to provide a more thorough account of the evolution of cultural forms and their meanings. For example, his study of authenticity in country music highlighted the evolution of cultural conventions that led to their acceptance as characteristics of the genre.25 He traced the ways in which elements of the style were not merely reflections of everyday life, but were themselves artifacts of the larger mechanisms of popular musical production. Becker extended Peterson’s insights about the production of culture in his examination of “art worlds.” Building on the insights of art critic Arthur Danto, Becker located the creation of art within a complex of individuals and institutions, and not only as the result of creative individuals acting on their own. The phenomenon known as “art,” then, could be better understood as the result of a loosely coordinated but collaborative effort of artists and critics, galleries and museums, financiers, art schools, and others. To indicate that he was not talking about art-as-artifact, Becker called the results “art worlds,” which, he explained, consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well,

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define as art. . . . The world exists in the cooperative activity of those people, not as a structure or organization, and we use worlds like those only as shorthand for the notion of networks of people cooperating.26

Differently from Peterson, who focused on the specific work of cultural producers operating within discrete media industries, Becker’s “worlds” approach revealed the varied human efforts that collaborate in less formal ways to produce cultural phenomena. In the realm of music, specifically, musicologist Christopher Small offered the concept of musicking as a way of understanding the variety of practices involved in the production of musical culture, from musicians and their audiences to ticket-takers at a concert.27 Musicking, for Small, refers to the array of practices that are engaged in the production of musical culture. His insistence on using the gerund “musicking” serves as a reminder that music is never only what it sounds like, and that it always reverberates with the human efforts that give it sound and form. Thus, for both Becker and Small, neither art nor music can be reduced to the singular product of a creative act, but each must be considered within broader networks of human activity that make the act and the product possible. Musical cultures and art worlds cannot be separated from the sound of music or the appearance of art; they are what happens when people engage in art or music making, or in meaning making in conversation with those cultural forms. In some respects, making worship music is no different from these other cultural forms, as it engages all six facets of Peterson’s theory of the field of symbolic production: technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational career, and market.28 As worship music evolved since the late 1960s and adopted the sounds of rock and roll, it adhered to conventions of popular musical production: record albums, artists committed to making worship and leading worship, attention to album sales, magazines, journalists, critics, and organizations committed to managing music copyright for houses of worship. These were not incidental by-products of a nascent music industry; they can be understood as integral parts of the mechanisms of cultural production. Even worship songs can be understood as a specific cultural form designed to serve congregations in worship, and not as “natural” results of prayerful intent or expression. Again, using the cultural production ap-

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proach does not mean that worship is artificial or hollow, but rather that the worship song is a cultural form whose social context does not necessarily preclude it from enabling transcendent expressions of worship. In this light, congregational worship can be understood as a cultural product, but worship music is not a perfect analogue to Becker’s take on art or Small’s understanding of “musicking” because worship, almost by definition, cannot be contained by a “world.” Even though it assumes culturally specific forms and practices, it is supposed to allow those engaged with it to transcend them and to enable practitioners to express and perhaps encounter something universal or divine. This is what separates worship, however one might choose to define it, from other modes of expression or communication. If worship is a cultural “world,” it is one that cannot totally encompass the intent or experience of worship itself; the act of musicking in the context of worship must make more than just sound, or else it is merely music. This understanding of the relationship between music and its intended purpose situates critics, songwriters, worship leaders, music industry professionals, and worshippers in a somewhat unstable relationship with the music they collectively make. The production of culture approach helps highlight these coordinated and contradictory efforts by calling attention to the ways in which they came to be, and not just to how they sound. Attending to the intentions, concerns, and aspirations of songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry professionals, as well as to debates about worship music, amplifies the variety of investments that enable sacred practice. Considering cultural production highlights the ways in which key cultural producers imagine their work in relation both to God and to the human needs of those who might sing their songs for worship. It enables us to hear the contradictory conditions inherent in creating music for worship that should, ideally, not be necessary for worship. Attending to the production of worship music does not compromise its power, though it may help to explain how it makes worship possible.

The Scope of the Work and a Note on Terminology How to refer to music for worship is almost as contested as the music itself and almost as influential to its cultural formation. The history of music in worship is so long that the form has taken on any number of

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titles, each iteration referring to its function and alluding to broader social relationships in which it circulates. The emergence of a specific generic assignation is a more recent development that coincided with the rise of genre as the organizing logic of the musical marketplace in the early 20th century.29 For centuries of worship music publishing, genre mattered less than publishing format or denominational affiliation, as songs for worship were typically published in hymnals or songbooks that were sold to churches. As a result, published collections used a number of terms to refer to the music they held. The subtitle of the 1651 Bay Psalm Book, the first hymnal published in the American colonies, referred to “Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs.” Half a century later, British minister and hymn-writer Isaac Watts called his 1701 hymnal “Psalms and Spiritual Songs.” John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, entitled his 1761 collection “Select Hymns,” and, in 1801, the first hymnal published by an African American congregation referred to “Spiritual Songs and Hymns” in its title.30 Beginning in the late 19th century, “gospel music” emerged as a term that referred to more contemporary-sounding songs written for worship. Led by composers like Thomas A. Dorsey and others, the rise of gospel music eschewed the traditionalism of hymn-based worship and traded on new sounds and new styles.31 The term applied to music by and for both black and white Christian communities and, as historian of religion James Goff and others have noted, the black and white gospel music traditions drew on one another, even as sociological and emerging music market conditions segregated them.32 The music industry played a powerful role in shaping American popular music by creating genres that aligned with markets, often defining them according to racial categories. This included a small but significant market for sermons by African American preachers who understood the power of emerging recording technologies as a tool for evangelism.33 Market dynamics, put in place by policies of racial and commercial distinction, helped to create two parallel industries for religious recordings: one white and one black.34 The music of the African American church has long retained the label “gospel music,” though that, too, is beginning to change. Deborah Smith Pollard, a scholar of African American religious music, found that “praise and worship music” had entered the black church, observing that “praise and worship music is used during the opening period of a church

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worship service, gospel musical or concert.” She noted that “praise and worship music” was even threatening to “replace the older gospel song repertoire.”35 The evolution of gospel music and the worship practices of African American congregations is a fascinating and rich story, and it is one that has had a greater impact on the evolution of American popular music than either white gospel music or the much younger forms of Christian rock. Yet the distinction between largely Anglo and largely African American churches is more than just musical. The fissure between white and African American evangelical churches (to say nothing of the growing number of Spanish-language evangelical congregations in the United States) is a well-documented sociological fact. Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith have examined the ways in which race informs the understandings, experiences, and institutional structures of American evangelicalism, ultimately concluding that the two, appeals to the universal “body of Christ” notwithstanding, are quite different indeed.36 Multicultural churches, as documented by Gerardo Marti, represent a small fraction of houses of worship that attend assiduously to their multicultural makeup.37 But the majority of American houses of worship remain quite segregated. I respect the distinction among forms and sites of American evangelicalism, and my research could not address every aspect of the cultural production of worship music in American evangelical congregations across race and region. So I focus, here, on the production of music for largely white American evangelical congregations, with the understanding that scholars like Deborah Smith Pollard and others are working on projects parallel to this one.38 This book focuses on the music that emerged in predominantly white churches and became the soundtrack for the resurgence in American evangelical life during the latter decades of the 20th century. Owing in large part to the significant place of popular music in the counterculture of the 1960s, a new strain of music influenced by the blues and folk rock eclipsed both “Southern Gospel” and traditional hymns. It first came to be known as Jesus Music and then as Christian rock or contemporary Christian music (CCM). Music written for worship came to be known, successively, as “praise and worship,” “praise choruses,” “praise music,” “contemporary worship music,” “modern worship music,” and, most recently, “contemporary congregational songs,” though this, too, is likely to change in the future.39 Changes in nomenclature have represented

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changes in how people make sense of music and its relationship to worship.40 Insofar as each and every label for music represents a compromise between the descriptive, the analytical, the practical, and the strategic, I want to state from the outset that, when I use the term “worship music,” I am using it to refer to a product of musical and cultural practices that have come to characterize congregational worship in primarily white evangelical churches since the late 1960s, when rock and roll became the predominant stylistic referent in predominantly white evangelical congregations. This book examines the production of worship music across four realms: discourse, songwriting, worship leading, and the music industry. Each will be the focus of a single chapter, providing ample space to examine the production of worship music in that realm, even as each is intertwined with the others. Woven through this book’s four chapters are persistent concerns that inform the production of worship music: concerns about the faith and character of worshipers, questions about the prominence that music should have in worship, the definition of worship, the relationship between congregational worship and worship as a lifestyle, and tensions between commercial interests and sacred service. Connecting these is an overarching appreciation of the centrality of music in worship and the understanding that, to serve as worship, the music must not call too much attention to itself. Focusing on the cultural production of worship music grounds the phenomenon in discursive, material, social, sonic, and spiritual concerns that are channeled through talking about worship, the craft of songwriting, the perils of live performance, and the mechanisms of a media industry. Emphasizing these realms of cultural production allows for an account of worship songs as paradigmatic “sensational forms” that calls attention both to their form and to the efforts required to create them.41 Understood as a cultural production, worship music also becomes more than just an accumulation of “sacred songs” that serve the needs of a congregation for music with which to worship. By focusing on the production of worship music, Shout to the Lord denaturalizes both the sensational and practical qualities of the music, and reveals the human concerns that make worship possible.

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. 15

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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

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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

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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

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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 ad-

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equately 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

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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: “The message is what makes a worship song a worship song. . . . Any song that helps people devote more of their lives to God is a worship song. The goal of worship is to lead people to respond to the greatness of the one and only living God.”18 Music journalist and essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan offered a more general, if slightly sardonic, definition in his description of “Praise and Worship, a new form of Christian rock in which the band and the audience sing,

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together, as loud as they can, directly to God.”19 Noting that “praise and worship” was “new,” Sullivan suggested a distinction between one form of music for people to sing together and another form of Christian rock for which this was not the aim or the intent. For each of these writers, the music’s defining feature derives primarily from its ability to serve the needs of worshippers in congregational settings. Some definitions of worship music emphasize qualities that highlight its stylistic proximity to American popular music, which both blurs its relationship with CCM and with popular music more generally. Author and teacher Robb Redman, who favored the term “Contemporary Worship Music,” defined it as “worship music in the genres of popular music produced over the past thirty years by North American Protestant recording and publishing companies, churches, and individuals.”20 In her dissertation, Monique Ingalls departed from Redman’s definition but offered a similar formulation with respect to “the broad repertory of evangelical congregational song composed from the late 1960s to the early 2000s in mainstream Western popular musical styles.”21 Although they acknowledge the significance of style, they still revert to explanations of worship music that privilege its use in and for worship. Ingalls frames her definition in terms of “congregational song.” Redman delineates the difference in terms of how style can inform practice: “Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) is a name applied to music meant for solo or ensemble performance, not congregational singing. . . . Music is performed in keys and tempos that are comfortable for the artist; such settings do not always work for churches.”22 Articulating differences between CCM and worship music, is, in a sense, less about distinguishing one from the other by musical qualities or generic classification, and more about creating meaningful language for describing the different social and cultural roles that music might play in American evangelical life. With echoes of Peterson and Becker, many scholars of music make a similar argument about genre more generally. Instead of approaching the formation of genres as a reflection of technical or stylistic musical differences, they emphasize the production of genres by sociological or marketing concerns.23 Nevertheless, the assignation of genre still seems to reflect an emphasis on musical style, not cultural production. Increasingly sensitive to this terminological problem, other scholars have suggested more flexible terms such as “subcul-

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ture” or “scene” as better modifiers than genre for capturing the social and cultural dimensions of music making.24 CCM, then, might be identified as the music of an evangelical subculture, which would fit nicely with Christian Smith’s deployment of that term to describe American evangelicals.25 Congregational worship music might best be understood as the music of a “scene” within that subculture, wherein its music can be defined by its use for a specific purpose. This mode of describing worship music follows DeNora, who proposed that people conceptualize “musical forms as devices for the organization of experience, as referents for action, feeling, and knowledge formulation. Music’s materials provide resources that can be harnessed in and for imagination, awareness, consciousness, action, for all manner of social formation.”26 For DeNora, engaging with music requires fusing a variety of realms including the imaginary and the social. Recalling that Orsi’s definition of prayer also utilized these terms amplifies the facilitating role that music can play for those who use it to toggle between the place of music in their everyday lives and its more elusive qualities that lend themselves to expressions of worship and not just music.

Making Expressive Worship Worship music is not only defined by its use in worship, but also by an understanding of what it enables people to express through prayer. Essayist Annie Dillard, whose writing is infused with religious and spiritual themes, offered one of the most popular and compelling visions of prayer as an act fraught with danger in which rote recitation cannot suffice: Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? . . . Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.27

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To my knowledge, Dillard does not identify as an evangelical, though she writes regularly about religion and about the power of prayer in her own life. Her description of prayer as combustible and more profound than ritualized worship was shared by many of the people with whom I spoke for this book. Everyone wanted worship that could capture, in cultural form, some version of their own expression of God’s greatness. These expectations, with their high stakes and potential power, understand worship as a unique form of expression. Dillard’s quasi-comical rendering of church captures the sense that prayer is dangerous work, and that any conventions for prayer should privilege the radical nature of expressive worship over adherence to ritual or form. What makes worship so potentially powerful is, of course, what makes it so dangerous: that congregations of people, equipped with a repertoire of songs and practices, might, together, express their souls directly to God. What kind of expression could matter more? As Anne Lamott, another writer whose essays frequently address spiritual matters, offered, “Prayer is us—humans merely being, as e. e. cummings put it—reaching out to something having to do with the eternal, with vitality, intelligence, kindness, even when we are at our most utterly doomed and skeptical. God can handle honesty, and prayer begins an honest conversation.”28 That honest conversation begins with an understanding of worship as a response to God’s grace. In his Introduction to Christian Worship, James F. White defined “public worship” as “a response in praise to God in the midst of daily life. It is a response not just to word and sacraments but to the totality of daily experience—the sun coming up, the squabbles in the family, the tedium of work. Thus it is a sharing of our words to God in a corporate fashion.”29 Philosopher James K. A. Smith offered a similar description: “The congregation’s response to the call to worship, after gathering, is the ‘invocation’ of God’s mercy and grace. We have a sense that we’re in over our head; we’ve responded to a call—and even the response is by grace—to a vocation that we can’t possibly fulfill on our own. . . . Gathering as an answer to the call to worship is a displacement of any human self-confidence or presumption.”30 Particularly for American evangelicals, whose persistent critique of other streams of Christianity and of religion itself rests on a sense that others are too preoccupied with decorum, formality, and structure, this definition of worship places the individual’s relationship to God at the center of its

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practice. Worship offers a method for expressing, exploring, and renewing that relationship. Reflecting on her ethnography of a Vineyard church, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann explained, “One cannot overestimate the importance of prayer in this kind of church. It is the means to Jesus and to God, the tool with which you build the relationship that will literally (as it is understood) save your life. Prayer is modeled as the central act of your life. . . . And the goal of prayer is to develop a direct, personal, and vividly felt relationship with their creator experienced through dialogue, through an interaction between two intentional consciousnesses.”31 This description of the role of prayer in the lives of worshippers reinforces what Chaves noted about the sociological dimensions of worship in the life of a congregation, but Luhrmann’s interpretation shifts attention away from the importance of worship on the congregational level and toward an appreciation of its effects on the lives of individuals. The danger and excitement of worship lies in its promise that it might provide a ritual form that can open the kinds of dialogue and expression to which Luhrmann and Lamott refer. The paradox of the expressive effort of prayer, and of ritual in general, is that in order to create experiences of the sort that they describe, individuals and communities often rely on scripts and formulae, on formats and conventions. In those conventions lurks a suspicion about the ritual forms themselves. Edging too far in one direction, one risks falling prey to rote institutionalization. Too far in the other might lead to the dispersion of community, or to theological or moral relativism. This paradox is central to expectations about worship and to definitions of worship as both structured by ritual and intended to exceed ritual forms. This is brought into clearer relief in emerging definitions of worship that privilege expressions outside of normative, church-bound settings. In fact, a strong current of thought around 21st century evangelical worship questions the need to limit worship to regularly scheduled congregational prayer. Instead, many insist on understanding worship as a “lifestyle,” in which any manner of responses to God’s grace should be considered valid. Dan Kimball, an outspoken leader of younger Christians called the “emerging church,” explains that worship is not something we do only once a week on Sunday morning or evening. Worship is a lifestyle of being in love with God and in awe of

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him all week long (Romans 12:1–2). It is offering our love, our adoration, and our praise to him through all of our lives. We are to adore the Lord all week, not just at “worship gatherings.” Our minds, our hearts, our bodies, our marriages, our families, our jobs—everything should be offered to him in worship. This includes what we think about, what we do, what we say, what we eat, and what we spend time doing.32

This was made clear to me in a conversation I had with Christian singersongwriter Sara Groves, a well-known and much beloved artist in the world of Christian music. Groves was as plainspoken as she was insightful, and her choice of words in our conversation matched the sharpness of her lyrics. We were talking about writing songs and the nature of worship, and how those two practices intertwine and weave their way through her life. “I am a worshipper,” she explained, “and I try to do that in everything that I do and do it with excellence.” She did not limit her sense of being a worshipper to singing or songwriting alone, and she refused to privilege those practices above others where she feels that she is worshipping by “bringing glory to God,” like gardening and being a mother. Declining to separate music from her broader conception of how she lives a “fully integrated life of the believer,” Groves explained patiently to me, “I write worship music. I don’t write congregational worship music. I have tried over the years to write corporate [congregational] worship songs and I went through a real period where I was really trying to write, and they just never turned out very corporate.”33 The difference between worship music and congregational worship music, Groves explained, is only partially “semantic.” It rests in part on her understanding that “worship is bigger” than the prescribed times of church-based, congregational singing. Defining worship in terms of whatever congregations sing on Sunday mornings between 9:30 and 11:00, she felt, would limit the range of ways in which people understand and, more importantly, express themselves in worship. Charlie Peacock, a longtime producer, songwriter, and critic of Christian music, put it similarly: “There is no distinction between sacred and secular. . . . It’s all for God, or it’s all for nothing.”34 In this formulation, the call to worship does not limit opportunities to worship by either music or setting. It encompasses a range of expressions and forms, and it can infuse every aspect of the life of a worshipper, allowing one to experience and respond

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to God’s grace wherever one is at the moment. Limiting worshipful expression to a specific place or time, Groves patiently and passionately explained, sells worship short, sells her own expressive life short, and, as a result, sells God short as well. Such is the power and possibility of worship, and it is why Groves’s distinction between “worship music” and “corporate worship music” is so revealing and so significant. It speaks both to her capacious definition of worship and to her understanding that different modes of worship might take different forms. This conceptualization of worship seeks to mute the tension between ritualized expression and the desire for more permissive and powerful forms of worship that stretches back to the late 1960s, when baby boomers first embraced worship music that drew on rock and roll to better express their faith. They wanted music that they could claim as their own and that, they claimed, could speak for them.35 They brought guitars and drum kits into worship. They wrote songs that sounded more like the Byrds than Bach, and they traded in their hymnals for mimeographed handouts and overhead projectors. “Rock ‘n’ roll was simple,” wrote critic Michael Hamilton. “It engaged deep emotions, and it portrayed itself as free of hypocrisy. But above all else, it focused the baby boomers’ longing and anxieties, their values and ideals. . . . Music was so important to baby boomers, it was inevitable that if they came to church at all, they would be bringing their music with them.”36 The ability to express one’s faith in that idiom helped to reinvigorate American evangelicalism by drawing people who might not otherwise have come to church, but also by creating an opportunity for baby boomers to express themselves and experience worship in a musical aesthetic that they felt they owned.37 As a result, early descriptions staked a great deal on the expressive power of the music itself. “The great vehicle of the Jesus movement is music,” Robert Ellwood, the author of one of the first scholarly examinations of this phenomenon, explained. “The ability of Jesus rock and gospel melodies to generate rich and powerful feelings in a mood and emotion-oriented age has brought and held the movement together. It is largely music that has made the movement part of a pop culture and it is the Jesus movement as pop culture that distinguishes it from what is going on in the churches.”38 Ronald Enroth, another early scholar of the Jesus People, described the music of a prayer meeting in similar terms.

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The music—said to be a fulfillment of the command to worship the Lord with singing and praises and accompanied by the orchestra and unbridled foot-stomping, hand-clapping, and dancing in the Spirit—is truly impressive. It is joyous; it is celebrative; it is nearly a frenzy. And most of all, it is loud, almost unbelievably so. Thirty instruments and three hundred people singing at the tops of their voices.39

Ethnographic reports from worship music’s formative years both described the phenomenon and helped to make it legible and reasonable to parents and mainline Protestants who might otherwise be worried about what these young people were doing in Jesus’s name. In so doing, these explanations also shaped discursive formations about the music, what it meant, how it felt, and both how and why young people were using it to worship. They ascribed an affective power to the music itself, investing in the new sounds of worship an expressive depth and range that contrasted with the modes of worship from most mainline Protestant churches. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, this represented the expressive vanguard of a resurgent American evangelicalism, defining religious ritual for what sociologist Wade Clark Roof has called the “generation of seekers,” which he contrasted to the religious “dwellers” of the preceding generation.40 Religious seeking implied a kind of dynamism to religious life that many baby boomers understood to be lacking in the religious commitments of their parents. They wanted rituals that could allow them to express their personal yearnings to and knowledge of God in ways that were not formulaic, but deeply felt. They wanted music that could help them to break out of the ritual forms they had inherited in the name of a more expressive, exuberant set of worship practices. In the decades since, the styles and sounds of worship music have continued to change, as a younger generation of evangelicals has emerged that seems even more prepared than their baby boomer parents to embrace a lifestyle of worship that emphasizes the personal dimensions of religious expression and, simultaneously, to invest even more deeply in the music that seems to enable it.

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Experiencing Worship Worship music developed during this period both to provide more expressive range in evangelical worship and because it promised a deeper experience of worship. Without reifying religious experience as the aim of worship, the experiential side of worship nevertheless came to represent a powerful locus of both authority and understanding. It provided another way of knowing and learning religious practice that often seemed more powerful than text and more moving than rote recitation. The experience of worship as a kind of open channel of communication with God fit well within the long-running American evangelical critique that religion has become too formulaic and too structured, and that it lacks the flexibility, responsiveness, and creativity through which one can foster a direct relationship with the divine. The perceived power of worship music that drew on rock and roll seemed to deepen and expand the experience of worship, drawing on emotion to propel worshippers’ attention toward God. Experience, while not the intention of worship, provided a powerful concept for articulating worship when it worked. This approach emphasized individual experience over collective action or ritual forms. Peacock’s, Groves’s, and Kimball’s embrace of worship as a lifestyle suggests that their own faith commitments outweigh the efforts of religious institutions to rein them in. I heard this opinion more than once during Sunday worship services when a worship leader or pastor said something like, “I have Jesus; I don’t need religion.” That formulation captured an approach to faith that sought to dispense with formalities and empty ritual in favor of an immediacy of connection between humans and the divine. Rejecting religion, in this context, represents a desire to expand one’s own relationship with God, outside of or in addition to institutional religious structures. More severely, some have posited that religion has become something of an obstacle to or a distraction from their expression of a more immediate engagement with God. A billboard for a popular evangelical Silicon Valley church that appeared during the early 2010s provocatively asked potential members, “Not Religious? Neither Are We” (see figure 1.1). Books like Phillip Yancey’s Soul Survivor, which is subtitled “How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church,” offer accounts of Christianity imperiled or at least challenged by institutional

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Figure 1.1. “Not Religious? Neither Are We.” Billboard for C3 Church, Palo Alto (renamed Vive Church). Photo by Jan Adams. Used by permission.

structures.41 Yancey’s book is a spiritual autobiography of sorts, written in response to his question, “What allowed me to ransom a personal faith from the damaging effects of religion?”42 This theme also echoed in Groves’s capacious definition of worship as a lifestyle; throughout our interview, she called herself a Christian and a worshipper, but never once used the words “religion” or “religious.” Each of these examples represents a rejection of the formality of church-and-ritual-based religion in favor of something more personal, more personalizable, and more deeply rooted in individual encounters with the divine. As a result of this approach to religion and faith, many people have become religious “nones,” despite retaining a deep sense of faith, a commitment to regular prayer practices, and even regular church attendance.43 The Pew Research Center’s reports on the American religious landscape, released in 2007 and 2015, both found a sharp rise in the religiously unaffiliated. Sociologist Robert Putnam referred to them as the “fastest growing group on the U.S. religious spectrum,” a label that highlighted both their demographic growth and their inclusion within a broader religious discourse.44 The increase in people who do not identify as religious does not necessarily mean that more and more people are identifying as “secular” or “atheist,” but rather that the appeal of religious denominations and affiliations appears to be on the decline. As sociologists Claude Fischer and Michael Hout have found, “religious nones”

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also include any number of evangelical Christians who attend church regularly, who have a strong belief in God, and who read the Bible and worship regularly, but whose faith commitments have outflanked their willingness to identify with or adhere to any particular religious denomination.45 The Pew Research Center corroborated this finding, reporting that 21 percent of “nones” pray every day and 68 percent say they believe in God, though with respect to congregational worship more generally, the Pew Research Center observed that “the religiously unaffiliated population is increasingly composed of people who rarely or never attend religious services.” Yet Pew also noted that the numbers of people who attend church regularly have not varied much over the past few decades despite an increase in people claiming to have “no religion.”46 Even though many claim to have no religion, they seem to maintain behaviors that might resemble religion. Some portion of this trend can be attributed to the “new metaphysicals” or to the rise of people claiming to be “spiritual but not religious.”47 Denominations seem to be weakening but religion and the individual impulses that motivate it remain powerfully ensconced in American private lives and subcultures, even among those who claim to have none of it. The readiness with which so many evangelicals disavow the term “religion” to describe their commitments to God and the Bible draws in part on the strength of their personal encounters with God both within and beyond formal “religious” rites. This perspective aligns with philosopher William James’s notion of “religious experience.” He argued that there is nothing definitively “religious” about the feelings with which religious experience is associated, and he instead thought of religion as a descriptive category for particular kinds of experience: “There thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act.”48 Drawing on the American transcendentalist tradition, James saw nothing unique in religion per se, but he certainly understood the utility of religion to refer to a category of experiences, or as a way of organizing ideas, objects, experiences, and people: “The name ‘religion’ should be reserved for the fully organized system of thought, feeling, and institution, for the Church, in short, of which [this] personal religion is called,

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but is a fractional element.”49 Even for James, religion is not the source of those feelings but a discursive structure deployed to make sense of them, organize them, or describe them in terms of “windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world.”50 For James, encounters with something transcendent validate religion as a framework for understanding them, not the other way around. Prefiguring an observation of Jonathan Z. Smith, one of the most influential scholars of religion in the late 20th century, James understood religion as an anthropological category, not a theological one.51 James’s formulation of religion as grounded more firmly in personal experience follows that of German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was among the first to suggest that religion is best understood not by looking at doctrine or text, but by examining how individuals experience it.52 His emphasis on the centrality of subjective experience in defining religion initiated a new stream of research into the nature of religion, as told from the subjective perspective rather than the institutional one.53 Religious studies scholar Ann Taves sharpened this observation further, formulating a notion of “experiences deemed religious” as a method for understanding religion itself as a product rather than a source of experience, despite the difficulties in rendering “experience” itself legible to others. “Rather than abandon the study of experience,” she wrote, “we should disaggregate the concept of ‘religious experience’ and study the wide range of experiences to which religious experience has been attributed.”54 Taves offers a way of understanding how people define religion and, as importantly, how they define what it is not. By appealing to subjective accounts of experiences that might be “deemed religious” as a way of collecting “building blocks” of religion, Taves both accepted the idea that religion is a discursive production and reaffirmed the sense that individual experience lay at the core of whatever people might define as religion. Thus, she argues that religion should not be understood as an ontological category but, as for James and Smith, an anthropological one. American evangelicals who reject religion also follow in this tradition, hoping to avoid the human constructions of religion in favor of a deeper, less mediated, and more expansive notion of faith and of the ways in which one expresses it. With respect to the role of worship in what is called “religious experience,” anthropologist Martin Stringer argues that it is impossible

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to establish the nature of worship, and that, at best, scholars can only engage with the “experience” of worship. Drawing on William James, Stringer argues that worship is not the same thing as a text or a song, nor is it equivalent to the performance of a text; rather, worship is, first and foremost, the experience of a text. “‘Worship,’” he explains, “implies something other than, or perhaps more than, the rite, the ritual, or the liturgy. The use of the word ‘worship’ places the emphasis not on the text or the performance as a thing in itself . . . but implies some level of engagement or experience of that thing.”55 The problem, of course, is that experience, central as it is to evangelical Christianity, is so deeply subjective, and, as a result, Stringer resigns himself to conclude that “the problem with the experience (of worship) itself, however, is that it is practically impossible to say what it is, or even what kind of thing it is.”56 Stringer’s critique of how we understand religion echoes claims of scholars like Peter Berger, who has argued that religious experiences are “irreducible” to quotidian or scholarly logics, and thus exist outside social and cultural frameworks.57 Yet people describe their experiences in words and, more importantly, continue to pursue them through the use of social and cultural forms, even when those linguistic or ritual forms fail to capture the entirety of the experience in question. Like Robert Orsi, Wayne Proudfoot, a philosopher of religion, put this perspective sharply when he argued that what appear to be transcendent encounters that defy expression are actually beholden to cultural logics and conventions: “What purports to be a neutral phenomenological description is actually a dogmatic formula designed to evoke or to create a particular sort of experience.”58 While his “dogmatic formula” is a little rigid, it nevertheless highlights the ways in which what comes to be called “religious experience” is better understood as a way of defining certain kinds of experiences as “religious” than it is a description of them. Proudfoot refuses to accept that certain kinds of experience defy explanation, arguing that they are conditioned by the social and cultural contexts that make them possible in the first place. The question, for American evangelicals in the 21st century, is not whether to identify their experiences as “religious” or not, but what place those experiences have in determining the nature of their faith, practice, community, and institutions. Musicologist Anna Nekola understands the whole of the so-called worship wars of the late 20th cen-

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tury as a struggle over this question, as American evangelicals tried to grapple with the power of individual religious experience in organized religious life.59 “A basic tension arises,” she explains, “when the evangelical church proclaims itself as a bastion of objective truth while at the same time accepting that religious experience is ultimately subjective.”60 For Nekola, debates over music are nothing less than debates over “theology, ideology, and the nature of faith itself,” reflective of a larger crisis of authority in the church.61 The veracity of individual experience, whether identified as religious or not, carries so much weight that it has become difficult for institutions to deny, ignore, or dismiss. Lutheran theologian Marva Dawn, an author and regular speaker and presenter on the worship music conference circuit, has observed this development and has offered a critique of the centrality of “experience” in worship. She argues forcefully that it is nothing short of “idolatry,” insofar as it draws attention to worship and the worshipper instead of God.62 According to Dawn, “Focusing in worship on me and my feelings and my praising will nurture a character that is inward-turned, that thinks first of self rather than of God.”63 For Dawn, focusing on the experience of worship distorts the effort and distracts people from its purpose, which is not to produce religion but to enable people to enter into a conversation with God and to become the people God wishes them to be. For Dawn, focusing on experience rather than on God is a corruption of worship. Her approach to worship and her rejection of the fetishization of religious experience fuel some elements of the broader rejection of religion in the name of a return to greater, deeper, more focused expressions of faith that may or may not be concerned with religion. Dawn concludes that Christian worship should not be saddled with expectations that it is producing religion, and neither should it be distracted by the pursuit of individual experience. Worship, she maintains, should be a method for responding to God’s grace and nothing else. Dawn’s purist pursuit of worship tempers the often exuberant embrace of experience as the sine qua non of worship and faith. It also reinforces the sense that experience remains a powerful, if misleading, category for explaining what makes worship powerful. Dawn’s message has penetrated the community of worship music makers, and its members well understand the power of their position and the possibility that their efforts might lead people into worship or lead people to pursue

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“religious experience” as its own end. This tension is part of what makes the discursive production of worship music so crucial and so fraught. The prominence of music in worship belies deeply held concerns about its impact on the very people who might employ it to pray. Dawn worries that all this talk about experience, by emphasizing the wrong thing, might have negative effects on people who are trying to worship. Focusing on religion might steer people toward ritual, and pursuing experience might displace God as the object and subject of worship. Because of the high stakes of worship, there is nothing more pressing for songwriters, worship leaders, and industry professionals than making music with as narrow a margin of error as possible. This means that they must write great songs that they understand should never be so effective at eliciting affective responses that people mistake the experience of worship for expressions of worship. No small part of this lies in the perceived power of music to deliver or enable the production of meaning in ways that words, on their own, cannot. The question of music’s ability to facilitate some element of transcendence takes on different overtones when applied to the expression of one’s faith commitments. In this context, making music for its own sake is not desirable, as it might sound great and feel good, but music for its own sake cannot be worship, even for Sara Groves. For those who reject religion as a label and embrace a theory of worship that can be applied anywhere, the production of congregational worship music takes on even more profound significance in a world where avowedly secular musicians have become so skilled at marshaling musical strategies that reverberate with transcendence. How does a songwriter try to ensure that their songs are directing people toward Christ and not merely toward an appreciation of what feels good when they sing? How can they access the timbres and patterns of popular music and still keep their songs actively orienting worshippers toward God? In a culture in which religion is optional but faith is not, music plays a role that is both vital and volatile because it stimulates people’s emotional lives in ways that are often unexpected, surprising, and seem as if they exist outside of the forms and formalities of cultural and social life. Music’s power over emotions has not been lost on the world of popular music, as musicians have long used their music to engage audiences affectively. Bands like U2, Coldplay, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, and Sigur Rós

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have formulated their versions of popular music into anthemic, sweeping songs that cover vast emotional terrains, while any number of singersongwriters have used their craft to make intimate songs that invite listeners into their inner lives. Electronic dance music, too, lives and dies by the build-and-release of musical tension, and genres like punk and emo are fueled by the rawness of their expressive dimensions, even more than by their musicianship.64 What musicians have done in the supposedly secular musical world is to actively cultivate the affective dimensions of music in order to generate a sense of something like transcendence. Evaluations of music’s qualities in this regard play a significant role in the larger discursive production of worship music. Music’s apparent ability to evoke powerful affective responses has long been the subject of scholarly and popular attention as generation after generation has sought to understand why people engage with music in the ways they do. Nineteenth-century musicologist and scientist Hermann von Helmholtz was among the first to systematically associate particular affective responses with particular notes and chords.65 More recently, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin has tried to explain “your brain on music,” by looking to brain chemicals to uncover the mysteries of music’s apparent power over emotion and memory.66 Looking for a way to explain the appeal and development of rock and roll in postwar America, cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg attributed the power of popular music to its ability to make people feel something, or anything, in the wake of the destruction demonstrated during World War II and the banalities of expanding suburbs.67 Much of the curiosity about music derives from an understanding of it as something not only to be heard and enjoyed but to be felt. This is different than the expressive dimensions of worship, though it often sounds similar. These resonances have fueled the work of a cottage industry of scholars, critics, and fans that is committed to keeping that discussion focused on the religious and spiritual themes in popular music, arguing that it might enable people to take certain genres or artists more “seriously,” or as attempts to render them acceptable to fans whose religious commitments might make listening to them problematic.68 At their best, they explore the ways in which the experience of music can become a site for the intermingling of sacred and secular interests, tracing related but different stories about the power of secular music to transmit what

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might be called “spiritual” or “religious” sentiment. Together, they offer elaborate and sometime esoteric arguments about the religious or spiritual dimensions of popular musical forms. Expressly and sometimes implicitly, they offer an intriguing challenge to the makers of worship music, arguing, effectively, that avowedly secular forms can outperform formally religious ones in providing powerful experiences of something larger than one’s self.69 In a short essay about an album by the little-known but obsessively loved band Neutral Milk Hotel, Joshua Dubler, a scholar of religious studies, writes about the ways in which listening to the music one loves can itself become something of a sacred practice. In nature, in love, and perhaps most frequently, in the intimate solitude of recorded music, a moment in time has the capacity to explode with exuberance, devastation, or in a wash of meaningfulness without name. And as the silly theory goes, in the wake of such explosions, grooves of significance are cut in the score of time. And so, for periods of days or weeks of even years before repetition goes stale and our attention is pulled in the direction of further novelty, a path through the woods becomes a discipline, pillow talk becomes a catechism, and an album becomes a liturgy to be hollered at the top of our lungs as the interstate flies by.70

For Dubler, these meditations either become the basis for or evidence of something much bigger and more significant: the kernel of the spiritual that dwells always within the “inner sanctum” of the secular. In Dubler’s analysis, avowedly secular popular music, of which Neutral Milk Hotel provides one well-regarded example, can facilitate spiritual experiences. With echoes of Kimball and Groves, Dubler argues that the band is even more effective than its religious counterparts because of its ability to evoke powerful experiences without the trappings, ritual, beliefs, expectations, or institutions of religion. Attempts to explain the phenomenon of art’s ability to express transcendent values go back at least to artist Wassily Kandinsky, whose famous 1911 essay “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” offered an explanation that inspired contemporary writer Judy Berman to offer an update called “Concerning the Spiritual in Indie Rock.”71 Berman concluded that what makes indie rock worthy of such an investigation is precisely its ability

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to navigate between realms of spiritual experience: “Kandinsky saw the spiritual and the earthly as opposites, but for indie rock’s spiritual explorers, they are inextricably linked. This music doesn’t suffer from the communion but originates in the space where they meet.” For Berman, the union of the earthly and the transcendent accounts for the power and the allure of indie rock. Yet in spite of her faith in indie rock to facilitate encounters with the sublime, she cannot completely divorce it from religion. Religion, for her (as for Dubler), remains an essential referent within the broader terrain of the spiritual that helps rather than hinders her ability to render such experiences meaningful. “Music may also make a grab for our souls by recalling the sounds or harmonic structures of devotional songs,” she writes, “thus reawakening our collective memory of what faith and worship feel like.” For Berman, as for Dubler, indie rock (and Berman also reveals a not-so-slight obsession with Neutral Milk Hotel) does spiritual work by recalling and resembling religion even as it supplants it. Indie rock can feel religious, producing something like religious experience even as it rejects or avoids religion itself. Although the experiences of Dubler and Berman might share some qualities with their more faithful counterparts, the contexts for those experiences make all the difference. The sounds of secular spirituality that preoccupy Dubler and Berman are the perfect soundtrack, in some respects, to an emerging American religious landscape that is populated by people who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” or who move among religious traditions with increasing ease and frequency, or who claim to have no religion at all yet retain commitments to God, prayer, and even their congregations. Both these “faithful unfaithful” and the religious “nones” update and extend Wade Clark Roof ’s “generation of seekers” and their emphasis on religious voluntarism that has dominated scholarly discourse on American religion in the late 20th and early 21st century.72 Though Roof ’s seekers sought religion, recent initiatives like How We Gather are seeking to identify and create secular sites that formalize what Berman and Dubler find so appealing in popular music. Formulated by two students at Harvard Divinity School who are trying to figure out how to minister to people who have no religion, How We Gather is an expressly secular movement that nevertheless hopes to capitalize on people’s desire to experience those things that religion is supposed to deliver, but without religion and without God.73

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Figure 1.2. “Worship at Full Volume” T-shirt. Shirt designed by Doug Van Pelt. Photo by Mariscela Mendez. Courtesy of HM magazine. Collection of the author.

Dubler, Berman, and others trace a similar phenomenon in music to which makers of worship have been paying careful attention. I had more than one worship leader confess to me that one of the most powerful religious experiences of their life happened at a U2 concert, and one of my favorite artifacts is a T-shirt from a Christian heavy metal magazine featuring an image of a guitar player bent over on his back, with the caption “Worship at Full Volume” (see figure 1.2). The conventions of cultural production in popular music, especially those that invest in the experience of the music, have become part of the productive apparatus for those who make worship music, as well. Yet the flows of cultural exchange are not equivalent. Dubler and Berman retain religion and religious experience as reference points for organizing and understanding their love of indie rock, but the opposite movement—of worship musicians who embrace indie rock as part of the aesthetic of expressions of worship—is not quite reciprocal. People invested in worship music temper their interest in the spiritual with a concern that it might lead people away from Christ by providing deeply felt experiences that they mistake for God. While secular popular music provides a cultural source and a

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referent, they refuse the possibility that its spiritual overtones could be equivalent to the sacred orientations of worship music. Yet they understand that it also holds the promise of powerful registers of expression that just might create conditions for experiences that are not mistaken for worship, but which accompany it nonetheless. That possibility encourages those who make worship music to continue doing so, even when they know that to succeed as worship means that their songs must allow worshippers to proceed on their own, without the music.

Learning to Worship To write music with that in mind is to play an educational role in American evangelical culture. Worship songs both show people how to worship and provide them with the tools to do so. They model prayer and ritualize its expression while pointing to the possibility that the songs may not suffice. They draw on popular culture in measured ways, incorporating some of the elements and tailoring them to sacred tasks. In all these ways, worship music plays a critical role in educating Christians not just about prayer itself but also about theology and about what it means to be a Christian in secular society. As a result, worship music has been the target of no small amount of criticism for being theologically thin, too focused on style, or too willing to indulge in romantic accounts of divine love of the “God is my boyfriend/girlfriend” variety. Acknowledging the power and popularity of music, historian Steven Nichols derisively noted that “Contemporary Christian music represents for many evangelicals the sum of their theological training and discipleship.”74 But that, in a sense, is reason enough to examine the production of worship music, and to take its producers seriously as intellectuals. If Nichols is correct, then even if worship music provides weak theological training, it is even more important to understand how the training materials are made, and what ideas, concerns, practices, and commitments inform its production. The reason people like Nichols and others write so passionately about worship music and its shortcomings is that they understand the pedagogic power of song. But, perhaps even more powerfully, they are aware of the ways in which worship songs teach people what encounters with the divine feel like and how to enter into them.

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This process begins, often, with ritualized expressions of cultural forms. Roof argues that religion itself begins with stimuli and that engaging with them enables people to encounter the sacred. Sermons, testimonies, repetitive responses, music, icons, lights, candles, incense, and other such phenomena trigger experiences of awe, mystery, and ecstasy, thereby creating the presence of God or awareness of the sacred. . . . Encoded signs and symbols provide the means by which experiences are generated and described, even recognized, as religious. More than just trigger experiences, a religious system undergirds conceptions of a transcendent reality and supplies the symbolic vehicles for living in its thought world and responding affectively and intentionally.75

For Roof, this makes beliefs “derivative” insofar as they follow rather than precede practice, though his observation should not diminish the significance of the practices or experiences in question. Instead, it should spark curiosity about how those stimuli come to occupy the place they do in worship, and how they might not only provide access to “transcendent reality,” but how the forms might instruct people about how to get there. Songs are one example of Roof ’s stimuli. They serve as teaching texts insofar as they provide expressions of theology and models of practice that allow people to engage with the sacred. The songs of worship enable people to enter into prayer and develop their skills as people who pray. Even those who reject the formalities of religion still require stimuli of the sort Roof describes. Sociologist Courtney Bender found that even for those who claimed that “contemporary spirituality was ‘all about experience,’” the nature of that experience included a wide range of bodily, rhetorical, and material practices.76 Bender’s careful examination of contemporary spirituality argued that even as loose and personal and experiential as spirituality could be, it still required an infrastructure of supporting places, texts, habits, and artifacts to facilitate it. Even the paradigmatic example of Robert Bellah’s Sheila Larsen, who crafted her own personal religion, which she called “Shielaism” and which came to represent the epitome of religious personalization, still acknowledges pulling on resources she gathered from extant religious traditions.77 Even in this most extreme of cases, personal spiritual or religious practice rarely emerges ex nihilo; it almost always draws on existing cultural forms.

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The ability to worship relies on such forms, and it takes practice and training before one learns to use them to enter into worship. Tanya Luhrmann calls it the “skill of prayer.”78 Through practice, people learn how to pray, and through prayer, they learn to experience some kind of connection with the divine. Ethnomusicologist Judith Becker explored this phenomenon in her study of trancing, in which she argued that despite its apparently chaotic qualities, entering into a religious trance is a quite highly regulated and skilled religious practice.79 Even the most practiced trancers do not simply slip into those states wherever or whenever they hear certain music. Instead, she argues, trancers have been “socialized within a community for whom trancing is valued as a means of interaction with the holy.” Trancing, therefore, should not be understood as spontaneous, but as part of a highly regulated, learned, and developed set of practices for religious engagement.80 For Becker, this does not evidence trickery or manipulation. The predictability of trancing and the stereotypicity of trancing, conforming to community expectations, is not, I am convinced, a result of fraudulence, of chicanery, but of skill. Trancers and deep listeners have more control over the activities of their minds and bodies than most of us. They are not “out of control” but, rather, more fully able to modulate and enhance what are normally automatic bodily responses than most people. They are profoundly in control of themselves.81

Entering a trance, therefore, is a learned skill. Becker’s rendering of the ritual framework for trancing is another aspect of the worship experience in which trancers employ finely tuned responses to contextual stimuli to produce ecstatic or deeply affective states. Similarly, Luhrmann’s study of faith in Vineyard churches traces the acquisition of the skill by which people come to differentiate between their own internal voices and the voice that they determine to be that of God. Luhrmann documents the significant effort and discipline involved in cultivating this skill, demonstrating that it is neither the result of prophecy nor insanity. Instead, she argues that “people train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God. They learn to reinterpret the familiar experiences of their own minds and bodies as not being their own at all—but God’s.”82 Luhrmann

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understands the ability to offer this interpretation as an acquired skill, cultivated and honed through sustained effort and practice, much “like learning to speak a foreign language in an unfamiliar country, with new and different social cues.”83 For Luhrmann, participants in Vineyard churches not only learn how to speak to God through prayer and ritual but how to tell if and when “God talks back.” Historian Leigh Eric Schmidt takes a historical approach to the inverse of this phenomenon, charting the decline in audible encounters with God’s voice, concluding with what he calls the “normalization of God’s silence.”84 For Schmidt, the gradual silencing of God’s voice in popular discourse resulted from changes in the ways people understood certain phenomena through a framework that relied increasingly on empirical verifiability and less on divine attribution. Schmidt’s account of changes in “auditory piety” maps onto the “fragmentation and privatization of religious authority,” and it aligns with secularist claims that authority cannot be attributed to religion at all.85 By examining the phenomenon of listening, Schmidt, like Luhrmann, traces changes in how people have made sense of what they have heard and how they could tell if what they heard was God or merely something else, if they were having a “religious experience” or merely some other kind. He attributes these changes to the rise of modernity in general, but in effect his study documented the ways in which people learned to listen differently as their relationship to the world changed. Learning to hear the world differently and learning to interpret what one hears has the power to reorient one’s relationship to the world and to God’s place within or outside it. That one can learn to hear God’s voice (Luhrmann), or not (Schmidt), or that one can acquire a vocabulary of ritualized responses to musical stimuli (Judith Becker) means that the skills associated with religion and whatever states of consciousness it is supposed to enable are acquired through practice. Those practices, whether they involve meditation, trancing, drumming, raising “holy hands,” speaking in tongues, or other presentations of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, nevertheless require scaffolding that can help to facilitate them. Scholar of education Jerome Bruner used the metaphor of scaffolding to refer to the way a mother “reduces the degrees of freedom with which the child has to cope, concentrates his attention into a manageable domain, and provides models of the expected dialogue from which he can extract selectively what he

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needs for filling his role in discourse.”86 Songs scaffold worship by providing ready-made sensational forms that people can use to worship. Drawing on popular styles, they are familiar, even ritualized cultural forms that guide worshippers toward more complex expressions of their own faith, allowing them to engage in collective music making as part of their own expressions of worship. Songs narrow the range of expression that enable worshipers to express their faith in order to facilitate the process by which worshippers learn what to do, what not to, and how to tell the difference. As a powerful cultural form that is not derived explicitly from more traditional forms of religious education like Bible study or sermons, worship music corresponds to what Sam Wineburg and his colleagues have called a “cultural curriculum.” Together with his co-authors, Wineburg, a scholar of history education, observed that people learn history in myriad ways, only some of which come from information formally taught in classes or presented in textbooks. Their study revealed that people cobble together bodies of historical knowledge from a variety of sources including popular culture and historical reenactments. Wineburg and his colleagues argue that these out-of-school sources comprise a cultural curriculum that “may be far more powerful in shaping their ideas about the past than the mountains of textbooks that continue to occupy historians’ and history educators’ attention.”87 Their research demonstrated how people’s understanding of history is derived from a variety of sources, both scholarly and fictional, in what they call “the distributed nature of learning in modern society.”88 Worship music presents a similarly distributed, loosely organized set of texts and practices that allow people to explore, study, express, and learn about evangelical Christianity. In this respect, it may represent a more powerful curricular force than the formal theological or philosophical writings of more traditional intellectuals, and it might represent a more meaningful mode of learning one’s faith than the weekly sermons that are typically featured in congregational worship. Understood in this light, songs serve people who are learning to worship. The songs that comprise this cultural curriculum provide some of the instruction and much of the media by which people learn what worship is and how they are expected to do it in American evangelical congregations. Worship songwriters, worship leaders, and profession-

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als in the worship music industry enlist popular musical forms in their educational effort to scaffold the experiences and expressions of individual worshippers while, simultaneously, providing vital elements of congregational ritual. In this way, worship music serves both the needs of individual worshippers and those of the institutions in which they worship as congregations. By serving both needs, worship music undermines the ability of either individuals or institutions to have the final say over its meaning and its sound. Those responsible for making worship music seek to make music that can instruct people in worship, enable them to worship, and help them to cultivate their own relationship with the divine. Though they provide music for personal expression to the divine, they do so through mass-produced, popular-style songs that serve as ritual forms. These forms are part of the cultural curriculum of worship. Worship songs shape the ability of people to express themselves in prayer, and they scaffold both its experience and understanding. Accounting for all of this within the context of worship, it is hard to overestimate the responsibility felt by those who invest in making music and invest in the music they make.

The Discursive Formation of Worship Music Framing worship music in terms of its expressive, experiential, and educational qualities helps make clear what is at stake in understanding its production. It is a process of creation that is fraught with the possibility that one might sing well but worship poorly, or that one might experience deeply but misapprehend the true nature of worship itself. One intention behind making worship music is to provide people with material that they can turn into prayer as an expressive form that is more urgent and vital than almost any other. Songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry professionals invest in songs and in the practices those songs are supposed to support in the hope that their efforts are just good enough to allow people to transcend them. Whether or not they participate in the creation of “religious experience” or label their music “religious” matters less to them than does the possibility that their music might either lead someone toward or away from God. What could be more important among those who take worship seriously? Although nobody can ever empirically determine the precise dimensions of

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expression, the nature of the experience of worship, or even whether they are teaching people well, the creators of worship music still invest deeply in songs as a ritual form that might succeed in spite of itself. Talking about worship, teaching about worship, and attempting to define it and its various dimensions is, in itself, an important element in the production of worship music. If songs are the ritualized form of the larger cultural production, then talk, discussion, debate, and theory are its nonmusical echoes. Both sonic and discursive investments represent efforts to understand what worship is and how it works, and both contribute to the ability of music to serve the needs of worshippers while also serving God. By formulating relationships between these two commitments, people—like the music industry executives who spent Sundays avoiding the music they made during the week—make worship music. By acting on those relationships, they translate ideas about worship and music into practices that educate people about worship and enable the expression and experience of worship without getting too much in the way.

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Songwriting Writing Songs Anyone Can Sing Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord. —Ephesians 5:19 Songwriting, for me, is like a release. It’s not a craft. Crafts usually involve a little bit of training and expertise and you draw on your experiences—but if you’re thinking about that while you’re writing, don’t! If I can do it without thinking about it, I’m doing it great. . . . I’m waiting to see what I’m gonna do next. That should give you some indication of how much planning goes into it. . . . . It doesn’t have to make sense, just give you a feeling. —Neil Young1

About 1,000 of us were there to hear Chris Tomlin, one of the world’s most popular and influential worship songwriters, talk about songwriting. It was July 2008 in Austin, Texas, and it was hot and humid. And we were in a tent in the parking lot of Riverbend Church as part of the second National Worship Leader Conference. Before he spoke, he sang. Accompanied by songwriter Matt Maher on piano, Tomlin strummed a few chords on his guitar and started in immediately on the chorus of what might be his most popular and best-known song: Holy is the Lord God almighty The earth is filled with His glory Holy is the Lord God almighty The earth is filled with His glory The earth is filled with His glory.2 47

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Almost as soon as Tomlin began to sing, some members of the audience rose to their feet and a number lifted their hands in praise. Almost everyone joined in. It sounded beautiful; this was, after all, a songwriting session at a conference for worship leaders—people who love to sing and know how to do it well. Voices layered harmonies atop the song’s simple melody as Tomlin led everyone toward the song’s two-line bridge: “It’s rising up all around / It’s the anthem of the Lord’s renown.” We repeated it a number of times, building a little momentum with each iteration before Tomlin slowed down his strumming, led us back to the chorus and allowed the voices and the spirit in the tent to settle back down into the rows and rows of plastic folding chairs. What just happened? We were at a church, but we were in a tent in the parking lot, in the middle of the morning on a Wednesday. We sang and we even sang scripture (Isaiah 6:3), but we were not worshipping . . . were we? The schedule called this a “songwriting session” and the time slot placed us after the morning’s scheduled worship session, which had taken place in the church’s main prayer center and which Tomlin also led. Yet, there we were: some people were singing. Others were doing something more like praying. Still others, like the younger man sitting next to me, expressed some skepticism about people who raised up “holy hands” just to show everyone else that they were praying. “You know those types,” he said, dismissively. I did know “those types,” though I was less prepared to disregard them in this context because I was more interested in how people like Tomlin made songs that could become occasions for singing or worshipping or both. What made a song work as worship? Was it the context or the content that enabled it to serve this temporary congregation? Was it the song? Tomlin knows quite a bit about writing songs for worship. Since he released his first album in 1995, he has become one of the most important figures in Christian worship music. He has won numerous awards and has written some of the most popular congregational worship songs in the world. On that morning, when he spoke about songwriting he explained that it always begins with worship: “Songwriting has got to come out of those times with the Lord.” But, he quickly clarified, the process does not end there. There is a difference, he reminded his audience, between “those times with the Lord” and the songs that those times inspire. Turning the former into the latter did not take magic, though. It

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required hard work. Songwriting, he reassured his audience, “is a craft and you can get better at it. So there is hope.”3 He may have drawn inspiration from worship, but he found salvation in craft. The effort it takes to transform prayerful sentiments into worship songs draws attention to the instability of the cultural form of the song and raises questions about its adequacy to serve in worship. When New Zealander David Garratt and his wife, Dale, began writing new songs for worship in 1968, he explained that their motivation lay not in crafting songs but in creating opportunities to express themselves to God. “Our motivation,” he recalled, “was a spiritual one. [We] thought of [writing] songs to God as a means to an end in worship. . . . We didn’t see the songs as being anything other than vehicles to lead us to God.”4 The Garratts, whose “Spirit and Song” series influenced subsequent generations of worship songwriters, invested in the intention behind the song far more than in the song itself. Like Tomlin, Garratt implied a certain distrust of songs born of the belief that songs, no matter how well crafted or cleverly written, ought not to outshine the worship they were written to facilitate. They should be written to serve the transmission and expression of ideas far greater than any song can reasonably contain. His self-consciousness about the inadequacies of songs did not deter him from writing them, but it implies that songs are hardly worth listening to unless they serve the needs of worshippers to access something larger than the music itself. Or, as a Myrrh Records promotional flexi disc from the late 1970s put it, “The Music is Today . . . The Message is Forever!” (see figure 2.1). Worship songwriters understand that while they write songs that can express a response to God’s grace, they are also writing for people. Songwriters like Tomlin and Garratt do not take that responsibility lightly. They are wary of their own power as interpreters of worship, and they worry that their songs might fail as worship because worshippers might mistake them for worship. Songwriters also worry that their lyrics do not accurately or adequately capture the sentiment that they hope to help others to express. These concerns plague songwriters as they strive to produce theologically appropriate, singable, memorable songs that allow worshippers to express themselves, experience worship, and also learn something. Taking the needs of worshippers into account, songwriters approach their craft not as an opportunity for purely artistic expression,

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Figure 2.1. Myrrh Records promotional flexi disc (ca. 1977). Collection of author.

but as a way of serving other people who might then serve God. This approach to songwriting separates them from their more popular counterparts and organizes their efforts around social and cultural concerns that, if well crafted, can become music that transcends them.

Making Songwriters The ability to write songs that move people is part of why songwriters occupy an important place in the American cultural imaginary. Their ability to transform personal experience or channel the experiences of others is, indeed, an unusual skill, and the list of romantic songwriters is long and capacious and it includes just about anyone who has written songs for others (Irving Berlin, Carole King, Smokey Robinson) and those who write songs to sing by themselves (the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Marvin Gaye). For worship

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songwriters, the ability to turn sentiment into songs is especially potent because of the kinds of songs they write. One might become a songwriter by writing songs, but being a songwriter often requires one to participate in a larger set of cultural conventions that not only make music, but that make songwriters, too. Standard versions of the origins of worship music tend to emphasize the music and its congruence with broader trends in popular music in the lives of baby boomers.5 This is not inaccurate, as many early and influential Christian musicians—those who made music before the generic terms “contemporary Christian music” or “worship music” had been coined—did emerge, reborn, from the counterculture, and they brought their music with them.6 In a typical account, historian Randall Balmer explained, “By the late 1960s, some evangelical musicians recognized that the strains of ‘Make Me a Blessing’ and ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ . . . could no longer compete with ‘Hey, Jude,’ ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’ and ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.’”7 The music baby boomers heard during their days in the counterculture, his argument holds, was too good to simply leave outside of church, so they tried to bring it in. But this is only part of the story. By locating the power of the music in the music itself, Balmer’s narrative ignores cultural shifts that made this kind of music possible. Specifically, part of what made this new style of music so powerful was its potential as a vehicle for personal expression. For decades, pop music was dominated by crooners like Frank Sinatra or Pat Boone, who largely sang songs written by other people. From Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building, the convention in popular music had been to separate the craft of songwriting from the art of performing. That changed in the early 1960s, with the arrival of a generation of performers like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. Each of these musicians began their careers singing songs written by others but soon they were writing and performing their own songs, collapsing the distance between the song, the performer, and the message. Billy Ray Hearn, one of the most important figures in the Christian music industry, remarked of these new singer-songwriters that he heard “people really preaching with their music.”8 The collapse of distance between the songwriter and the singer fueled the impression of immediacy, intimacy, and authenticity in the music itself.

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Christian music followed a similar trajectory in the postwar period. During the 1950s, vocal groups like Youth for Christ toured the country singing songs written by professional songwriters like Ralph Carmichael.9 In the wake of Vatican II, which inspired people like Ray Repp to compose new music for the Catholic Mass that drew on the aesthetics of folk music, Carmichael and others composed a raft of evangelical musicals that presented Christian messages in increasingly popular musical forms. Titles reflected their attempt to sound contemporary and included efforts like Good News, Happening Now, Natural High, One Way, and, most famously, Tell It Like It Is.10 Written to be performed for churches, youth retreats, camps, and college students, these efforts were fully realized musicals, intended for outreach.11 The music sounded more like Broadway musicals than their culturally clever titles and psychedelic album art implied, and formally they were closer to the pop music of the 1950s, with composers writing songs for choruses or individual singers to sing. The evangelical musicals were not rock albums and to perform in one of these musicals was to play a role, not to worship. As Hearn noted in the liner notes for Real: A Soul Experience, “I don’t think anyone in those days thought it should be performed as a service in a church.”12 Though the music sounded more contemporary, it had not yet crystallized as one element in the voice of baby boomer Christians looking to sing their own words in their own musical idiom. This changed with the first of the singer-songwriters. Though the figure did not fully emerge until the early 1970s, it has roots that can be traced back further through the history of American folk music. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, what came to be known as “folk music” promised a greater sense of musical authenticity by shirking the production values of the Tin Pan Alley and Top 40 music machines in favor of acoustic guitars and participatory performances known as hootenannies.13 By the early 1960s, members of the “Folk Revival” oriented their critiques toward the writers from Motown and the Brill Building, whose finely tuned sense of teenage desire, captured in songs like “Up on the Roof ” or “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” became the soundtrack to young love and youth culture in the postwar United States.14 Although they often shared similar musical and cultural roots as well as major label support, the confessional singer-songwriters who emerged at the beginning of the 1970s offered a more “mature” approach to love and

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loss, one grounded in personal experience rather than predictions about what they or their producers thought would be a “hit.” Music critic and historian Elijah Wald holds the Beatles responsible for this shift in American popular music, arguing that the “Beatles destroyed rock and roll [by] turning it from a vibrant black (or integrated) dance music into a vehicle for white pap and pretension.”15 Playing outmoded versions of black music, the Beatles larded them with “effetely sentimental ballads,” a shift that set the stage for later singer-songwriters who combined musical and lyrical seriousness with a distinct personal voice and thus, he argues, denuded American popular music, robbing it of fun, leaving it to be studied and critiqued, heeded but rarely danced to. This development led rock critic Lester Bangs to launch one of the first full-scale critiques of singer-songwriters as early as 1971 when he lambasted James Taylor for taking the whole enterprise of popular music too seriously.16 Ironically, the very figures whom Wald and Bangs blame for destroying rock and roll believed they were trying to save its soul. As teenage romance evolved into the angst of baby boomers crossing the dreaded 30-year-old threshold, and the romantic political idealism of the 1960s gave way beneath its own internal and external pressures, musicians responded by exploring new, more personal terrain, both musically and lyrically. In response to the cultural and political changes of the 1960s, singing songs written by professional songwriters ceased to be satisfying for artists who wanted to be taken seriously, even for made-for-TV bands like the Monkees.17 Topical songs had largely run their course, too, having grown increasingly heavy-handed in response to the changing political landscape. Any popular musician who wanted to be taken “seriously” came to feel that he or she had to write his or her own songs, and many turned inward to mine his or her own life for material.18 A similar shift supported the evolution of Christian singersongwriters as the desire for more expressive, experiential modes of worship demanded more than slickly packaged but somewhat stilted Christian musicals. Emerging from the folk music movement that generated stars like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, songwriters and songwriting became increasingly personal. Albums like Laura Nyro’s New York Tendaberry (1970), Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman (1970), James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James (1970), and Paul Simon’s epon-

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ymous solo debut (1972) ushered in the age of the singer-songwriter, which celebrated explicitly autobiographical songs as well as songs that sounded like they were. This emergent cultural form drew the song and the songwriter closer together, blurring the line between the songs they wrote, the lives they lived, and the people they were. Nobody embodied this approach to confessional songwriting at this moment quite as fully as Joni Mitchell, whose album Blue (1971) set the mold for much that followed. Reflecting on the making of that album, Mitchell explained: The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.19

Mitchell infused her description of the album with the spirit of a quest for authenticity that had become so much a part of the counterculture and its critique of mainstream American cultural life as something manufactured, hollow, and otherwise riven with falsehoods.20 Her response was to produce music that echoed the realities of her experience alone; she attributed the fact that it resonated with anyone else to its expressive authenticity. Neither the romantic clichés of the American songbook nor the bombast of blues-based psychedelic rock could satisfy a segment of a generation seemingly obsessed with the pursuit of their versions of the truth, whether that meant following drugs or Jesus. Singersongwriters and their songs offered a deeply subjective version of truth: at once intimately personal and wholly revealing. This approach generated a version of musical authenticity grounded in the self-consciously unmediated performance of the personal. What could have been more appealing for new Christians seeking new ways of expressing their own newfound passion for God on their own terms? Christian rocker Larry Norman, with his albums Upon This Rock (1969) and Only Visiting This Planet (1972), became one of the first to wed expressions of his faith to the sounds of blues-based rock and roll. Norman’s musical choices became part of his overall posture, which was as faithful to God as he was critical of organized religion. Norman did not write music for congregational worship or for religion, claiming

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that he “just wanted to explain God without using any of the language or ideas that had been taught in the church.”21 He embodied the role of songwriter as truth-teller, criticizing the music industry, American culture, and the church with equal fervor, in pursuit of an ever-purer message. Norman, alongside a number of other acts including Children of the Day, Randy Stonehill, and Second Chapter of Acts, pioneered this genre, which was known briefly as “Jesus Music.” Like CCM, which succeeded it, the term generically referred to anything that sounded like rock or folk music but whose lyrics contained explicit Christian references. Norman embraced his role as a troubadour for new Christians, and songs like “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music” became anthems of the moment. Jesus Music had its largest stage at Explo ’72, a multiday music festival described in a LIFE magazine cover story as “a Religious Woodstock.”22 Organized by Campus Crusade for Christ, Explo ’72 brought young Christians from all over the country to Dallas for a multiday festival of service, learning, and music, held at the Cotton Bowl and led, in part, by Billy Graham. The lineup featured most of the leading performers of Jesus Music, including Larry Norman, Children of the Day, Randy Matthews, and African American gospel singer Andrae Crouch, as well as performers like Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, who had a much wider appeal. They prayed and played and preached to a large crowd of baby boomers seeking religion outside the mainline Protestant churches of their parents.23 Not just a concert, Explo ’72 helped produce Jesus Music as an emerging cultural form that spoke to young people in their own idiom. Although Explo ’72 has received a good deal of attention for its high visibility and large attendance, songwriters of Jesus Music usually played much smaller venues within the informal network of Christian clubs, communes, and coffee shops that began to spring up around the country.24 These locations mirrored the conventions of small-scale folk and folk-rock performances that were better suited than large festivals to singer-songwriters. Christian songwriters who helped fuel the growth of Jesus Music and worship music stepped readily into this new role, spinning yarns and singing songs about their faith to the newly faithful. In so doing, they solidified the relationship between their personal sincerity and their music, a pairing that helped to underwrite the power

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of the singer-songwriter as the voice of honest conviction and personal expression. The emergence of the confessional singer-songwriter as a central figure in the formation of what journalist Tom Wolfe would dub the “Me Generation” also represented the potential for the expression of personal and collective religious sentiment for new Christians. Christian musicians, whose countercultural critiques of religious formalism and formality drove them outside mainline Protestant churches, found the values of personal expression, transparency, and intimacy well suited to their newfound faith and their desire to express it through worship. The music of this new mode of personal songwriting and performance coincided with an emerging sense that God was immanent, intimate, and accessible. As sociologist Robert Wuthnow explained, “The 1960s began with Christian theologians declaring that God was dead; it ended with millions of Americans finding that God could be approached and made relevant to their lives in more ways than they had ever imagined.”25 In line with Wuthnow’s observation, in the early 1970s Jesus was everywhere. Jesus Christ Superstar, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s hippified retelling of the story of Jesus, topped the album sales charts in 1971. Time magazine, which named Jesus its “Man of the Year” for 1971, glossed the movement in this way: Jesus freaks. Evangelical hippies. Or, as many prefer to be called, street Christians. Under different names—and in rapidly increasing numbers— they are the latest incarnation of that oldest of Christian phenomena: footloose, passionate bearers of the Word, preaching the kingdom of heaven among the dispossessed of the earth. Their credentials are ancient, for they claim to be emulating Christ and his Disciples. They often build their lives on the Book of Acts, living in common like the early Christians. They abjure drugs, proscribe sex outside marriage, pray and preach incessantly among drifters, addicts and homosexuals and even, occasionally, in conventional churches and schools. They evoke images of St. Francis of Assisi and his ragged band of followers, or of the early Salvation Army, breaking away from the staid life of congregations to find their fellow man in the streets.26

That same year, Billy Graham served as the grand marshal of the New Year’s Tournament of Roses Parade and the state senate of California

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established February 13, 1971 as “Spiritual Revolution Day.” Evangelical Christians also captured the attention of mainstream media as popular magazines like Look and Life published a handful of stories about new Christians.27 That same year, amid a surge of popular media attention focused on Jesus, and alongside major label releases like Blue and Sweet Baby James, Maranatha! Music, the first record label committed to recording worship music, released its first record of worship music. That album, The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert, helped establish some early elements of the form, but more than that, it helped cement the role of the singer-songwriter in making worship music. The album and its label emerged from the worship scene at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, which had been flourishing under the leadership of Chuck Smith during the late 1960s. Only a few years earlier, Calvary was a relatively unremarkable suburban church until Smith began welcoming young refugees from the counterculture and providing some assistance for them to study, congregate, pray, and even, for many of them, live in shared housing.28 Led by the forward-thinking Smith and influenced by the presence of Lonnie Frisbee, a young charismatic preacher, Calvary became a destination for ex-hippies looking to find new forms of Christian religious expression.29 Smith, though more traditional than the younger crowd that joined him at Calvary Chapel, quickly came to appreciate the power of music in youth culture. Smith kept Sunday mornings fairly buttoned-down, but, with Frisbee’s leadership, he gave some evenings over to the crowds of jeans-wearing, long-haired young people who studied and sang with exuberance. He encouraged the musicians in bands like Love Song and Children of the Day to write music for worship services that catered to his rapidly growing younger audience. Smith understood the role of music in the growth of Calvary Chapel well enough to advocate for the creation of a cassette “tape ministry” to “continue expanding its ministry through songs with the young people.”30 Calvary’s leadership committed $1,000 to create Maranatha! Music, a record label with the “sole purpose to get the Gospel out.”31 The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert was the result of that investment and it was informed by Smith’s and others’ understanding that the best way to spread the energy and excitement of Calvary’s worship was to produce a record that sounded as much as possible like Calvary sounded in the middle of youthful prayer. But Calvary did not have the

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technical capacity to record live worship at a suitable quality, so instead each track was recorded individually and packaged together as a “concert” album, implying that the recording was captured live at Calvary. It was not, but the marketing and presentation of the album contributed to the overarching sense that it represented Christian expression unadorned, unfiltered, and unmediated.32 This fit well with the emergent figure of the Christian singersongwriter, a role that the artists associated with Calvary readily embraced. Debbie Kerner, whose song “Behold I Stand at the Door” appears on the album, found Christ as a teenager. Born to Jewish parents, Kerner began writing songs after the nuns of her Italian convent school encouraged her to do so in the wake of Vatican II. A “fake hippie” by her own admission because she was never drawn to do drugs, she was inspired by her peers in and around Calvary after she moved back to Southern California in high school. “I was quite romanticized by the whole thing,” she recalled, “but I loved the music because everybody was writing these folky little songs.”33 Kerner, whose clear voice and delicate guitar playing evoked folksingers like Holly Near and Laura Nyro, “started to write music that was very folky in nature but very simple and with Christian lyrics.”34 Her recollections of the romantic simplicity of the moment echo those of other singer-songwriters, who emphasize the immediacy and emotional honesty of their songs while downplaying the process or craft of songwriting. Ethnomusicologist Monique Ingalls calls this the “folk discourse” of worship music, which amplifies the “amateur nature of these compositions: that these were common, everyday people—not trained musicians—composing simple, Spirit-inspired songs which grew from their own life experiences. These songs, in turn, were effective as worship songs because they expressed something ‘real’ grounded in the personal spiritual life of the songwriter.”35 By describing her songs in the fashion Ingalls describes, Kerner both embraces and reinforces the honesty and immediacy that characterize ideal forms of worship music. Recalling how she came to write “Behold I Stand at the Door,” Kerner explained: I think [I] was sitting in private and the stairs filled up with people above me just listening because they wanted to be there. They were trying to sneak out there. I became aware that they were there and I thought,

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“What can I sing for them? What can I sing? Right. I am going to write a new song.” So I just wrote. Just sitting there and picking away. And that’s the song that’s on that album.36

Her narrative is as much about the song as it is about the songwriter. Yet the fact that she was in a stairwell that was accessible by other young Christians, and the fact that she first considered what they might want to hear, complicate her use of the folk discourse. While her individual intent may have been pure, it emerged in relation to her understanding of the needs of those around her. Her recollection embeds her personal expression of some “truth” in a social context, revealing the distributed nature of even the most personal of worship expressions. A similar theme can be heard in the recollections of Chuck Girard, whose band Love Song performed at Explo ’72 and served as the informal house band for Calvary Chapel during the early 1970s. Girard, a former rock and roll singer who achieved some minor mainstream success in the early 1960s, grew increasingly disenchanted and, like so many of his generation, began a lengthy personal quest that led to drugs, Hawaii, and Eastern religions. Eventually, he found his way to Calvary Chapel where he recalled experiencing “a real feeling of love. . . . All the other people I’d talked to were always talking about a God that they had to attain, instead of the more personal concept of having him right now.”37 Girard’s personal experience of God encouraged him and his bandmates to give their lives to Christ. Already a professional musician by the time he arrived at Calvary Chapel, Girard fit the role of the singer-songwriter even better than Kerner. In his accounts of songwriting during the early years, Girard made explicit the centrality of his personal experience and wrote songs fueled by a commitment to others who might share them. From the beginning, our idea was to compose and perform music that would be uncompromising in its content, yet contemporary in style. Because of this attitude, our music was reaching kids where they were, and they were actually feeling the message and experiencing the same kinds of changes we all had gone through. I guess it’s because our main thrust was to create music that related to non-Christians. It’s one thing to portray the Christian life as a bowl of cherries, but that’s not entirely realistic. We talked

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about the trials, the struggles, the pain of life here on earth, and then, most importantly of all, the victories we experienced through Jesus.38

Girard was uninterested in romantic songs about life, and, like Kerner, he wrote quite self-consciously with an audience in mind. The better and more immediately he could render his own experiences and impressions, the better he believed the music would suit the worship needs of those for whom he was writing. In worship songwriting, individual expression and social connection are closely related, often because songwriters write songs for others to sing. Emphasizing an artist’s approach to songwriting by highlighting his or her unique ability to express a deep and profound “truth” inscribes songwriting as a mode of expression, rather than the more subtle and social negotiations that Kerner and Girard describe. It also helps to construct a notion of the singer-songwriter as someone uniquely gifted as an artist and a teller of truths. The folk discourse guards against suspicion that a song might be too slick to serve as worship or that a songwriter might be motivated by something other than their own faith, but it also masks the ways in which worship songwriters often write with other people in mind, even as they strive to craft songs that speak, as directly as possible, to God. The productive labor of the folk discourse encompasses songs and songwriters, and, in the case of The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert, the recording process, as well. Kerner recalled the recording session with characteristic use of the folk discourse: “I came in on Love Song’s dinner break and I just brought my guitar out there and I sang the song once for the sound check, once for the take, that’s it. It was just me and my guitar. I didn’t know that I was supposed to take all day, nobody told me that.”39 Girard offered a more self-conscious but similarly revealing description. “I decided that—as we did with the first Love Song album—we didn’t want any violins or sweetening,” he recalled. “We just wanted to capture the raw thing that was going on. So consequently . . . the performances [are] like they would be if you were hearing the sound live.”40 This approach to recording was supposed to reproduce both the songs themselves and the Calvary-style worship itself, and their recollections of the recording process help further frame the songs within the folk discourse. These instances of the folk discourse helped to establish

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Calvary as the source of new and expressive worship music that was unadorned, immediate, urgent, and authentic. The album served as an agent of Calvary’s evangelical perspective, in addition to becoming a model for others to stop listening and start singing.41 No less a figure than pastor Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church and author of The Purpose Driven Life, recalled precisely how the album worked in just this way. I was working as a lifeguard and director of the campfire services at Cazadero Christian Camp in Northern California during the summer of 1970 where a revival broke out all summer. Some of the campers came up from Orange County and brought “Come to the Waters” and other early Jesus People songs. It was “our kind of music”—written by us, not for us, in contrast to the many youth musicals that were circulating in churches those days. We began to use them all at the camp and then where I went to high school that fall. The next year, 1971, I was the worship leader (with the requisite Martin D-35 guitar, long hair, and sandals) for a four-person team of kids that led “youth revivals” across Northern and Southern California. One of the host churches was in Santa Ana. I took the team over to Calvary Chapel where we bought the first two albums, The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert and the first Children of the Day album. We rushed to a record player, soaked in the music, started using all the songs, and writing our own as well.42

The album both inspired and modeled songs and songwriting, enabling songwriters to beget songs and future songwriters to imagine new sounds of worship. It helped to encourage a new wave of songwriters, spurring the growth of worship music by spreading the sound and the songs. But the folk discourse has limitations. Worship songwriters cannot get away with naïve claims about personal expression because to do so would be to privilege themselves too strongly within the discourse of worship. Instead, their stories about songwriting emphasize their relationship to prayer, which frames their songwriting as an outgrowth of their own worship. Chris Tomlin explained that his songwriting “all comes from a simple response to sitting alone in my room with my guitar and my Bible open, singing my heart out to God.”43 Songwriter Don Moen described his motivation for songwriting in similar terms, as a response to questions like, “What is it that is moving me today? What do I think God wants to

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say to me right now or to the church? What is in my heart that I would like to say to God? If I was having a conversation with him, what would I like to say?”44 In a songwriting session at the 2008 National Worship Leader Conference, Paul Baloche explained that he frequently takes Bible verses or simple musical ideas and “prays with them” on his own, allowing them to grow and develop first as prayers and only later as songs. Elsewhere, Baloche explained how focusing on worship allows him to keep his songwriting concerns in check: “I believe that the best worship songs happen as a by-product of worship. We can tell our inner editor, ‘Hey, get off my back; I’m not trying to write a song, I’m just singing my prayers.’”45 Worshipping freely, which, for Baloche, also includes regular sessions alone in the worship center with the volume on his guitar turned up high, shifts his attention from songwriting to worshipping and, paradoxically, enables his songs to take shape. Worship songwriter Matt Redman poetically summed up this approach: “The best congregational melodies work in worship because they began as worship.”46 The discursive framing of worship songs first as worship and then as songs is reinforced by the stories that worship songwriters tell about the songs they write. Part dedication, part genealogy, these “stories behind the songs” have long been a popular form of musical culture (VH1’s long-running Storytellers series is the best example of this as a performative convention), and worship songwriters have embraced it. Telling stories works in both directions to reinforce the sincerity of expression behind the song while bolstering the persona of the songwriter. Darlene Zschech has spoken about writing “Shout to the Lord” at a time when “I was in the middle of a hard personal time, and I just went into the study, and I had this awful piano. . . . And I sat there and opened my Bible to Psalm 96, and just started to worship the Lord. . . . And about 20 minutes later, this song was done.”47 Redman regularly speaks about how he wrote “Blessed Be Your Name” after September 11, 2001, because he felt the “distinct lack of songs appropriate for this time.”48 Songwriter Matt Maher explained his motivation for writing “Your Grace Is Enough.” It’s a song I wrote from a period in my life where I was reading Romans, and Paul’s letters, especially Second Corinthians. And he talks about having a thorn in his side and God’s grace being sufficient in that. And just really kind of going “well, I’m not sure I fully really believe that, but

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maybe if I write a song about it and sing it enough, it will sink in.” So, that’s kind of the prayer with that song. Like the thief on the cross, asking Jesus “remember me when you inherit your kingdom.” Just, “God, look, remember me. I’m nobody, but if you could remember who I am, then maybe your grace in my life would be sufficient for all things.”49

Bart Millard of MercyMe has told the story of writing “I Can Only Imagine” as a reflection on his father’s passing: “It was literally written in five minutes—but it was something that had been on my heart for ten years.”50 These are more than simply stories. They represent a mode of being a songwriter, and they provide an accessible cultural form for people to use when making sense of songs and the people who write them. Those who engage in autobiographical talk that traces a song back to personal prayer authenticate both themselves as songwriters and their songs as vehicles for worship. The forms are mutually constitutive and mutually productive. And yet worship songwriters guard against taking up too much space in worship and they fear that their songs might do the same. The folk discourse and the attribution of songs to prayer are both efforts to dislodge songs and songwriters from their larger intentions. Yet, as both Kerner and Girard explain, songwriting is an inherently social act, even as it grows out of a desire to worship. There is nothing predetermined about the verse-chorus-verse structure as a mode of expression; it is a specific cultural form born of particular historical circumstances. Very few people would feel the need to transform their personal expressions of prayer into song were it not for their cultural contexts and social connections. Both songs and the people who write them, therefore, can be understood as cultural products. Stories about songs fit into this endeavor, as documents of expectations about what songwriters are supposed to do. The folk discourse and talk of prayer partially mask the social origins of worship music, even as the figure of the songwriter and the form of the popular song circulate in ways that suggest and enable the possibility of transcending them.

The Craft of Songwriting The craft of worship songwriting can be understood as the practice of transforming spiritual expressions into cultural forms and of turning

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cultural forms into spiritual expressions. It requires translating personal sentiment into songs that contain universal or universalizable expressions of worship as much as it is defined by an intention to turn acknowledgments of God’s transcendence into expressions that anyone can call their own. As songwriter Laura Story explained, “As worship songwriters, I feel like our responsibility is to write songs that are the voice of God’s people.”51 Songwriters and their songs operate at the intersection of a variety of commitments: to worship, to congregations of worshippers, to God, to the Bible, to the affective powers of music, and to the educational potential of their music. The conventions of American popular music provide forms for both music and persona that make such ambitious efforts legible, sensible, and even possible. They have also raised the stakes on investments in worship songwriting by introducing the possibility that worship songs might live up to cultural standards but fall short of spiritual ones. Songwriters are finely attuned to the fact that the same song they write to enable others to worship might inadvertently mislead them. The awareness that their songs might fail as worship encourages them to work harder at the craft of songwriting in order to mitigate the possibility that their songs might mislead people. They approach songwriting with no small measure of reverence, understanding that their songs must not be so affecting that they fail as worship. Consequently, worship songwriters are scrupulous about the words and music they write, and they try to find the right balance of creativity and simplicity, of innovation and tradition. Worship songwriters are students of both the Bible and the American popular songbook, and there is no shortage of handbooks, advice columns, workbooks, or workshops to inspire and encourage them. On the whole, songwriting advice for worship songwriters does not depart too dramatically from that for other kinds of songwriters. Baloche explains that “good songwriters are lifelong students of great songs,” advising aspiring songwriters to “acquaint yourself with the emotional impact of specific chords, hooks and lyric lines, and try to read at least one book on songwriting a year.”52 Songwriter and producer Charlie Peacock similarly urged songwriters to “respect the art form. Respect its place in history, [and] all the great songwriters that have gone before.”53 Worship Leader magazine, one of the leading publications in the worship music world, frequently runs

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columns by well-known songwriters with suggestions for practical exercises such as “write a new song employing the structure of a classic hymn with lyrics that describe God’s work in creation.”54 God Songs, a worship songwriting instructional manual by Paul Baloche and Jimmy and Carol Owens, overflows with similar exercises intended to challenge and encourage songwriters to improve their songwriting. These exercises run the gamut from the poetic (“Find ten more similes or metaphors in the Bible”) to the technical (“Take one of your songs and bump it up or down a notch to find just the right key”).55 Anyone can be moved by a biblical passage or dream up a melody, but, as Baloche and the Owenses explain, “it’s the ability to finish the song that makes the difference. And that’s where the craft comes in.”56 Craft can take any number of forms. As Baloche and the Owenses explain, “there are no rules [in songwriting]. But there are principles. There are observable, definable qualities common to effective songs of all kinds.” A worship song, they explain, should draw on those same qualities, qualities derived not from considerations of spiritual expression, but from successful popular music. A good song, they assert, “must be not only original and inspiring, but simple, repetitive, and predictable— Predictable to a point, but not so predictable that it’s boring.”57 Phil Silas, songwriter and editor of Song Discovery, a quarterly compilation of worship songs, said that great worship songs are distinguished, in part, by how quickly people can learn them. “What makes really great worship songs,” he explained, is that “after one listen you can sing it.”58 Or, as Baloche and the Owenses have written, “A worship song should be easily and quickly learnable.”59 Songwriter Debbie Kerner explained that songs have to pass the “whistle test”: “If you can’t whistle it by memory after you heard it once, you don’t have a hit. It is just that simple.”60 Worship songs should have catchy melodies and great lyrics, and the quality of the song will be determined, in part, by the ability of the songwriter to make those elements work in concert, even if the ultimate success of the song will only be apparent if it succeeds in worship. With respect to lyrics, songs written for worship are constrained by a limited range of possible subjects, so songwriters strive to express eternal truths in novel ways. Songwriters understand the power of the word, so they attend to their lyrics with great care. Baloche suggests writing with both a rhyming dictionary and a Bible at the ready. With respect to

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lyrics, working on one’s craft means not settling for hackneyed rhymes or threadbare literary devices either. “Dove-love-above” is the “Junemoon-swoon” of worship music. British songwriter Matt Redman tells aspiring songwriters to be “ruthless with [their] lyrics.”61 Vineyard songwriter Bryan Doerksen encourages people to “take risks with words,” but to take the responsibility of songwriting seriously: “The goal is not to be clever, but to awaken worship with our words.” Yet he also reminds them that “learning to write great lyrics takes lots of work, some raw gifting to work with words, and then lots more hard work.”62 Peacock agreed, encouraging songwriters to keep writing and developing their songwriting skills, despite the failures: “You have to write a lot of songs to get to the great songs.”63 At a worship leaders’ conference, Baloche had similar advice for an aspiring songwriter who wanted to give him a CD of his best work. Baloche suggested that he write 100 worship songs, and then bring him the best two.64 One part of this emphasis on lyrics is grounded in a commitment to artistry, creativity, and a sense of the power of poetic language. The other part draws on the specific requirements of worship music in evangelical culture, as songwriters worry about writing songs that sound great but inaccurately capture key theological or biblical concepts. In a cultural and religious context that values a close relationship with biblical texts and can tend toward literalism, words matter in powerful ways.65 Writing songs that misrepresent important ideas or take too many poetic liberties might make for better songs, but they might inadvertently lead people astray in their faith by putting false words in their mouths. Christian musicians have not always paid such close attention to their lyrics, and for many years CCM songwriters and those who wrote for worship were strongly criticized for writing songs that were theologically “weak” or which leaned too heavily on the romantic imagery of popular music to represent the singer’s relationship to God. Worship songwriters have grown increasingly self-conscious about this tendency, and they are painfully aware of the reputation of their idiom, as well. As a result, they have become more careful about their lyrics so as not to perpetuate the problem, but also so that they can offer songs that they adhere to normative notions of evangelical belief and practice. When someone at the songwriting seminar asked Tomlin “what makes a great worship song?,” he did not hesitate in his answer. “Theology,” he responded, be-

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fore quickly adding, “[but] if it’s not singable, there’s going to be no theology to give.”66 To ensure the accuracy of their lyrics, songwriters often consult pastors or more learned colleagues who can offer a critically informed eye and can help to ensure that they do not contain any errors with respect to either theology or the Bible. British songwriter Graham Kendrick tells a story about recording a new song in which he rendered the image of “Christ being born as a human being” as “clothed in humanity.” A friend pointed out that the clothing metaphor suggested impermanence, and echoed a “well-known heresy.” Kendrick rewrote the line to read “dwells in humanity.”67 This story might seem like an example of lyrical fine-tuning or nitpicking, but for songwriters who understand their songs as educational, and who are self-conscious about their role in the cultural curriculum of a community that take texts seriously, such seemingly small choices represent the much larger issues at stake in making worship music. The editorial board of Song Discovery, a curated bimonthly collection of new worship songs, places a similar premium on lyrics. Song Discovery solicits submissions of new worship songs, which its editorial board reviews and from which it selects a handful for inclusion on its bimonthly CD or playlist.68 Its curatorial vision is guided by three criteria: Is the song “creative,” is it “true,” and is it “biblical”? The second and third criteria speak directly to the concern for lyrics. “Above all else,” explained the editorial board, “this criterion is most important. We need to make sure the lyrical content is doctrinally sound before it is presented to congregations to be sung over people in worship services. What truth is it speaking to the congregation?”69 Song Discovery’s emphasis on “doctrinally sound” lyrics reinforces the roles that worship songs play as facilitators of worship and as teaching texts. If a song’s lyrics are too poetic or stray too far from biblical or theological topics, then the song, no matter how catchy the chorus or how innovative the production, might run the risk of misleading worshippers and confusing the pleasure of singing a well-crafted song with the experience or expression of worship. Yet songs that are lyrically sound will not necessarily succeed as songs without music that people both want to sing and will be able to sing. As they do with lyrics, songwriters compose music with the needs of worshippers in mind, and this consideration limits the range of their melodic expression. The most important constraint can be attributed to the fact

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that congregations are filled with untrained singers. For songs to work in that context, they have to be written with those voices in mind. As Baloche and the Owenses explained, congregational worship songs should be written “to be sung together by average people, very few of whom have musical sophistication or training.”70 For Robert Wuthnow, this contributes to the unique place that houses of worship hold in American society, as they are virtually alone in their ability to host people from different generations who get together to sing on a regular basis.71 For songwriters, this means writing songs that members of a multigenerational, largely untrained congregation can sing and sing with enthusiasm. The result is a tendency among worship songs to cover a relatively narrow musical range, rarely exceeding about an octave and a half. Of the 220 songs included in WorshipTogether.com’s Essential Modern Worship Fakebook, 218 follow this pattern.72 Of the two songs in the volume that violate this rule, one, Will Pavone’s “For Your Name,” uses only two outlying notes. The other song, Tree63’s “King,” spans two full octaves, but the notes that define its lower limit appear only in the song’s bridge, as a repetitive refrain (“we will give You glory”) to be sung as a kind of counterpoint bass line to some spoken lyrics. The collection even includes a “vocal range index” that notes the low and high notes in each song, so that worship leaders can select songs that fall inside their congregation’s range.73 Whereas popular songwriting can take on any imaginable form so long as it expresses the needs or desires of the songwriter, worship songwriters are bound by their responsibility to worshipers, and they encourage one another to craft their songs with this consideration centrally in mind. Songwriter and worship leader Tommy Walker explained: I am always asking the question[s]: Can anybody do this? Can the congregation sing it? Can anybody play it? So, the beautiful thing is, I am a worship leader of [a] local church, so whenever I write a song I sing it for my church and it doesn’t matter how cool it is, if they are pouring out their hearts before God and responding and expressing worship to God, then it’s a great song. If they are not, I don’t care if it’s the coolest [chord] progression I ever came up with, it doesn’t matter.74

Walker, a musician known for his sophisticated guitar playing and innovative chord progressions, tempers his creativity by asking whether or

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not his songs can serve the needs and abilities of congregations. He even jokingly referred to his church as his “head of A and R,” using the colloquial title for music executives in charge of developing “artist and repertoire” to signal their power to veto new songs. Jeff Deyo, a songwriter, worship leader, and lead singer of the influential band SONICFLOOd, explained how he changed his approach to making music from one album to the next as he began to understand that his songs might be used for worship in congregations. Reflecting on an album of older songs that were retooled for worship, Deyo explained, “A lot of worship leaders told me that, while they really loved the music [from my first album][,] some of it was too complex to play in their churches. So what we did this time was to remix many of the songs to bring out the fundamentals. We’ll be offering them as additional resources, a stripped down way of utilizing these songs for a Sunday worship service.”75 Contrary to the folk narrative, the arrangement of worship songs has become an element of making songs for worship. Whereas the folk narrative relied on a kind of expressive naïveté, Deyo’s story captured the intentionality and concern for others that inform his songwriting. Approaching his music as worship forced Deyo to adjust the songs to make it possible for worship leaders to use them in a congregational setting. Rerecording his own music was more than a matter of merely simplifying production or arrangements, though. It meant transforming his songs according to the ways in which he imagined how the songs could sound if sung by a congregation, and then reverse engineering them.

The Responsibility of Songwriting Writing songs that direct people to God but are created with basic human limitations in mind is no small task. Songs that merely repeat doctrine might sound forced or overly didactic, while songs that are too personal or poetic might sound solipsistic or self-indulgent. Similarly, those that are too experimental or musically complicated might prove hard to sing and be of limited use in congregational settings. The craft comes in striking some kind of balance between expression and utility, between songs that capture the specificity of experience and those that enable more generalized expressions of faith. Good worship songs cannot be coterminous with their songwriters. Songwriter Matt Maher

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explained that the best worship songs “can be sung without the songwriter.”76 Or, as Jimi Williams of WorshipTogether.com predicted of much recent worship music, “a hundred years after they’ve died, people may not listen to their recordings anymore, but the songs are going to be sung.”77 This definition of worship songs emphasizes the fact that they can be successfully taken out of the context of their production. It imagines songs as cultural products, but not as the result of specific conditions of production. Songwriters strive to write songs that can become universalized expressions of truth, but they are writing, often, with other people in mind. The needs and abilities of worshippers inform lyrics and music, and they figure centrally in the responsibility that songwriters feel toward their craft and their congregations. The responsibility that songwriters feel toward other worshippers counters critiques that fixate on the use of the personal pronoun “I” in worship songs as evidence of an increasingly self-centered approach to worship and theology. In his analysis of the contents of hymns in American Protestant hymnals published between 1737 and 1970, Stephen Marini found a trend that moved increasingly toward personal, intimate, and individualized expressions of faith. Newer hymnals, he explained, tend to construct an “autobiographical narrative rather than a biblically based apostolic one, concentrate on emotional rather than objective spirituality, and articulate an intimate subjectivity toward the divine rather than a distanced one.”78 Marini’s analysis, which concludes at the precise historical moment when worship music first began to appear, bolstered the sense that American Protestant hymnals had long been on a track toward emphasizing personal experience as the grounds for faith and theology. Critics have argued that worship music accelerated this trend by incorporating the style and habits of rock and roll and inscribing the authority of the individual worshipper or the figure of the songwriter at the expense of a transcendent God. Such a conclusion, however, fails to recognize the ways in which worship songwriters often utilize the narrative first person in order to displace it. Unlike secular songwriters whose narrative “I” is indistinguishable from their authorial one, worship songwriters write songs with a transferrable subjectivity. Worship songwriters understand that autobiographical inspiration cannot work for congregational worship, because it has to be formulated generically

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enough so that it can enable the worship of other people. The “I” of worship songs may begin with the specific life experiences of the songwriter, but it cannot end there. Worship songs written in the first person must be inhabitable by others who wish to turn that same song and that same sentiment into their own worship and, often, into that of their congregations. Almost as importantly, both songwriters and those who might come to sing their songs understand that they are rarely the only ones singing (even if they sing as if that is the case). The lyrical “I” can thus become both more personal and more general when worshippers sing songs they understand are being sung by others. This is not lost on songwriters who understand their craft in terms of its impact on how others worship. Worship songwriter and longtime music industry executive Don Moen explained his approach to songwriting in these terms. I don’t go just write a song. . . . I kind of wait for that seed of truth to drop into my spirit, then I can write and then I can craft the song. But you know there is something to be said for just being a diligent songwriter, too. I don’t want to, you know, diminish the importance of being excellent at your craft. . . . [A well-crafted song] might touch people in the area of their emotion. I don’t think it’s going to touch them in their spirit, which is ultimately going to change their life. I don’t want to just tickle their ears and have a feel-good song. . . . Now, I just like just writing songs, too. It’s just fun writing, but when it comes to writing a praise and worship song, you need to do more than tickle people’s ears. Really, you are dealing with truth here, and I think it’s so important that the people . . . get the substance of the song.79

Moen calls attention to his relationship with those who might sing his song to distinguish between a “feel-good song” and one that is written for worship. Whatever might motivate him to write, he crafts songs around his idea of a congregation that might use it in worship. In this way, he is always in conversation with worshippers, writing both for them and for their worship. Moen’s audience is largely imaginary, but other songwriters write directly from relationships forged in their home churches. Songwriter Laura Story, who had been a touring musician before joining the staff

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of a local church and who has since written several widely popular worship songs, explained how working in a local church strengthened her songwriting. It’s hard when you are writing supposedly from the point of view of this organism that you never feel or you are never part of. So, I can even tell over the past years . . . that my specific songwriting has gotten a little bit richer especially because I am not sitting in a tour bus trying to imagine what the church is going through or imagine what the voice of the church is. I am actually hearing from people day in and day out and whether a church goes through a time of really needing to confess or whether a church goes through a time of . . . [looking] more towards global endeavors.80

Story’s participation in the everyday life of her congregation enriches her songwriting and informs the songs that she might write for them to sing in worship. The people who are most likely to sing her songs are members of her community, and her ability to channel their needs fuels her songwriting and complicates notions of the romantic singersongwriter expressing themselves in prayer. Her songwriting is deeply influenced by her bonds with other members of her community, and her responsibility for them fuels her approach to songwriting. Songwriter and worship leader David Crowder, who ranks among the most popular worship songwriters in the world, explained that he also writes music with his home church in mind, despite his popularity and fame. “My approach has always been the same,” he offered. “We are writing for this group of people that we find ourselves in front of here in Waco, Texas, and if it fits elsewhere, wonderful, but we’re not writing for it to fit elsewhere.” He elaborated further, explaining that the evolution of those relationships outside of congregational worship, week after week, shapes his approach to what happens in his songwriting and in leading worship. I’m thinking in terms of our local scene, the church that we’re a part of, and so for that group of people, we can come up with an idea that we think will work and then see, immediately following, [that] it doesn’t work. And at the same time, I think our people are a little more patient. . . . We’re together

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this week. We’ll be together next week. We worked together last week, you know. There’s continuity to things that all does not have to be accomplished in a three and a half to four-minute pop song, so we’re afforded the ability of patience, and that’s helped us be able to construct more meandering experiences because there’s history and trust that’s been built.81

Those relationships allow Crowder some additional creative freedoms, while also drawing on the responsibility he feels for his community and his congregation. The relationships between songwriter and congregation reveal the social and cultural dimensions of worship music, whether they constrain or encourage creative musical expression. I heard many successful worship songwriters tell aspiring ones that they should “write for their home church,” figuring that if their congregation will not sing their songs, what makes them think others will want to do so. Songs, therefore, are social productions that emerge from relationships both real and imagined between a songwriter and his or her congregation. From this commitment emerges a responsibility to write songs that serve the practical and spiritual needs of worshippers, and it reveals how each need enables the other.

Feeling the Music Writing for other people means understanding that lyrics and music must speak to the specific conditions of a worshipper’s life, and that this power lies not in a song’s technical elements, but in its ability to move people emotionally. The ability to stir emotions is perhaps the most volatile aspect of worship music, and it is the one that songwriters both embrace and fear. Emotion enables worshippers to open themselves up to encountering theological content in new ways, yet it can be easily mistaken for the object of worship. Songwriters understand that music’s ability to reach people on an emotional level is part of their songwriting tool kit; at the same time, they are aware of the risk of manipulation. As a result, worship songwriters strive to write songs that are affecting but don’t become affectations. They understand the role of emotion in the expression and experience of worship, and they are aware that emotion is neither its aim nor a measure of its success.

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The history of church music is rife with criticisms about its being too personal or “emotional,” or, worse, “sentimental.” Preachers, composers, and evangelists have long walked a fine line between emotion and emotionalism. Charles Wesley, one of the most prolific and influential hymn writers of the 18th century, struggled to write music that would move people, but that would only move them in proper directions. As Madeline Marshall and Janet Todd have argued, “Wesley’s purpose was not the expressive venting of feeling but rather the evangelical directing of feeling. Emotion, roused and controlled, would carry the singer to God. Passion was a means to a didactic end, and its expression was usually exemplary.”82 Wesley struggled to balance emotional content with the educational purpose of worship and feared that emotion loosed would undermine the ability of his hymns to instruct. As a result, he approached worship as an opportunity to rouse sentiment, but only insofar as it could be channeled toward godly purposes. He did not consider emotion as an end in itself but as a means for orienting a worshipper’s heart toward learning about or experiencing the divine.83 What to do with music’s emotional overtones has plagued American evangelicals ever since. The Second Great Awakening, which redirected the currents of evangelical worship away from the New England singing school tradition and toward vernacular musical practices, benefitted dramatically from the confluence of popular styles and sacred content.84 The music of these revivals played a crucial role in what Nathan Hatch has called the “democratization of American Christianity,” as revivalists borrowed popular melodies and set evangelical lyrics to them.85 Evangelical preachers who interpolated folk songs for worship not only retrofitted a popular medium for religious purposes, they also altered the parameters of worship itself. The use of “social music,” a term that often referred to dance tunes, meant encouraging a more physical and enthusiastic style of worship. Evangelists used popular musical forms to spread the gospel, but those forms had a powerful reciprocal effect on the experience of worship, creating opportunities for more emotional and more personal engagement and expression. The music initiated changes not only in styles of worship but in the ways in which people regarded its substance, as well. As evangelical worship began to sound different, people’s expectations of it began to change too.

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By the late 19th century, as the fires of the Second Great Awakening cooled, the musical innovations that they fueled codified around a handful of musical and practical conventions that became broadly known as gospel music. Composers such as Ira Sankey and Fanny Crosby wrote many of the most popular gospel songs of the era, injecting worship with equal parts emotion and entertainment. Randall Balmer observed that the 19th century also ushered in “overtones of sexuality and sentimentality” into worship, through new hymns that reflected an even more personal and intimate relationship with God.86 A century later, Don Miller’s study of “new paradigm churches” in the United States during the mid1990s glossed these elements of worship as “sacred lovemaking.”87 The question for songwriters has long remained one of how to make songs that can access the emotional power of music without succumbing to it. The importance of emotion in music has not been lost on scholars of other forms of music, who have noted its significance over and over again and have tended to focus on its effects rather than its origins. The 19th-century German scholar Hermann von Helmholtz tried to assign different affective meanings to specific notes, chords, and scales.88 In his exploration of “your brain on music,” Daniel Levitin tried to understand why music moves people in the ways that it does, which is less often framed in terms of one’s “brain” and more often in relation to one’s heart. Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino, who conceptualized “music as social life,” located music’s affective power in its ability to foster a sense of “communitas,” which he described as “a possible collective state achieved through rituals when all personal differences . . . and all other personal distinctions are stripped away[,] allowing people to temporarily merge through their basic humanity.”89 For cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg, the power of popular music lies in its ability to evoke affect that contains the kernels of some kind of liberation or even transcendence.90 Sociologist Simon Frith takes a slightly different but related approach, arguing that even the simple aesthetic distinction between “good” and “bad” music remerges from a fundamentally affective relationship with music. What’s really at issue is feeling. In the end, “bad music” describes an emotional rather than an ideological judgement. We don’t like a record; we then seek to account for that dislike (we don’t, on the whole, arm

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ourselves with a grid of ideological consistency through which everything must pass before we feel it). Feelings, particularly feelings of like or dislike—for music, for people—are often surprising, contradictory, and disruptive; they go against what we’re supposed to feel, what we’d like to feel. The important point here is not that critical judgement is always a process of justification (and not really explanation), but that the feelings it describes are real (and not just discursive).91

This formulation is more complex in the context of worship music, where assessments of quality are not based solely on aesthetic criteria, but on the ability of a particular song to serve as worship. Whereas Frith argues that feelings precede taste, statements about the intersection of affect and quality in worship music always consider some measure of concern for what it might do to the people who are singing it. Taste, in the context of worship music, is never the only criteria for whether the music can work as worship. Nevertheless, Frith’s observation about the “real” feelings that music evokes, and the role of emotions in making determinations of music, apply to worship music as much as they do to other musical forms. This is the blessing and the curse of worship music, as concerns about the affective dimensions of the music have shaped it almost from its very beginnings. As people began experimenting with using rock and roll in worship, people began mounting objections to it because it was too emotionally rooted to serve as an appropriate vehicle for worship. Partially driven by a fear that rock and roll, in particular, would stir emotions counterproductive to living a life committed to Christ, this line of criticism often depicted a church under siege from external forces and regularly approached the sentient, affective qualities of popular music with great suspicion.92 This follows Frith’s model, in which an affective response to music (in this case: fear) drives what are presented as more objective, doctrinally grounded rationales for policing the musical boundaries of Christian worship. Critiques of this nature articulated a retroactive desire to police the production of new music and its introduction into congregational worship. Also present in them is a grudging awareness that emerging forms of worship music seemed capable of tapping into something deeper or stronger in people than could the more traditional repertoire of hymns and congregational song.

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People feared that these new forms of music would be too successful at channeling peoples’ emotions and, in the process, distract people from prayer. As a result, much early writing on worship music was polemical and quite stark in its claims about what kinds of music were suitable for worship. In the late 1960s, as Larry Norman was becoming widely known but before the release of The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert, Bob Larson penned the first of his strenuous objections to the use of any popular music in worship based on what he claimed was its fundamental appeal to base human emotions.93 His manifesto, Rock and the Church, argued that rock music was “written to be felt rather than heard,” and that “music can exercise its influence over the body without meeting any intellectual resistance from the higher nervous centers.”94 Ultimately, Larson rejected attempts to synthesize rock music and the church, concluding that “the use of Christian rock is a blatant compromise so obvious that only those who are spiritually blind by carnality can accept it.”95 Larson’s opposition, often couched in racialized terms about the music’s “primitive beat,” represents a reactionary response that sought to foreclose debate or forestall the popularity of rock and roll among young Christians. By staking out a position on the extreme end of the emerging musical terrain, Larson gave voice to the significant but shrinking popular sentiment that rock music had no place in congregational worship. In the process, he also helped frame future debates around the inherent power of music to rouse people’s emotions and provide misleading affective experiences that could be mistaken for religious ones. For Larson, a great fear was that people might believe they were having religious experiences, when, he argued, they were only being moved by the music. Less vociferous critics than Larson expressed concern over the same aspects of this musical culture that others praised. In one account of Bethel Tabernacle, a late 1960s example of a “hip church,” where “ministers teach that Jesus rock music is not biblical,” Breck Stevens, a young pastor, explained that “folk and rock groups are not allowable means of witness and Christian entertainment” because “a person can be caught up in the emotionalism of the music and thus be prevented from having a true spiritual experience.”96 Claims like this one, about the power and purpose of popular musical style in worship, underscore the fear that the music’s innate ability to arouse emotions will obscure the real

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purpose of worship, though often these critics are less clear about what that might be. Ethnographic accounts of young Christians from the early 1970s capture a more equivocal and, in some cases, more nuanced understanding of what it might take to turn rock music into worship. One quasiethnographic account of young Christians from the early 1970s quoted a young woman named Sandra who explained, “Christian rock music is like worldly music; I like it because I can dig the beat, but I don’t like it when it gets too loud and you can’t understand the words because a lot of it can distort people. If the music gets over-powering, you can’t get what they’re saying about the Gospel. My mind just cuts off right there. . . . My mind just says wow, I don’t think God is pleased with a person jamming it and here you are just digging on the beat.”97 Sheila from Santa Barbara couched her preferences in similar terms: “I like any music God can use to win souls, as long as it’s for the glory of God and not for the glory of the person who is playing it.”98 Unlike Larson, who could only hear the possible ways in which the music might distract people, Sheila and Sandra could hear both its potential and its limitations. Their ability to make distinctions like these suggests that the production of worship music that drew on the forms and styles of rock and roll required more than just the transposition of a style from one context to another. Roger C. Psalms, in his book The Jesus Kids, explained that popular music with spiritual themes had begun the work of evangelism, but that it alone could not complete the task. “Pop music like ‘Spirit in the Sky,’ ‘Jesus is a Soul Man,’ and ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ is seen by many Jesus people as a non-Christocentric offering to kids to capitalize on their interest in Jesus but not offer them the true Christ.”99 To make music for younger evangelicals, Psalms suggested, required more than just playing popular songs in church or adapting them for worship; it would have to appeal to their aesthetic sensibilities while also offering them something deeply informed by theology and the Bible. Writing in his Jesus People Maturity Manual, a workbook for hippies who found God, evangelist and author David Wilkerson instructed his readers that “music can be loud but never lewd,” by which he meant that music should be spirited, but it should not sound too much like rock and roll.100 Following the well-established refrains of racialized rejections of rock favored by people like Don Larson, Wilkerson wrote,

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“it is lewd to override a good musical message with the beat so frenzied it becomes evident the performers only want to excite or ‘grab’ an audience.” Strong beats, “muscle twinges . . . seat squirmings and surface feelings” should be guarded against, while “the only purpose of the music must be to move the hearts of men closer to God.”101 Yet Wilkerson did not object to the use of rock music for evangelism or worship, provided it held by his outline of what “proper” music sounded like and how it felt. Even Billy Graham heard the sounds of evangelical potential in the affective qualities of rock and roll. Writing about the first time he preached at a rock festival, in Miami in 1969, Graham wrote that he felt “thankful for [the] youthful exuberance” of the concertgoer, but “burdened by their spiritual searching and emptiness.” He recalled that he “had been listening carefully to the message of their music. We reject your materialism, it seemed to proclaim, and we want something of the soul.” Yet Graham was not fully taken with the music itself, and he feared that his audience might mistake the yearnings expressed in music for the “only dependable high the world has ever known.” So, he reminded them, “Jesus was a non-conformist . . . and He could fill their souls and give them meaning and purpose in life.”102 Though he recognized the power of music as “youth’s second language,” he turned that observation into a claim that music alone could not answer their burning questions nor could it satisfy their yearning for something greater.103 The music might sound good and feel good and it might even respond to deeply felt existential concerns, but it could never, for Graham, approach the promise of Christ. Graham, Wilkerson, and others could hear echoes of rock and roll’s potential for worship, but they worried about the music’s affecting power. Neither Graham nor Wilkerson objected to the style and both recognized the potential of this cultural form to serve the needs of people looking for expressive, experiential worship. The testimonials of Psalms’s “Jesus kids” echoed a similar sentiment, explicating their musical preferences in terms of how well they served their ideas about religion. The prevalence of attitudes like these suggest that the adaption of American popular music for the purposes of worship required more than simply singing songs like “Spirit in the Sky” in church. Similarly, they evidence the sense that worship music could not just appropriate

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popular musical styles wholesale without consideration for the specific context of congregational worship and the needs of worshippers. Instead, it would have to develop its own conventions of production and performance that could serve both the affective needs of worshippers and the educational demands of corporate worship. Tensions between what the affective appeal of music enables and what it obscures continue to inform the work of songwriters, even as the discourse around emotion and feeling in music has become more sophisticated. Marva Dawn noted that some worship planners and participants think that to praise God is simply to sing upbeat music; consequently, many songs that are called ‘praise’ actually describe the feelings of the believer rather than the character of God. In the extreme, a focus on good feelings distorts the truth of the gospel into a ‘health, wealth, and victory’ therapy. We must recognize this for the idolatry it is.104

Dawn argues that worship that appeals too strongly to an individual’s feelings not only fails God but also fails the person by selling short the rich complexities of theology and divinity. She worries that worship that privileges the affective responses of worshippers over worship itself will quickly devolve into sentimental pandering, foregrounding individual feelings and relegating God to the margins. Her words warn against investing too deeply in emotion as a goal or a property of songwriting, and she critiques those who emphasize affect over religious devotion. Dawn argues that while emotions are legitimate elements of worship, they should be neither its goal nor considered evidence of whether or not worship is “working.” Focusing in worship on me and my feelings and my praising will nurture a character that is inward-turned, that thinks first of self rather than of God. What we must note[,] instead, is the way churches are failing to enfold worship participants in the sense that their identity can be found best if God is the focus of their existence. Against all the pressures in our culture—in advertisements, status, position, power, or whatever else—to find ourselves, the most beautiful identity imaginable is that of the baptized child of God.105

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For Dawn, this is the one purpose of worship. She worries about the power of music to engender emotional responses that can reinforce the solipsism of the broader culture rather than resisting it. Feelings, she fears, can mislead, and music is so adept at eliciting emotional responses that it always threatens to eclipse the worship for which it was written. Dawn advocates for worship music that can access emotion as part of a larger religious sensorial experience that can redirect worshippers away from their individual experiences of a song and toward a more sophisticated encounter with the divine.106 Songwriters are keenly aware of this tension as well, and they try at every turn to engage in the affective aspects of music while avoiding indulging too deeply in them. In their songwriting manual, Paul Baloche and the Owenses highlight the centrality of emotions to the craft of songwriting. “The cardinal rule of songwriting,” they explain, is to “make the elements work together to enhance the feeling of the message.”107 Songwriter Jimmy Webb, writer of some of the most popular songs of the last 50 years, whose book Tunesmith appeared on the shelves of many of the songwriters with whom I spoke for this book, explained how this works: “There is no underestimating the emotional impact of the well-crafted verse/lead-in/chorus. It is the nuclear weapon of the modern songwriter. Songwriters are quite shamelessly playing with the emotions of human beings when we do this and it is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.”108 The question for worship songwriters is how to write songs that employ affect in the ways that Baloche and the Owenses describe but that are less shameless than Webb. For a worship songwriter to write like Webb would be to risk misleading or manipulating worshippers, but to write without feeling would be nearly as cold. The challenge is how to access the affective potential of music such that it enables others to enter into worship honestly, sincerely, and passionately, without letting their personal emotional experience define or overwhelm the function of the song as worship. “Songwriting,” explain Baloche and the Owenses, “is an emotional medium, a vehicle for the expression of feelings. . . . [So songwriters should] try to match the mood of the music with the meaning of the message, so the listener can feel it. This way, the song becomes more than the mere transfer of data—it becomes an experience.”109 Without reifying “experience” or feeling as ends in themselves, Baloche and the

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Owenses acknowledge that the emotional aspects of music allow people to learn in deep ways. Affect thus becomes one of worship music’s most powerful and most dangerous elements, promising to both deepen the experience of worship and threatening to displace God at the center of the effort. As a result, songwriters work to craft songs that are enhanced by emotion but not dominated by it. Affect offers another register for people to encounter the cultural curriculum of worship music, but even that has its limitations, as songwriters worry that individual emotion might overtake faithful expression. As Bob Kauflin explained, songwriters should express strong emotion for Jesus in our songs. Our purest and highest and deepest strongest emotions should be for the one, for whom all things were made, Jesus Christ, but the love we have for him is complex. . . . Our voicing of our emotions for Jesus and the songs we write to Jesus are temporarily guided by the character and glory of the One we are speaking to. They are guided by God’s word, they are governed by God’s word.110

Emotion is good and even worthy, but Kauflin warns that it must always redirect worshippers to God, not toward themselves. As an inherent quality of music, emotion neither could nor should be avoided. It is part of what makes music so alluring and so powerful. It is also one of the aspects of music that worship songwriters worry about most because it is one that they have the least control over. They can write melodies for people to sing, and they can labor over their lyrics, but what worshippers feel is another matter entirely. Music can be harnessed to stimulate powerful responses, but the outcome is never guaranteed. As participants in complex creative and social worlds, songwriters worry about this aspect of music. Affect is too powerful and too potent to leave out of the worship songwriting formula, yet its potency also contains the possibility of misleading people about the intention or ultimate purpose of worship. The craft of songwriting, then, is not to give over to unbridled expression, nor is it to avoid the power of emotion in music. Rather, it is to craft songs that can take advantage of the emotional depth of the worshipper, while trying to always direct attention away from the worshipper’s experience and away from the song, and toward God. Steeped in this concern for human tendencies and

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needs, worship songwriters work more assiduously toward songs that they hope will tap the depth and range of human expression but never end there.

Writing Useful Songs Songs are social products and songwriting is a social act. Songwriters write in relation to people, and they are constructed out of the songs they write. They bear the responsibility for creating the conditions for congregational worship, and they do so with the full acknowledgment that they are writing songs while trying not to make those very songs too prominent in worship itself. This is no easy feat, as worship songwriters invest in the lyrical, musical, and emotional dimensions of songs, but do not rely on them; to do so might distract or mislead worshippers. Songwriters write out of concern for the ability of worshippers to pray, hoping to provide songs that can become the worship of others. Thus, their concerns usually focus on serving the spiritual needs of worshippers with songs that serve as scaffolds for worship, even as songwriters also account for their voices. The people who have been most critical of worship music that sounds like rock and roll have long feared the negative impact it might have on worshippers. The possibility that it might diminish worship is merely a lost opportunity; the real fear is much deeper and it continues to push songwriters to invest more deeply in their craft to guard against the possibility that they might mislead or misinform people. These are not concerns that worship songwriters take lightly. Though they borrow heavily from the conventions of popular music, they understand that their work departs from that of their peers who write solely for personal expression or public entertainment. Worship songwriters feel the responsibility of writing for congregational worship, and they struggle to write songs that capture their commitments to God, to worship, to music, and to worshippers. Since the recording and release of The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert, those concerns have shaped worship songwriting and, as will be discussed in chapter 3, how worship leaders approach their role in turning songs into worship during a worship service. With strong echoes of William James, members of the first generation of worship songwrit-

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ers in the early 1970s wrote songs that they intended to foster worship that was “no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formulae, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence.”111 For worship to matter, whoever sang it had to mean it and to feel it, even if the words they sung were not, originally, their own. The interplay between text and emotion, between song and sentiment is what makes worship music both so vibrant and so volatile. The work of the songwriter is to craft songs that capture both of these forces and channel them toward people who wish to express something beyond the song.

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Leading Worship Making Music in Congregations Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. —Colossians 3:16 The sound of our songs should never drown out the silence required to listen to God. —Martin Smith1

I spent much of the spring of 2009 visiting the New Life School of Worship, one of the first dedicated programs of study in the United States for people interested in learning how to lead worship. On one chilly March morning in an auxiliary building on the campus of New Life Church, I observed a group of young musicians practicing together as a worship band. The students stood with their instruments, amplifiers, and microphones atop a large stage at one end of a room that had been constructed to host New Life’s teen ministry. Holding a Fender Stratocaster, the student bandleader, whom I will call Tom, encouraged his bandmates as they played through a song that he had selected for the morning’s rehearsal. After the song concluded, Tom nodded approvingly, complimenting and thanking everyone. “We’ll play it again,” he told them, and, in preparation, he provided detailed descriptions of exactly the kind of sound that he wanted from each band member and from the group as a whole. His instructions were very specific. He told his lead guitarist that his instrument should have “no overdrive” and asked him to “put compression on it” to create a cleaner sound, before suggesting that he play a “single-note melodic line and then add in the roots of the chords.” 85

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He told the keyboard player to just play a “pad” that would supply a gauzy chordal underpinning for the song, and he instructed the bass player to play quarter notes in the verse and whole notes in the chorus. The drummer, he advised, should play a steady 73 beats per minute. Those instructions covered the verse and the chorus, but for the bridge he asked for “some real crunch. I want something nasty . . . like sick dirt.” He told the keyboard player to cut out the pad and to play an octave higher, suggested that the guitar player add some overdrive, and exuberantly explained the effect he wanted the song to have: “I want to hit [the bridge] hard. Real hard hitting. Like I just got hit in the face and I fell down, like I have a headache.” The bridge, he told them, would lead into a “crescendo thing,” before resolving into a final repetition of the chorus. With that, they launched back into the song, with each player playing their part more or less as Tom had explained it.2 In truth, this rehearsal was actually a rehearsal of a rehearsal, as it took place within the Worship Band Practicum, one of the school’s curricular modules. Tom’s band was on stage in front of his instructors, his classmates, and me, walking his student band through the paces of a practice as part of his learning how to lead a worship band. When the band finished playing through the song for a second time, his classmates offered enthusiastic applause and compliments about how clear Tom had been with his descriptions of what he wanted from each of the members of his band. They all especially appreciated the “’80s style” synthesizer. The class’s instructor made special note of the use of guitar pedal effects within the overall arrangement of the song: “The compression was great, the overdrive was great. You had the goods to rock it.” Feedback about the performance focused almost exclusively on its technical elements and on Tom’s ability to draw what he wanted out of his bandmates. There were no mentions of worship or the Holy Spirit, and no talk about prayer or religious experience. The workshop participants limited the discussion to the sonic elements of the song itself and how they wanted it to feel. People even joked; when the keyboard player could not find a cable she needed, someone in the class called out “let’s pray on it.” Everyone laughed. Rehearsal during the practicum contrasted sharply with morning devotionals. Also led by students, devotionals had taken place only a few hours earlier in that same space with those same students who had then

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gathered there to worship, not to practice. During morning devotionals, student musicians stood on the same stage and led the same people in worship. I heard them sing loudly and I saw them raise their hands or stand with their arms held in front of them, as if ready to receive something. I saw more than one student singing while they walked around the room in what appeared to be a deep reverie. Others sat on chairs, on the floor, on the side of the platform. The difference between the two settings could not have been clearer. As one student explained to me later, “In the morning we prayed. This is just rehearsal.”3 The difference between prayer and practice might be contextual, but the student’s reflection on the difference speaks to a host of larger concerns with respect to the production of worship music by worship leaders. Rehearsal, it seemed, was a time to work out the technical aspects of a performance; it was no time for serious prayer. Or was it? If they were practicing how to practice leading worship, how much should they focus on their sound and how much on their intention? Could the use of guitar overdrive or the switch from quarter notes to whole notes in the bass really make a difference in the ways in which this particular arrangement of this particular song would be able to move a congregation into and through their worship? Did they get too deep into concerns about what might sound good or interesting or cool in ways that could distract or mislead people from the task at hand? The basic question Tom and his peers faced during that morning seemed like a simple one: How do you make worship music for a congregation? As students in a program for worship leaders, they were in the right place to learn the answer. Tom’s response on that morning, focused on the technical and sonic aspects of that question, was motivated by a sense, however muted, that with the proper arrangement of rhythm, timbre, and pacing, he would be able to help his imagined congregation to pray. Much like songwriters who embrace their responsibility for writing songs that may become the worship of others, worship leaders balance the technical demands of performance with a mandate to use music to help people worship. Worship leaders transform songs into practice, creating the conditions for musical experiences that might enable people to express themselves to God. This is more than a matter of learning to play songs that they heard streaming on a website or for which they read a lead sheet. It demands a commitment to the technical

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aspects of playing and to an understanding that their role in a congregation is never only about the music. In fact, worship leaders explain, they can be more of a distraction than a benefit by focusing too much or not enough on technique or performance. Yet they approach their music with the same level of commitment as almost every other performing musician: they are trying to cultivate a familiarity with both instrument and repertoire so that they do not have to worry about the mechanics of playing, and can focus on worshipping along with their congregation. Too much practice, though, might make them sound too polished, too little practice and they might hit a wrong note or miss a chord change and disrupt their congregation’s attention to prayer. Trying to lead worship through prayer, then, is often a negotiation between practice, performance, and prayer, as worship leaders worry about how, where, and whom they lead. This chapter will explore how worship leaders make music in relation to these concerns, and how they manage their responsibilities as performers, leaders, and possible distractions.

Faith in the Music Songwriters focus a great deal of energy on crafting songs that they feel confident will at least not intentionally mislead those who wish to use them in worship. Worship leaders extend this effort, transforming songs into occasions for collective music making that they hope will not mistake the pleasures of singing for the power of encountering God. Because it is impossible to establish that difference with certainty, worship leaders strive to make music that they hope will take advantage of the pleasures of singing and lead to a more profound form of expression. Part of this effort relies on the affective dimension of collective music making addressed in chapter 2. Writing songs with this in mind is one thing, but taking responsibility for the collective endeavor of congregational worship in something different. One popular truism about music is that it feels good to make music with other people; just about anyone who has played in a band or sung around a campfire or raised his or her voice in prayer would testify to this. As a result, there is no shortage of studies or opinions about the power of collective music making, though they usually focus on non-

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religious settings.4 In recent years, perhaps no one has become associated with this understanding of music making more than folksinger Pete Seeger. Once upon a time, wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.5

Seeger’s faith in music’s ability to convince people that “there is hope for the world” locates the power of music in the “right songs,” but, more powerfully, Seeger finds it in the act of collective song. Arlo Guthrie agreed: “As far as I can tell, the real practical benefit of seeing people sing together is that if they can learn to sing together, they can probably learn to do other things together.”6 Even electronic musician Brian Eno has expressed his sense of the benefits of collective singing: “I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others.”7 In a more scholarly vein, Thomas Turino has argued that music is unique in its ability to cultivate a sense of collective belonging, and Kiri Miller’s study of sacred harp singing examined the ways in which singing has enabled a diverse, diffuse community to gather around the practice of singing.8 Daniel Levitin, the cognitive neuroscientist who tried to explain “your brain on music,” offered a slightly different approach to explaining this power. For Levitin, the effects of music can be explained primarily in chemical terms and can be best understood as the result of acoustic stimuli on neurons in one’s brain.9 Levitin also writes beautifully about the social aspects of music, its role in ritual, and its ability to unify groups of people: “In a great many ceremonies, there is a clear goal to

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perform the act [of music making] as a community. Part of music’s role then involves the social bonding function of bringing together members of a community.”10 If communal music making is so powerful, then the effects of music cannot be traced solely to brain chemistry; the setting and context play a part in the release of the chemicals in question. There is something, even Levitin allows, to the idea that the act of making music together heightens or intensifies whatever other effects the music might have on its own. For sociologist Émile Durkheim, collective action, often grounded in religious ritual, generates a feeling of belonging.11 Durkheim was primarily concerned with understanding the mechanisms of group cohesion, and he acknowledged the significance that feelings play in reaffirming or producing one’s connection to a group. He understood that it was not enough just to understand that one belonged, but that one had to feel a sense of belonging. Durkheim attributed the feelings of membership to what he called “collective effervescence,” which manifests when a group engages in a common ritual and generates a kind of shared or common “electricity.” This effect, Durkheim understood, was not a by-product of collective action, but a central feature of it.12 Perhaps this is why Mark Chaves notes that were congregations to cease holding regular worship events, they would be in dire trouble.13 For Chaves and Durkheim, regular participation in collective action reaffirms the health and stability of the collective by providing ritualized occasions for the group to reenact and reconstitute their shared bonds. For evangelical worshippers, though, the social dimension of collective action can never suffice, as it would place the body of the church above God. Whatever must happen in worship cannot, in this sense, just be about the music and the people singing it. There must be something more to which the songs and emotions are pointing. Yet many accounts of music in congregations still fall back into Durkheimian formulations of the social power of collective singing. In one ethnographic account of a Sunday worship service, sociologist Gerardo Marti observed that “the ambiguous crowd now shares a unity in being guided through this corporate Sunday gathering. Over the next twenty minutes, we pass through a succession of songs, a togetherness evident in the ebb and flow from song to song, until the lead pastor comes to the platform to start his morning sermon.”14 Similarly, ethnomusicolo-

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gist Jeff Todd Titon, in his mammoth study of an Appalachian Baptist church, captured the perceived power of communal prayer, concluding that, for the members of this church, “A church united in prayer is acknowledged to have great power, to be a powerhouse for God. . . . In one mind and one accord, the congregation becomes a community.”15 Both these accounts reveal a great deal about the place of making music in congregations, yet they tend to naturalize the power of music and its role in collective practice, ascribing to the music itself and to the act of singing a singular ability to elicit a feeling of connection with others and often neglecting the fact that worship must be about more than just making music. Interestingly, a similar sentiment repeats throughout literature about Christian worship from the perspective of those within the church. Although these works often contrast worship music to popular music, art music, or concert music, they still often follow Durkheim, insisting that the participatory nature of worship is what generates its power.16 Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith describes the place of music in worship in ways that echo Seeger and Marti. He ascribes to singing a unique power, describing it as an “action that activates the whole person,” which “gets ‘in’ us in ways that other forms of discourse rarely do.”17 Making a claim about the innate power of music, Smith describes worship as essentially social and defines it as “the act of gathering in response to a call to worship.”18 Smith offers a theory of worship that affirms an interactive and mutually dependent vision of humanity in which interpersonal relationships have theological overtones. Worship, he argues, becomes a mode for turning belief into a kind of collective embodied performance: “As recipients of God’s greeting, we become imitators of God by extending welcome to our neighbors and brothers and sisters. We are immediately reminded that worship is not a private affair; we have gathered as a people, as a congregation, and just as together we are dependent on our redeeming Creator, so too are we dependent on one another.”19 In Smith’s formulation, the act of making music is not merely social but theological. Therefore, he concludes, collective song empowers the body of the church, unified in worship, to embody the divine.20 Marva Dawn agrees, emphasizing that the style of worship ought to echo the overall communal and theological imperative for worship that is open, inviting, and accessible, but that does not sacrifice its deeper

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commitments. Dawn is agnostic about style, but she cares deeply about the production of worship as a social phenomenon. “Any kind of music or style of worship . . . can be hospitable,” she writes, “if corporate worship is kept open as a ‘public space’ into which every person can enter rather than becoming the private coziness of individuals in their devotional relationship to God.”21 Echoing Robert Wuthnow’s description of prayer as a “public good,” Dawn emphasizes the value of worshipping in community, which, she argues, can serve as a bulwark against the excessive privatization of religious experience.22 By advocating for congregational song, Smith and Dawn both favor the social, “horizontal” power of music and offer an implicit critique of the individualism associated with “vertical” worship that imagines a worshipper speaking and singing directly to God and ignoring the people around them. Each of these descriptions, from the chemical to the political to the sacred, inscribe music with a unique kind of inherent power to communicate and to connect. The problem with this perspective is that it places too much faith in the music itself, and, in so doing, naturalizes it. It reifies the music and turns it into a mere stimulus for good feelings or collective sentiment. Singing can catalyze this reaction, but most of these accounts overlook how the music is made to focus on what it produces, in good feelings or stronger social bonds. Music does not just appear; someone or some group of people must draw it out, create it, produce it. As Howard Becker has written of art worlds, such experiences require an array of human investments that rely only somewhat on the existence of an art object itself. Similarly, the cultural production of music can only be partially attributed to a song or some instruments, the choirmaster or the chemicals in one’s brain. Each of these has its place, but none can properly be credited with the whole effects of communal song, whatever they may be or however they may be experienced. Ironically, attributing so much to the inherent power of music renders any discussion of culture or context almost moot. If these powers are simply present in the music itself, then the context should not matter, which results in some surprising similarities between the theological vision of James K. A. Smith and Arlo Guthrie’s more secular one. But context does matter and it matters in powerful ways. For practicing people of faith, collective singing is not necessarily the same as worship. Had I attended a night of folk singing at a church, I would

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likely have heard music as beautiful as that which I heard on Sunday mornings, though I am fairly certain that I would not have seen quite as many people crying or shouting or comforting one another. Communal singing may well generate feelings of togetherness and cause surges of oxytocin that result in feelings one might associate with communitas or collective effervescence, but the feeling of togetherness cannot be credited to the music alone because music does not exist in a vacuum. Someone wrote the songs that people were singing and someone else was leading those assembled in song. Wherever music seems to do the work of bringing people together, someone or some group of people is responsible for creating the conditions for that collective expression, whether it is exerted “horizontally,” across the congregation, “vertically” toward God, or, somehow, both. What might look or sound as if it is largely “vertical” always has deeply “horizontal” roots. Accounting for worship leading in this way helps to explain the ways in which even the most powerful occasions for individual worship always derive from cultural conventions and social concerns. Acknowledging these conditions reveals a deeper characteristic of ritual performance. Attributing the power of collective music to the music itself assumes that it is a sure thing; people just need to gather together to make it. Worship leaders, by contrast, are aware that collective song might fail as worship even when they lead well, technically speaking. Because worship always aspires to expressions that are larger than the music itself, worship leaders understand that not only might they fail, but that, in a sense, they should fail at making music in order to make space for worship.

Making Worship Leaders Given these concerns, one popular conception of leading worship depicts a worship leader as someone whose role is defined by his or her ability to disappear into a congregation. A review of City on a Hill, an influential compilation album of worship music from predominantly CCM artists, offered the following definition of leading worship: “In the best of worlds, the praise & worship musician is someone who becomes nearly invisible, their artistry and skill acting as a sacrifice rather than an attention-getting device.”23 Journalist Deborah Evans Price reinforced

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this notion of leading worship by paraphrasing worship leader and songwriter Darrell Evans: “When he’s in front of an audience, the invisible wall that usually separates the performer onstage and the audience dissolves.”24 It is tempting to describe worship leaders in this way, because it fits well with both the Protestant commitment to direct engagement with God and some version of the songwriters’ folk discourse. As formal intermediaries, worship leaders should be unnecessary. Yet the creation of this impression, or the ability of a worship leader to join his or her congregation in worship, requires a great deal of attention to the details of performance, the complexities of the music, and to the various aspects of what it means to facilitate the worship of others. If it is possible to lead by disappearing, it is only because of a great deal of effort, practice, and training. It, too, is a cultural production. As American evangelical Christianity evolved over the last few decades of the 20th century, so did the needs of congregations, churches, and communities. Informal prayer groups sometimes became established churches, the Vineyard split from Calvary Chapel, rebellious baby boomers married and built families, and so-called megachurches began popping up around the country. Specifically, the growth of “seeker churches” like Willow Creek and Saddleback Church in the 1980s made it clear that leading worship for a congregation of 1,000 or 5,000 required a different set of skills than leading a group of likeminded ex-hippies in a stairwell or a living room. No longer just groups of young people gathering on Wednesday nights or worshipping in communes or coffee shops, newly established congregations had new needs that were reflected in a variety of ways, including in their leadership structures and positions. How to lead a congregation in a worship service that could welcome people from different generations or manage different musical tastes or life experiences requires more than just musical skill or a sincere desire to worship. At a certain point, it no longer seemed sufficient for someone to show up on Sunday mornings and strum an acoustic guitar for 90 minutes, no matter how pure their intention. Serving the needs of a congregation was different than just being able to worship. This led to the creation of the role of worship leader, and subsequently to publications, conferences, and educational programs that promised resources and support for them. It also had the effect of formalizing and professionalizing some

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of what had previously been more idiosyncratic and possibly more spontaneous approaches to leading worship. During the formative years of worship music, there were virtually no resources for worship leaders and nobody was formally trained to lead congregational worship in this emerging musical style. Schools of sacred music typically taught a more classical repertoire, leaving guitar players and singers who had no formal training in church-based music without anywhere to study. Extending the folk narrative of songwriting to congregational worship, the dominant approach to leading was simply to lead by example, on the assumption that worshipping with a pure heart would, on its own, pull worshippers along. Love Song’s Chuck Girard wistfully recalled leading worship in this way. There was an innocence then that is not there now. No record companies, no charts, no big bucks contracts, just music, ministry, and Jesus. Your motives for being in it were tested just by the fact that there was no money in it. You were in it for God or you weren’t in it. We didn’t know we could say no. If the phone rang with an invitation to play somewhere, we felt it must be God. We would sometimes play 2–3 times a DAY in those days. We would just get in our vans and take off. We never knew what we were getting paid, or how big the crowd would be, it was just an opportunity to preach the gospel. The glue that held the group together was our drive to see souls saved. Man, it was good.25

According to Girard, leading worship did not require anything more than a good band, a catchy chorus, the proper posture, and a willing congregation. There is more than a little nostalgia in Girard’s recollection, which depicts worship music’s formative years in terms of a kind of expressive purity, a quality that extended to every dimension of making music. In his account, there was little distinction between worshipping and leading worship, save one’s placement in front of a congregation. That simplicity was part of what made it so powerful, discursively speaking. Although this arrangement placed a strong emphasis on worship, it had little room for discussions about how worshippers might become leaders. In that context, intention mattered above almost all else, and this emphasis held even as other differences about what constituted appropriate modes of worship turned into doctrinal and denominational divisions

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among American evangelicals. As Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel grew during the early 1970s, some of its members began experiencing more expansive expressions of worship. Most famously, Ken Gullicksen, who had been attending a Bible study at Chuck Girard’s house, began hosting worship services that encouraged a wider expressive range of worship that included standing and clapping, as well as glossolalia or “singing in the spirit.”26 He developed a vision for a style of worship that enabled greater “intimacy and freedom” than Smith permitted at Calvary, and he encouraged those who worshipped with him to sing and write songs with greater lyrical emphasis on one’s personal relationship with God.27 Eventually, Gullicksen teamed up with John Wimber to split from Smith and Calvary to create the Vineyard, a network of churches that favored this more expressive approach to worship.28 Although they wanted worship that included “gifts of the spirit,” which Smith did not welcome at Calvary, their general approach to leading worship hardly changed. Both Gullicksen and Wimber had musical backgrounds, and both men brought their tastes and talents to their new church. They framed leading worship with little more than the notion that one’s desire to worship would encourage others to follow. Echoing Girard, Gullicksen explained, “I played guitar and sat on a stool and led some worship and taught the Bible.”29 Another writer recalled a similar vision of leading worship in the early days of the Vineyard. There was no hype, no charismatic worship leader trying to stir up the emotions of the crowd in those early days—just simple, honest worshiping, led by a band and a gentle worship leader with a heart for God. John [Wimber] had a vision of hundreds of “garage bands” (a term for informal bands that rehearse in someone’s garage, typically playing drums, guitars, bass, etc.) called to lead people into living worship.30

Despite doctrinal and practical differences that eventually separated Calvary and Vineyard, the narratives of worship leading in both settings shared the sense that music, when played by someone who meant it, could create the conditions for deep, sustained, and expressive worship. A person became a worship leader by having a “heart for worship” and a willingness to step out in front of a congregation and sing. Leading was little more than a by-product of this arrangement.

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Yet changes in the landscape of American evangelical churches would instigate a reconsideration of the responsibilities and skills required for leading worship. In the context of an established church or church plant (a church founded by an existing church), and certainly in a “megachurch,” musical talent and a good heart did not quite qualify someone to lead worship.31 A 1988 column in CCM magazine argued that churches should start paying attention to this fact, and start institutionalizing the role of worship leader by bringing musicians onto their staff. Very few people question the importance of music for worship services. Music is perhaps every bit as crucial to our worship services as preaching, yet our ministers are put on full-time salaries and provided with homes to live in, while our musicians (who need time to pray and practice as much as pastors need time to study and pray) are usually forced to hold down day jobs . . . just to make ends meet.32

The article went on to note that the failure to create a formal role for worship leaders was inhibiting the growth of worship music. Only when musicians are compensated for their contribution to the church, the author concluded, “will Christian music approach its full potential.”33 This began to change with the emergence of formal training programs for worship leaders. Among the first of these was the International Worship Leaders’ Institute, a weeklong “training school to help equip pastors, worship leaders, singers and instrumentalists,” which began hosting annual conferences in 1986.34 In 1992, Integrity/Hosanna! launched its own conference, which it modeled on other multiday Christian music festivals like Agape and Cornerstone. Their “Praise 92” conference differentiated itself from other offerings by emphasizing “praise and worship” music and featuring Hosanna! Music worship leaders Ron Kenoly and Lenny LeBlanc, among others.35 In the late 1980s, CCM magazine ran occasional articles with titles like “Bringing Praise into the 90s” and “21st Century Praise” that imagined what a reinvigorated worship music scene would do for Christian music generally:36 “Will 21st century praise be longer, louder, more diverse, more sophisticated, more visual? . . . Will praise become a more recognized weapon of spiritual warfare? Will nearly all contemporary Christian pop music concerts end with praise and worship? The answer to all those questions is probably ‘yes!’”37

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Chuck Fromm, president of Maranatha! Music and longtime leader at Calvary Chapel, heard in these developments an opportunity to expand the availability of resources for helping worship leaders develop and better serve the church and their congregations. Fromm already had a publication called Worship, and he wanted to launch a new magazine that focused more on worship leading. Despite the emergence of worship leader conferences and growing attention to the role of musicians in worship, Fromm found the magazine a hard sell, owing to the widespread understanding that leading was largely an effect of worshipping and not something that needed much attention on its own. This understanding was so deeply ingrained that when he told people about his idea for the magazine, many responded with confusion. “For them it was sort of oblique, [like] writing a magazine about air,” he recalled.38 Undaunted, Fromm and CCM Publications launched Worship Leader magazine in 1992 to support, educate, and connect worship leaders. Unlike CCM magazine, which focused on music news for fans, Worship Leader saw itself as a teaching tool and a connector between and among its readers. His introductory column, entitled “Come Join Us in True Worship,” outlined the magazine’s purpose both in terms of the practical and philosophical dimensions of worship: “The desire to ‘true worship’ (John 4:23, NIV) today—spurred on by its association with church growth—has produced a myriad of techniques and products that hold great promise. They result in a church in transition regarding its rituals and forms of worship.”39 Fromm promised that his magazine would address this situation by providing both spiritual inspiration and practical support, and by keeping its readers up on the latest trends, tools, and resources. [It will] provide you with ideas, information, and resources to help you enhance and facilitate worship at your church. We’ll profile churches, worship leaders, and artists; publish articles and columns on worship, management, and other topics; and help keep you abreast of the technology of today’s worship through reviews of electronic keyboards, soundboards, etc. We’ll also review the latest in praise and worship recorded and printed music. Lastly, because leaders build and teach other leaders, we’ll keep you in touch with others in the worship movement.40

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Fromm understood that training worship leaders was a delicate effort. Only people who worship can lead others in worship, but only worshipping no longer seemed sufficient for leading congregations. Yet too much attention to the techniques of leading might distract people from worshipping while they are leading; leading, he understood, must be subservient to the demands of worship itself. Even as the tools of leadership and styles of music change, the focus on worship itself should remain constant. The magazine, he hoped, could help people retain a focus on worship itself by contributing to their ability to lead others. The purposes of God remain constant . . . but the tools worship leaders employ must be useful for the times. For some, it is a glorious time of reformation and change. For others, it is a time of high stress and anxiety. . . . It is the challenge of Worship Leader to help sort through the convergence and sometimes clash of worship traditions to give our readers a vantage point, a perspective from which their own visions of worship for the church, their fellowship, can be formed.41

As the magazine grew, it toggled back and forth between addressing the spiritual dimension of worship and offering advice about the technical aspects of the job. These two narrative threads trace through almost every issue. Articles offer instruction, advice, profiles of worship leaders of all kinds, investigations of trends, and reflections on the impact of current events on worship practices. Meanwhile, advertisements for resources, product reviews, and album reviews keep readers abreast of new releases, resources, and developments. One issue presented a “Worship Leader Boot Camp” that included short articles on songwriting and creating “flow” (creating the “journey of worship”) alongside columns on communication between senior pastors and worship leaders and techniques for finding volunteers for the worship team.42 Another issue, dedicated to the “Worthy Workman: The Worship Professional,” explored a number of “problems and paradoxes inherent in worship as a job” such as “How does a worship artist make the transition from local to global? How is the slippery slope between commerce and calling best navigated? What is the impact of making a living by leading in worship?”43 By raising these concerns and by placing the question of how to

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worship in conversation with more technical and practical dimensions of life in church leadership, the magazine encourages worship leaders to focus on their skills and techniques, but never to forget why they need them in the first place. The success of the magazine, alongside a handful of other resources, led to an expansion of educational programs for worship leaders including books, conferences, conventions, online training platforms, instructional videos, and the like.44 In 2007, after about 15 years in print, Fromm expanded the influence of Worship Leader magazine by launching the National Worship Leader Conference. Since its debut, which drew around 3,000 people, the conference has expanded from a single annual gathering of worship leaders, teachers, songwriters, musicians, and vendors to an initiative that organizes multiple events around the country each year. Sessions focus on the same range of themes and concerns as does the magazine, allowing professional worship leaders to learn from leaders in the field, to talk about gear and techniques, and to serve as spiritual nourishment for continuing their work in their home congregations. Efforts to better train and equip worship leaders also led to a growth in educational programs. The 2012 edition of Worship Leader’s “guide to higher education,” a special advertising section that included many of the opportunities to study worship leading, included five “events” and 18 schools, each of which offered their own training program for worship leaders.45 These programs typically offer a balance of classes and experiences that address the practical demands of a leadership position within a church and the spiritual demands of leading a congregation in worship. Though 14 of the 18 schools listed are attached to established universities and colleges, nearly all of the programs listed are less than 10 years old. The first of this wave of educational programs was the New Life School of Worship, based at New Life Church, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. When I attended the 2007 National Worship Leader Conference, it was the only school represented there. Ross Parsley, a founder of the school, told me that the idea for a school came to him after many other churches called him asking if he knew of young worship leaders who could lead worship like they do at New Life Church and who were looking for employment. Parsley’s response was to create a school that

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could train people to meet the needs of churches for worship leaders. His explanation of the school’s founding positions it precisely at the intersection between better training for worship leaders and the demands of the church labor market. Churches needed worship leaders and worship leaders needed training. The development of programs like the New Life School of Worship, alongside conferences and print and digital resources, demonstrates the trend toward greater awareness of the roles and responsibilities of worship leaders. As the role became more professional, training became more systematic, and while people like Chuck Girard and others fondly recall the purity of the early 1970s, the emergence of a more robust apparatus for training and supporting worship leaders has enriched the discussion about what it means to lead worship and how to do it. Leading worship can no longer hide behind a folk narrative, nor can it rest on the supposedly inherent power of music. Neither can it be attributed to the earnest commitment of a worshipper who happens to have access to a microphone, a guitar, or a platform. The training and educational infrastructure for worship leaders reveal the role itself as a cultural product that has been formed, formulated, cultivated, and transmitted in response to the needs of churches for people to lead them in worship. At its core, this is a social need, even though the most visible (and audible) work of leading worship centers on more spiritual concerns.

Performing Leading The emergence of the professionalized worship leader has been accompanied by a concern for placing too much attention on performance at the expense of worship. The fear is that to focus too much on techniques of leading might cause people to emphasize production over worship, and thus lead to distraction or to outright manipulation. At the same time, to focus too much on one’s own worship might also leave the congregation adrift without adequate direction. Worship leaders operate within this tension, trying to make music that leads people in prayer, but also trying to lead people by praying openly and honestly. As with songwriters, worship leaders approach their responsibility to their congregations with a sense that to succeed in one aspect of their work may hinder their ability to do so in another.

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When I spoke with Parsley about how he learned to lead worship, he recalled having a difficult time negotiating the competing demands of his own desire to worship and his commitment to the congregation. Sometimes I would be worshipping and my focus and my attention would be on Christ and what He has done and then I would have to stop. “Oh, here comes the verse and I have to turn around.” Cue the band. Here we go. [Are] we are going to the verse okay? We are safe now. Oh, crap, I forgot how we end this song, you know? There is this back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.46

I heard many comments like this from worship leaders, and they all attest to the practical concerns of leading worship while also focusing on their own worship and worrying about the band, the song, and what is going on with the congregation. Parsley’s perspective on leading worship speaks to just how challenging it is to negotiate these responsibilities, and how the demands of worshipping and leading can so easily conflict, even in the middle of worship. On a more practical level, leading worship is less about making music that sounds good than it is about enabling others to worship, however they might sound. I heard many worship leaders and pastors explain that one has to worship in order to lead worship, telling one another, “You can’t lead people somewhere you have never been.” Other articles and books express this sentiment in a variety of ways that revolves around a vision of worship leading as fundamentally about worshipping. British songwriter and worship leader Tim Hughes explained that to approach the task as anything other than worship is to misunderstand the responsibility of a worship leader: “In worship . . . there is no room for performance.”47 Performance, for Hughes, smacks of inauthenticity and of musicians more concerned with “impressing people or feed[ing] their insecure egos” than worshipping honestly.48 Hughes explained that playing music is only one of the roles of a worship leader, and it is not the most important one, either: “A worship band, by its very definition, must be made up of worshippers.” By implication, it should not be made up of people who are merely musicians or performers.49 When looking for people to serve in a worship band, Hughes urged his readers to think first about “character,” explaining that “once you’ve looked at character,

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move on to musicality.”50 Music, he argued, should be considered only after more important elements can be accounted for. As the pastor of a large church in Belmont, a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, Scotty Smith offered a similar approach to selecting people to serve on his worship team, explaining how easy it would be to hire excellent musicians, but how poorly that would serve his congregation. [We could hire] the best percussionist, the best bass players. I mean it’s easy to pull off something that’s just musically really good. You can create a worship-leading entity, but are they lead worshipers? If we had to choose between the two, we would rather have a worship team that are lead worshipers, that is [made up of] those who are exploring, growing, connecting with the Lord, who happened to be good players too. We’d rather have that than all eight players [for whom] it’s a Sunday morning gig, or it’s just another way to . . . get a record deal.51

Smith’s approach to selecting musicians derives from his sense that worship supersedes musicianship. Francis Chan, author, speaker, and founding pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, California, agreed. He explained that music should account for “only about 20 percent” of the role of the worship leader, which he estimated to be just enough “so as not to be a distraction.”52 Otherwise, he preferred someone who was “intimate with God” to someone who was musically gifted. To be sure, Smith, Chan, and Hughes would certainly select worship leaders who are also excellent musicians, but their shared emphasis on worshippers over musicians demonstrates the depths of their concerns that worship leaders might invest too deeply in performance and draw undue attention to the music and derail the congregation’s efforts to worship in the process. Worship leaders should be good musicians, but they cannot let the quality of their musicianship interfere with their commitment to their congregation or to their own worship. Songwriter and worship leader Glenn Packiam explained why he values good musicianship in worship. I think a good worship leader matters tremendously and you know not just in musical skills, so that the musicians’ mistakes are not a distraction

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to the people. I mean that’s the language we try to use: you don’t want mistakes or the musical element to distract the people with a bunch of bad notes and the band playing loose.53

His approach to leading worship is organized around the needs of worshippers, even as it emphasizes the quality of the music. Music should be of high enough quality so that worshippers can focus on worship and not on the music. To lead a congregation in this manner is to make music with the understanding that worship is always greater than the music, and with an awareness that, to allow room for worship, one must be prepared to step back from a place of prominence and allow the congregation to worship on their own. How to do this has been the source of a good deal of discussion among worship leaders. Some pastors and worship leaders fear that the more focused people are on the performative and technical aspects of leading worship, the further they get from its spontaneous, expressive qualities and thus from the ability of worshippers to worship. A worship set that is too tightly focused may not allow for more improvised responses to the Holy Spirit, if it is moving in the congregation. The concern that people might emphasize songs over spirit has sparked many debates about how much worship leaders should focus on the technical aspects of their music making and how much space they should leave for more spontaneous expressions of worship.54 Longtime worship leader and songwriter David Garratt elaborated on this concern as he reflected on the growth of training programs and resources designed to foster “excellence” in worship leaders. We’re taking the thought of excellence of what we do to a point where it’s become excellence of musicianship and excellence of singers, and even excellence of lighting and dress and sound equipment and all that sort of stuff, and although I think it’s important that we do our very best in that area, my real concern would be that, in doing so, we somehow leave God out of it. We somehow leave out the possibility of giving Him room to break in and do something that He wants to do. . . . I just feel that that’s where we’ve come and that our programs are so orchestrated that we don’t give room for anything outside of it.55

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Garratt worries that an emphasis on excellence has become something of an end in itself and that the demands of tightly rehearsed songs might prevent worshippers from taking advantage of the freedom necessary for songs to become more experiential expressions of worship. Worship leaders share this concern. They worry about their own musicianship, fearing that they might create powerful experiences that are fundamentally musical rather than spiritual, and that their ability to perform might lead worshippers to confuse the latter with the former. Bob Kauflin offered a sharper account of how he relates to making worship music in which he explicitly warns against finding meaning in the music itself. “I don’t want to lead in such a way that people think that music leads them into the presence of God,” he said. So you can come in and set a musical vibe with a band and then kind of persuade people to worship through that, through textures, musical textures, a groove. As a worship leader I don’t want to program people that way. I mean, not that it’s wrong to do it but I don’t want them to have to rely on a musical stimulus always to turn their thoughts towards God because what God has given us primarily to turn our thoughts toward him is his Word empowered by the Holy Spirit. That’s what imparts faith to people. Music then comes along again to support that, envelop it, complement it. . . . I think God wants us to sing because it engages our hearts, but He doesn’t want us just to sing because it’s emotionally pleasing.56

Kauflin argued that the more emphasis a worship leader places on the quality of their music, the more central the music becomes and the more likely worshippers are to mistake making music for worship. The same is nearly true of the worship leader. “My job as a worship leader,” observed Kauflin, “is to figure out how can I bring [godly] truths to bear on people’s minds even as I am trying to serve them with music.”57 Qualified by his use of the word “even,” Kauflin’s notion of worship extends far beyond making music, diminishing both the music and his effort in the process of helping others to respond to God’s grace. Excellence in musicianship might be a distraction here, too, not because it constricts the range of expressive prayer, but because it might be mistaken for the quality of prayer itself. Worship leaders like Kauflin

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worry that they might mislead worshippers by performing so well that their congregations think they’re worshipping when they’re not. As with songwriters who labor over their lyrics to mitigate the possibility of inaccurate references to God or the Bible, worship leaders make music with the awareness that their very efforts to guide people in worship might inadvertently lead them astray.

Learning to Lead by Getting out of the Way This is a persistent concern for worship leaders who shared their fears that worship had become trapped by its own conventions. The success of the approach to worship that interpolated rock and roll in order to access its expressive and experiential qualities had sown the seeds for its own failures. With growing sensitivity to this tension, worship leaders have had to develop an approach to their role that allows them to both develop a range of leadership skills while diminishing their own prominence in leading worship, lest it seem like manipulation, performance, or distraction. As Garratt suggested, the pursuit of excellence had become, for some, a false idol, or an end in itself rather than a means to worship. Others worried that demonstrations of prayer, like raising one’s hands or crying, had come to be mistaken as evidence of worship, and they feared that worship leaders might try to manipulate their congregations to elicit those reactions. One strategy is to consciously try to diminish one’s own prominence in the congregational setting. Rick Muchow, who served as the worship pastor at Saddleback Church for 24 years, explained, “I just get up there and get it started. But I try to stay out of the way as much as possible.”58 Extending this logic to the issue of personal motivation, Paul Baloche explained how he prepares to lead worship even when he does not feel like it. Essentially, his approach focuses on removing himself from the equation: “It is of the utmost importance to acknowledge our emptiness to the Lord. To say something to the effect of, ‘Lord, here I am—about to lead others in worship, and I feel so far from You at this moment, and yet I have a job to do. I don’t want to get in the way of what You want to do in the lives of these people.”59 Dove Award–winning songwriter and worship leader Meredith Andrews explained her work to me in similar terms. When Andrews leads worship, she likes to read scripture or

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intentionally sing someone else’s songs in order to “take me out of the picture.” She contrasted leading worship with entertaining, saying, “I’ve learned this from a great deal from experience: leading people in worship is not at all about singing at somebody.”60 Or, as one advertisement for Shure brand audio products reminded worship leaders, they should invest in good technology “because nothing should distract from why we are here.”61 This requires no small amount of effort and intentionality. Even as worship leaders speak about stepping aside in worship, they acknowledge the effort required to do so, and how it is born of a concern for the experience of the congregations they lead. Stepping aside or “disappearing,” then, is a learned skill, one that worship leaders cultivate over time, with practice. It is easy to adopt the language of Andrews or Muchow and much harder to develop the habits necessary to resist the pleasures of the spotlight or to look to one’s congregation for affirmation. Songwriter and worship leader Matt Redman confessed to his desire to look for positive signs of his leadership in the displays of worship in a congregation, and how he tries to resist it. He wrote, with obvious irony and self-consciousness, that “some outstretched hands, perhaps—that definitely means its working! . . . Don’t I sometimes squint through my half-closed eyes to see what other responses are happening, hoping to see at least one person on their knees or in tears?”62 Derek Webb has been a popular songwriter and CCM performer both as a member of the band Caedmon’s Call and on his own. He is not a worship leader and does not write worship music, but invitations to lead worship come from congregations anyhow. He spoke candidly about his concerns in this area, explaining that he routinely turns down offers to lead worship because he is aware of how to leverage his skill as a performer to induce the kinds of reactions that people associate with worship. I can do it. I totally know how to do it. I guarantee you: I know how to use music as a kind of way to raise people’s emotions and just stir them emotionally and [if] I backed up [off] the mike and closed my eyes and strummed my guitar and led, you wouldn’t be able to feel the difference. I guarantee you couldn’t tell [the] difference. Maybe that is just because I am a really good liar, because I am . . . I am a tremendous liar. But the point is [that] you couldn’t [tell the difference].63

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Webb knows that he could use some of the conventions of worship leading to elicit a response that might feel like or resemble worship. He was uncomfortable with how familiar they felt to him, and he feared that the temptation to employ them would override his desire or intention to worship at that moment. Worse, to do so would be to mislead the congregation into thinking that they are worshipping when they are not. Baloche shared a similar concern about his own ability to provoke certain responses in his congregation, saying, “I [can] just push all the right buttons, and I don’t want to do that. I really don’t.”64 Pushing the “right buttons,” or using any other of a number of tricks or strategies he might have to elicit a response from his congregation, is not, for Baloche, what a worship leader does. Instead, leading worship forces him to pay careful attention to his own behaviors and intentions while still leading his congregation in worship. There are times where I will say, “Hey, let us lift them up unto our Lord,” just to help us break out of our composure. But I’ve got a little watchdog in my brain that is always asking me, “Are you doing this to facilitate and help them, or is this because you are feeling insecure, [and] you need them to respond in a certain way to validate your leading right now?” These are things that are quick little barometers in my heart. . . . I’m just saying I’m wanting it to be honest, I’m wanting it to be genuine, and I’m really just praying a wordless prayer, “God, I want these people to connect with You, God.” I don’t want to get in the way.65

For Baloche, the best approach to leading worship is not to draw attention to one’s self, but to step aside and allow the congregation to worship. If he is successful in this regard, it is due, in part, to his ability to be hyperattentive to his own motivations, his own worship, and to his congregation. Paradoxically, the more attentive he is to the dynamics of leading worship, the less personally he assumes responsibility for his congregation’s experience of worship, and the more effectively he can step aside and let them worship. Chuck Kraft, an influential professor of anthropology and intercultural communication at Fuller Theological Seminary, took this approach nearly to its logical conclusion. In an article about his own approach to

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worship in congregational settings, he explained that he has tried to stop paying attention to worship leaders almost entirely. I stopped expecting the leaders to do something for me. And I became a good bit less concerned over their ethicality. You see, when I expect more of them than they can possibly deliver, I am being unethical. . . . Are the worship leaders trying to manipulate me? Are they simply trying to create something artificial? Perhaps. And that’s a very important question for them to get straight with God. But they need to know that worship is up to the worshippers. . . . My question is, “am I going to let their behavior or any other factor rob me of the opportunity of meeting God at this time and in this place?” My answer is “no.”66

For Kraft, worship leaders can never succeed. Questions of manipulation and earnestness, about performance and leadership, have become too distracting, so he opted to ignore worship leaders rather than risk being misled by them. Bob Kauflin, who has trained worship leaders for years, made a similar point in a story about an experience he had at a worship conference. Some years ago I was at a conference and a guy was leading and it was very man-centered. It was showy, it was unaffecting. I have been through this before and I just said, “Lord, I am not going to waste this time.” So I got on my knees. I just start thanking God for His mercy to me, and I just had a significant encounter with God in spite of how the guy was leading.67

For Kraft and Kauflin and others like Twila Paris, whose epigram introduces this chapter, not only has music become a distraction, but so have the very practices of leading worship. In this formulation, worship leaders can only succeed when they work hard to avoid becoming the center of attention and assuming too much responsibility for the experiences of those they are supposed to lead. This should not be mistaken for the folk discourse of Chuck Girard, and neither should it absolve worship leaders from attending to the complexities of making music. Paul Baloche, too, encourages aspiring

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worship leaders not to shy away from consciously cultivating the skills required to lead well. First Chronicles 25 says all the musicians were “trained and skilled in music for the Lord.” So it’s important that we aspire to excellence in our craft. But it also says “they were trained and skilled in music for the Lord.” And that’s the key. “For the Lord.” . . . You are creating a journey with songs, prayers, scripture and spoken word. . . . Look at the journey on the page and be open to prayer transitions. . . . Do this intentionally, do it with skill, and practice it. We practice guitar, we practice keyboards; it is just as important to practice the art of leading.68

The ability to lead requires training and effort alongside ongoing consideration of the needs of worshippers. To do it well requires a great deal of practice, not just in the pursuit of making music but in the “art of leading,” which, for worship leaders, means getting out of the way. The music of worship is both passionately embraced and deeply contested, and worship leaders actively attend to this tension. It is one of the key skills of leading worship. For Baloche, as for Webb and Redman, the primary concern is one of intention rather than effect. They agree that, to lead worship well, one must develop a finely tuned sense of that relationship so as to resist the temptations of looking for effects as evidence of intention. This is a learned skill, and one that is perhaps more important, even, than musicianship. It derives from acknowledging the influence that worship leaders might have over a congregation, part of which means working arduously to avoid availing themselves of the power that performance might hold. As a result, they describe leading worship as a kind of restraint. They check their skills and their desire to scan their congregations for evidence of their own ability to lead people in prayer. They try to temper their desires for musical excellence in order to allow more spontaneous expressions of worship to appear. They effortfully attune themselves to their own desire to worship while keeping their attention on their bandmates and the songs they are singing lest their songs divert the attention and intention of worshippers. This understanding of the complex negotiations of leading worship undermines accounts of leading worship as a kind as a kind of disappearance or sleight of hand. Worship leaders cannot fade into the back-

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ground, and even the appearance that they do is itself the result of sincere and sustained effort. Worship leaders are, by and large, earnest in their intentions to worship and to lead, and the ways they go about doing both of those together requires acknowledging and embracing the fact that to succeed in making worship is to diminish their performative presence. To be sure, stepping into the role of “singer-songwriter” or “performer” sometimes brings with it some tempting occasions to become a “worship superstar.”69 Some worship leaders certainly fall into these roles, but these temptations should not threaten the entire enterprise. Leading worship is both the result of careful skill development and the product of a sincere commitment to worship as a congregational practice. In this way, it can be understood as both a social and a spiritual practice.

The Cultural Production of Leadership Worship leaders are not alone in making worship music. Many worship leaders serve as full- or part-time members of their community’s clergy teams, taking on duties that have little apparent connection to music. When describing their roles in their congregations, worship leaders talk about music but they also note other responsibilities including outreach, teaching, and pastoral work. In some respects, the salaried worship leader is a consequence of the professionalization of the position and the result of institutional demands that often accompany congregational life. In other respects, the role’s emphasis on responsibilities outside of regular, ritualized worship echoes a more expansive definition of worship and an accompanying sense that leading worship is at least as much about leading people as it is about making music. John D. Witvliet, a professor of worship, theology, and congregational studies at Calvin College, describes worship leading primarily as pastoral work: “The church needs more than craftspeople, coordinators, and performers, and none with the hubris to be spiritual engineers. The church needs pastoral people to plan and lead its worship.”70 Witvliet expanded his vision by enumerating three qualities of a worship leader: a love of learning, a pastoral heart, and a spirit of joy.71 None of these have anything specifically to do with music or performance. They echo the much broader definition of worship itself and its place in congregational life. Notably, identifying as a worshipper is not on his list, either.

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For Witvliet, the ability to play music does not qualify a person to lead, and neither does a passion for worship. Instead, by emphasizing learning and pastoral work, he framed the ability to lead worship in the social relationships that emerge between clergy and congregation. Dove Award–winner and worship leader Laura Story described her work in precisely these terms, explaining that she spends much of her day on the staff of her church meeting with people and building relationships, in which music serves an important but not a primary role. The worship department that Story leads in her congregation includes six other professionals, and together they coordinate over 100 volunteers. She said that they could serve the congregation with a smaller paid staff and fewer volunteers, but we see it as a place where we are building relationships with the people that are volunteers, so instead of asking a guy just to show up and play guitar on a Sunday morning, instead we get together with him throughout the week, or throughout the month or whatever and have coffee with them and find out how is he is doing, find out how his family is doing. . . . And the more we invest in them the more we find that they are wanting to invest in what we are doing, and so you will get away with asking the person who sacrifices [a] lot of their time to be part of something for free because of the investment we are making in their lives.72

Consistent with her approach to songwriting, the relationships built through her church’s volunteer music ministry lay the groundwork for leading worship. Music provides the rationale for her ministry, but it does not occupy the majority of her time during the week, and neither does it fundamentally shape how she sees her role in the congregation. Instead, music serves as a kind of pretext for building relationships between her and volunteer musicians. Glenn Packiam explained his approach to leading worship in similar terms, emphasizing the tension between the public performance of worship in front of the congregation and how he and his colleagues spend the rest of their week. Echoing Witvliet and Story, Packiam prefers the term “worship pastor” to “worship leader,” as he feels it better captures the nature of his work and that of his colleagues and students.

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The platform is our most public exposure, but being a worship pastor is infinitely more than what we do on the platform. In fact, the bulk of our time in the week is not spent gearing up for Sunday. It is spent caring for the people that are in our ministry and trying to care for the people that are in the church.73

Packiam insists that “if you really want to [lead people in worship] you got to live life with people and walk with them and that is what worship ministry is about.”74 For him and for Story, the ability to lead worship does not start with musicianship, but with relationships. The music matters, but secondarily. For Packiam, music both emerges from and provides a basis for church ministry outside of the ritualized settings of congregational worship. Songwriter and worship leader Drew Cline recalled his process of coming to approach leading worship in a similar way. When we spoke, Cline, a young, affable songwriter and worship leader, had just led worship for participants at the National Worship Leader Conference in 2008. He was reflecting on how it felt to lead worship for a group of people whom he neither knew well nor constituted a congregation, strictly speaking. He connected this experience to his own evolution as a worship leader. He began leading worship as a worship leader for hire, describing himself as “the worship concert dude . . . doing three different denominations, three different days of the week in the same town.” When the pastor of one of the churches in which Cline had been serving asked him to join his staff but not to lead worship, Cline recalled being “offended and challenged” by his suggestion. “I was like, ‘that is what I do.’ I did not understand,” he recalled. “And he said, ‘What I am trying to tell you is [that] we want you to be one of us so when we look on that stage, we do not wonder about your life, we do not wonder about your struggle, we do not wonder about who you are.’” The pastor asked Cline and his wife to join a small group in the church, “and to be a part of these people’s lives. They were contractors and nurses and people that were with the church. They had nothing to do with music.” Participating in the church community as a member rather than a leader or a professional changed how he approached leading worship.

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I began to hear stories and I begin to trust people and they began to trust me and I began to notice something I had never noticed in worship leading. Seven, eight years ago I [would] look over [to] the guitar player and not just think “that was a wrong chord” or “that is a horrible tempo.” I could look over and go, “that tone is okay.” But it did not matter as much. The priority of people over performance became so important to me and I began to see so much of the effectiveness of leading with the team that trusted me and I trusted. . . . There is a point where being in a church is different than being in a conference. We need somebody we can look at there and go, “Man, I know his wife, I know his kids, I know everything about him and he still comes in when he is not feeling great, he knows my name, he knows my family.” You walk a life with people and you trust them.75

Cline’s narrative captures the growth of his own understanding of what it means to be a worship leader in a community. As he deepened his connections to other people, he began to more fully appreciate the work that being a worship leader required and he began to understand the relationship between making music for worship and being a member of a congregational community. The two, he realized, were intimately related, and his ability to lead worship came to be defined through the relationships he built in the congregation. Cline’s story is, in a sense, a fundamentally social one. It is about the effect that deepening his relationships in a community had on his ability to lead. It had little to do with making music, technique, effective rehearsals, or even with the prominence of his place during congregational worship. Rather, his story captures the expansive set of skills and dispositions that are required of worship leaders who wish to work in congregations. Leading worship in this context begins with investments in congregation and community, and part of the process of becoming a worship leader is learning to be attuned to the social dimensions of the role before one can engage in its sonic ones. This is congruent with the understanding of worship leaders as figures whose love for music is tempered by their understanding that the music only matters in worship if it does not contend with worship as the focus of people’s attention or intention.

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Making Music and Making Worship Cline, Story, and Packiam are worship leaders because of their musical skill and their ability to translate that into worship. Yet part of the process of becoming a worship leader, even with the increasingly sophisticated apparatus of conferences, educational programs, magazines, websites, and other resources, still demands that they learn to maintain perspective on their place in congregational worship. Like songwriters, they approach their efforts with a desire to express worship and they craft their musical presentations around concerns for congregational needs. If songwriters try to find lyrics they hope will not mislead those who want to sing their songs, then worship leaders endeavor to turn music into worship that does not dwell too long on the music or the people who are making it. Their ability to succeed in this effort derives as much from their ability to make music as it does from their ability to help worshippers make music on their own. Similarly, their ability to lead worship is strengthened more by investing in interpersonal relationships than it is by emphasizing musical skill. For worship leaders, simply leading worship by worshipping is not a possibility. Leading a congregation requires great effort and attention to both the technical aspects of music making and to the social aspects of the congregational community. Although worship services are often the focus of much interest and worship leaders attract their share of attention in the scholarly and popular press, those who are thoughtful about their work accept this attention with some reluctance as they understand their power and the possibility that they might be tempted to exploit it. They make worship music with intention, and they are vigilant that their desire for excellence not overtake their understanding that worship should always allow for greater ranges of expression than songs can sometimes allow. They both embrace and resist their unique role in creating worship, leading their congregations in making music whose effectiveness as worship is strengthened by their understanding that worship is never about the music. Singing together might have its own affective effects, but worship leaders hold this at a distance, accessing elements of it but fearing that it might misdirect the intentions and experiences of worshippers. Worship leaders are

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therefore as concerned with how they might mislead their congregations as with how they might lead them. Worship leaders are attuned to the dynamics of live performance and the tension between entertainment and worship. They take the songs of songwriters and translate them into musical experiences that they hope will become ritual expressions of worship for themselves and for the members of their communities. Yet songs circulate outside of church, as well, in the form of recordings that feed the sense that worship can happen anywhere, raising new questions about the place of songs and those who perform them. This chapter focused on the negotiations required to make worship music in a live setting. The chapter that follows explores the production of worship music outside of church, as the demands of the music industry introduce new ways of evaluating the relationship between cultural forms and sacred pursuits.

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Selling the Spirit Making Worship Music in the Marketplace Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth. —John 4:23–24 A lot of music that I was working with at the company was more evangelistic in nature. It was from person to person: “I’m telling you about my relationship with God and what God can do for you.” [This was] opposed to [songs] being directed to the Lord as a prayer song, as a song of exaltation and acknowledgment of who God is and thanksgiving to God. —Steve Rice, Integrity Music1

I was in Brentwood, Tennessee, in Chris York’s office. Gold records lined the wall and music magazines were scattered on the coffee tables in the office where we sat on a comfortable brown couch to talk about his work in EMI’s Christian Music Group. When we spoke, York, the son of longtime Christian music industry heavyweight Peter York, had been working in artist and repertoire (known as A&R in industry parlance), which meant that he was responsible, in part, for finding bands and helping to develop their careers. He recalled a conversation with a young band who visited his office earlier in the week. We asked them, “Are you guys a worship band or are you a rock band?” And I think they even have a hard time [choosing]. I think they probably answer that question differently depending on the context, because they do corporate worship. They will lead worship at a church where they’re 117

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just doing corporate songs that people are singing; it’s probably mostly songs that people know and maybe some of their own songs.2

His question cut two ways. On the surface, it asked band members to describe their own musical ambitions and what kind of band they wanted to be. At the same time, York wanted to know how to make them legible within the Christian music marketplace. The question implied an important, if not entirely useful, distinction between worship bands and rock bands that is, nevertheless, crucial to the production of worship music within the Christian music marketplace. Written to be sung and not just heard, worship music circulates somewhat distinctly from other forms of Christian music, and York’s question asked his emerging artists not just what kind of music they wanted to be known for making, but how they wanted their music to be encountered. York’s question, therefore, was as descriptive as it was productive, as he tried to understand better how to create a space for the band both in the market and in the minds of the people who might encounter their music. As sociologist of music Tia DeNora argued, what to call music is a crucial element in the production of music and its meaning. “The act of description,” she wrote, “co-produces itself and the meaning of its object.”3 In this way, York and his colleagues produce music and musical culture. By asking a band to define itself as a “worship band” or a “rock band,” York used the logic of A&R not only to help develop a young artist, but to define worship music, as well. The choice York put to the young band is not quite as stark as it seems, however. As definitions of religion and worship have grown increasingly malleable, so, too, have the distinctions between different forms of music that can serve them. If Sara Groves can write worship songs that are not corporate, then any song can, theoretically, serve as worship for any worshipper, whether or not they are in church. Similarly, although York asked his band to choose what kind of band they wanted to be, the music industry has embraced the possibility that musicians and their music can be both popular and worshipful. Professionals in the music industry also understand that just because this is possible does not mean it is always the case. Not all songs can work as congregational worship, and not all performers can or want to lead congregations in worship. Despite the prevalence of artists and songs

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that serve both in and out of church, the production of worship music still holds to certain conventions. This chapter examines how these conventions produce songs that can be recorded, recordings that can be sold, rights that can be regulated, artists that can be marketed, and profits that can be disbursed. Each of these contributes to making worship music, too, insofar as it is a sensational form that serves both sacred and commercial purposes. The efforts of the music industry focus on form: artists, songs, albums, MP3s, and copyright. Nevertheless, no amount of marketing or A&R attention can make a song succeed in worship; it can only become popular in worship if it serves people as worship. The more popular a song becomes as a vehicle for worship, the more valuable it becomes as a commercial property, which reintroduces concerns about the forms music takes that enable it to circulate in the first place. Beginning with this circuit of exchange between form and function, this chapter seeks to understand how the commercial production of popular culture still makes transcendent expressions possible.

Making Generic Music When Calvary Chapel launched Maranatha! Music, the expectation was not that the music would be commercially viable. The label’s first album was meant only to spread the gospel and share the excitement and energy of worship at Calvary. It was never made to sell. In fact, in an attempt to retain the purity of its focus on creating music for worship, labels like Maranatha! Music and Vineyard Music eschewed many of the conventions that dictated the making and marketing of popular music. By focusing on music for worship, the labels wanted to promote songs that could circulate independently of their recordings, as if the recordings were blueprints for congregational worship, not definitive renditions. Although they embraced the album format, producers of worship music initially resisted many of the other conventions that defined marketing, recording, and distribution in the music industry. In this way, producers of worship music consciously tried to make their music differently than their counterparts in Christian rock and the broader American music industry. This approach contributed to the marginalization of worship music by developing conventions of musical production that,

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its producers hoped, would keep those involved focused on prayer. They hoped that their antimarket approach to making music would guard against the temptations of success and deflect criticism that they were anything but sincere in their desire to make music for worship. Most visibly, producers of worship music tended to avoid promoting individual songwriters or singers in favor of choirs with generic names like the Maranatha Singers, whose collective identity outweighed that of any one performer. Album artwork for worship records usually did not feature pictures of singers at all, and instead tended toward illustrations, quotations, or nonfigurative artwork of some kind. During its first two decades, Worship Leader followed this convention and did not present specific worship leaders on its cover, despite story after story about them inside. This approach ran contrary to much of the logic of music marketing in both the Christian and general music industries and, in the process, it reinforced the sense that the music was not written to be valued as a commercial property. Ron Kenoly, one of the few African American worship leaders on the Maranatha! Music label, recalled that “most of the early recording companies doing praise and worship didn’t want to put emphasis on a personality. They wanted to keep praise and worship music very generic.”4 This approach to marketing helped to distinguish worship music from Christian rock and to subtly assert the purpose and purity of the music. Kenoly’s recollection of the nature of worship music described a strategic approach to musical production that ran counter to the logic of an industry where artist and style are carefully calibrated to be anything but “generic.” This approach to making music led to the exclusion of worship music from broader discussions of Christian rock, and reinforced the sense that this was music for worship and that it ought to be spared the competition or indignity of aggressive marketing. In any case, for labels like Maranatha! Music and Vineyard Music, albums and songwriters mattered less than the production of a kind of musical anonymity that fueled the impression that any congregation anywhere could sing their songs in worship. That was the goal. More than record sales or the promotion of certain performers, record labels committed to making worship music wanted other people to take their songs and sing them for themselves. In response, the larger music industry largely ignored the genre. Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) magazine, which made its debut in

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1978 as the journalistic complement to a burgeoning music scene and lent its initials to the genre it was created to cover, almost completely omitted any mention of worship music for its first two decades. Although founding editor John Styll used the pages of CCM to facilitate important discussions about the nature, sound, and purpose of Christian music, he almost entirely avoided the contributions of worship songwriters, worship leaders, and worship music.5 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, CCM rarely ran advertisements for worship music and seldom reviewed albums of worship music. In other visible ways, too, the magazine avoided worship music, featuring only two worship artists on its cover over the first two decades of publication. Chuck Girard of Love Song appeared on the cover of issue 13 (July 1979) and gospel singer Andrae Crouch appeared twice (November 1979 and March 1983), but the next artist who made his or her name making music for congregational use did not appear until March 1998, when CCM presented a collage of worship leaders under the title “A Call to Worship: Churches Embrace a Renewed Praise Movement as Christian Artists Wrestle with Their Role in Worship.” The cover featured images of well-known worship leaders like Twila Paris and Ron Kenoly, along with smaller photos of Michael W. Smith, Fernando Ortega, and an up-and-coming British worship band called Delirious? (see figure 4.1). Typical of this sensibility, a 1988 interview with Christian musician Steve Green lamented the apparent split between CCM and worship music. He observed, “It seems that congregational participation in music is really in the back seat these days. We go and hear a lot of performers in Christian music and there isn’t always the opportunity for people to jump in and worship together. They go and watch and they are entertained but it’s not a shared worship experience as much as paying for the ticket and going.”6 Green’s comments captured the sense that worship music and Christian rock had come to represent two distinct musical cultures even as they served the same community. In an editorial also from this time, Styll explored these differences and tried to mitigate them by referring to the unity of the community despite differences among artists. “The problem,” he explained, is that when we say “Christian Music” and half of you think of Petra or Amy Grant while the other half thinks of praise albums or the 2nd Chapter of

Figure 4.1. Cover of the March 1998 issue of CCM magazine. Photo courtesy of CCM magazine, www.CCMmagazine.com.

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Acts (and a daring few think of The Call or Mr. Mister). . . . If you go to a Michael W. Smith concert expecting a hands-in-the-air praise-a-thon, you might be disappointed. On the other hand, if you go to a Carman concert looking for something other than a religious service, you might be equally disappointed. . . . A new praise chorus shouldn’t be judged on the basis of its suitability to Top 40 radio. Remember, even though it’s all Christian music, various artists have different agendas and each must be evaluated on the basis of his or her stated intentions.7

Styll’s attempt to capture all “Christian music” under one generic label reified the differences between music for worship and Christian music for recreational listening. Moreover, he virtually acknowledged the latent understanding that worship music was not suitable for popular consumption, and that Christian music artists might entertain but would likely not worship. Styll’s explanation and Green’s lament revealed a deeply and widely held sense that worship music was hardly worth talking about in a serious way outside of ritual worship. Terms like “full-time music ministry,” which appeared in CCM throughout the 1980s and 1990s, generally referred to working and touring Christian musicians, not to worship leading or songwriting.8 The use of the language of “ministry” in this context implied that Christian musicians bore a responsibility to their audiences, and that they played a role in the lives of their listeners that extended beyond playing rock music made “safe” through its Christian lyrics.9 The relationship between music and ministry hovered in the background of much writing and thinking about CCM throughout its first few decades, and it invited wide-ranging criticism of some Christian artists whom others in the scene charged did not take their music ministry seriously enough. Even as CCM and the Christian music marketplace virtually ignored worship music, many still held fast to the expectation that all Christian musicians ought to consider their music to be ministry and approach their efforts as more than simply expressions of their creative or artistic spirit.

“Serious Rock and Roll Music” The result was that neither musicians nor audiences thought of worship music as a sensational form that anyone cared to think about beyond the

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context of congregational worship. Chris York recalled, “I remember as a kid that grew up in youth group church my whole life, it’s like . . . you wouldn’t listen to worship music and that was [what] somebody sang at church or something that maybe your grandparents listen to. Nobody just listened—if you were young, you didn’t listen to worship music.”10 Chad Segura, an executive at MusicTogether.com, remembered a similar relationship to what was then called “contemporary worship music”: “There were things that were supposed to be contemporary but you are still like, ‘okay. That was contemporary . . . in another time and another era.’”11 Jeff Deyo, the lead singer of the band SONICFLOOd, whose 1999 album helped change the culture of worship music, explained, “I never thought of myself as a praise and worship leader . . . a year or two ago it was a nono for the cool bands.” He described his impression that worship leaders were “‘either a guy with an acoustic guitar or a guy with a piano and an organ.’”12 These were not compliments. The songs of worship had developed their own stylistic and practical orthodoxies, and the attention to compilation albums and “generic” musical production created a corpus of songs that had become nearly as impenetrable as any hymnal. Around the turn of the 21st century, this began to change, as some in the worship music industry began to awaken to the sense that they had fallen out of step with the demands, needs, and tastes of American evangelical Christianity. This realization led Steve Rice, an executive at Integrity Music, to question what he and his colleagues were doing. We weren’t serving the church. We weren’t giving them a lot of songs that they can use in the congregational worship service. They were still using songs from 20 years ago and hymns and yet, I knew, hey, there are worship leaders out there that are younger than me, you know, and they’re using songs that I know are not the kind of songs they like to listen to. When they go home and turn on Christian radio, they’re listening to DC Talk and all these other bands. . . . There was a huge need there spiritually for that depth of lyric and that ability to worship God—I mean, people want to be in the presence of God.13

Even though they were making music for worship, Rice felt they were no longer in sync with the listening habits and musical desires of their audience. He realized that labels like Integrity were failing to serve the spiritual

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needs of their customers when that was exactly what labels like his were supposed to be doing. Rice’s frustration came, in part, from his impression that much of the music that people turned to for lyrical depth or affective musical encounters did not come from artists associated with worship. In effect, worship music was bested by music that was not written for worship. Other songs and other styles seemed to provide spiritual nourishment more readily than songs written for worship. Rice began to listen for artists who could make music for worship that sounded more like what he was hearing in Christian rock. He wanted music that sounded less like the praise choruses that had come to characterize congregational worship and more like the kinds of music people were turning to and tuning in when they wanted music with urgency and depth. He would not have to wait long. By the time the British worship band Delirious? (sometimes stylized as Deliriou5?) reached the United States, they had been recording and touring in Europe for a few years as Cutting Edge, a name they adopted from a monthly Sunday night worship service that they led. Following the convention in worship music, they first came to be known as the band from Cutting Edge worship, without a formal name. As a budding worship band, they played an integral role in the birth of Soul Survivor, an annual Christian music festival that began in England in 1993 that focused primarily on youth ministry. Soul Survivor had grown out of the Anglican New Wine summer conferences, which began nearly a decade earlier and where, in 1989, Delirious?’s lead singer and primary songwriter, Martin Smith, first met Vineyard songwriter Andy Park while working as a recording technician for the conference’s worship sessions. Delirious? benefited from the energy and momentum of Soul Survivor, which became something of a launching pad and a community for other British songwriters including Matt Redman, among others. Building on the success of Soul Survivor, in 1997 Kingsway Music launched its Survivor record label and invited a bunch of executives from US-based Christian labels to that year’s conference. Rice recalled returning home with a suitcase full of worship music and with typically low expectations for how they would sound. My honest first inclination was “this stuff ’s not going to be very good.” I’ve heard UK Christian music in the past and . . . you know . . . but I’ll do

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it. So I put them in my suitcase, I brought them home and began listening to those CDs, and was blown away by the depth of content in the lyrics and the way that those songs moved me to worship God. They were not performance driven, they were not necessarily great radio songs like we were making, but to me, I thought, “this is why I got into Christian music in the first place. This music ministers to me. It excites me about God and it’s delivered in a modern music style, which was shocking.” All praise and worship music really in the US up to then was just old school stuff. It didn’t appeal to the young generation, it didn’t appeal to me, and I was in my 30s and so this was huge, you know. So I began playing it for some of my staff and they were moved the same way.14

Chris York shared a similar experience when, at 15 years old, his father gave him a cassette tape of the band. He said, “Hey, you should check this out, this is a band called Delirious? from England.” And he was like looking at signing them. . . . Even when he told me that they were a worship band, I was not even really interested because I only listened to rock music. I can remember listening to that on my Walkman and just being like, “this is not music for me but . . . it’s connecting me to God.” That band probably changed my life in that sense and I think changed the worship scene.15

Chad Segura of WorshipTogether described his early encounters with the new sound of worship music in similar terms: All of a sudden you’re hearing these songs that you’re going, “Hey, that’s actually a hooky kind of a pop melody there you got going on and hey, gosh, you’re actually using distortion on your guitar and hey, there’s drums?” And it’s not just happy drums, it’s like rock n’ roll. And so, honestly, that was the thing for me, I mean the structure—it was moving away from just sing-songy things and don’t think that they aren’t those.16

Segura, York, and Rice struggled to make sense of what they had heard because it did not easily fit into the conventional definitions of worship music with which they were familiar. Delirious? identified as a worship band and wrote music that seemed to make good on lead singer

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Figure 4.2. Delirious? live at Saddleback Worship Conference, June 26, 2008. Photo: Ari Y. Kelman.

and songwriter Martin Smith’s description of their approach to making music: “God was—and is—speaking through the music, and that our creativity should be unleashed in response to God rather than used to define Him.”17 The approach to making music was likely familiar to congregations, but the sound was new (see figure 4.2). At first listen, Delirious?’s first big song, “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever,” written in 1994, sounds like an unusual candidate for a worship song.18 It is a pretty, midtempo number, led by an acoustic guitar strumming in rhythmic 6/8 time. The bridge, which repeats twice in the recording, breaks with the song’s rhythm and has only the slightest hint of a melody. At least twice during my fieldwork, when the song was sung in worship, the bridge seemed to slow the momentum of an otherwise lively rendition of the song, leaving a congregation of singers rocking or standing awkwardly, without much to sing. By contrast, the chorus, which just repeats the song’s title, is buoyant, brief, and catchy, and every congregation I visited loved to sing it over and over again. The

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instrumentation and arrangement of the song referenced modern rock of the 1990s, but the repetition of the chorus still resembled many of the “praise choruses” that had been written in the 1970s, which were often only a few lines long and repeated until worshippers felt ready to move on to the next song. The song sounded new, but it still fit a very familiar form that helped ease its embrace in congregational worship. Delirious?’s impact cannot be understated, but sociologist Howard Becker reminds us that the band would not have had the effect it did were it not for the efforts of record labels, music publishing, conferences, marketing, and, possibly, the nascent influence of the Internet as a resource for worship leaders. The songs sounded fresh, but without the support of various arms of the music industry they would have had almost no way of becoming legible to American congregations. In order to become worship for American congregations, a variety of efforts had to participate in producing them as worship music. Journalists, whose reporting sometimes breathlessly chronicled this new sound, lent popular support to the efforts of Rice and others in making worship music and helped explain how these new bands fit familiar models of worship music. Melissa Riddle, a Christian music journalist, first reported on the “U.K. Revival” in the pages of Worship Leader magazine. In a cover story about “Youth in Search of an Awesome God,” Riddle wrote about how “churched and unchurched youth alike are being drawn in by all-too-familiar sounds.” “From funk to rave to dance club to pop to hip-hop,” she explained, “bands like Martin Smith’s Delirious? and Phatfish are re-contextualizing what worship music is, intriguing the young with lyrics of adoration and praise for God.”19 Six months later, Riddle described the phenomenon in the pages of CCM: “This is serious rock ‘n’ roll music . . . but there is a spirit of worship to it.”20 Although Rice and York described the immediacy of the band’s impact on their own sense of what worship music could sound like, American congregations needed a little time and help to fully embrace Delirious?’s music in their worship. Album reviews also helped situate their music within the worship conventions of American churches. The American release of Delirious?’s 1998 debut, also called Cutting Edge, did not fit the established categories for Christian music and even echoed concerns that this was not quite a welcome change to the conventions of congregational worship.21 As a review in CCM magazine explained,

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Most churches end up borrowing folk choruses from the Jesus Movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, or pirating a worship track off an Amy Grant or Rich Mullins album. Enter England’s Delirious?, a band that has not just written some little worship choruses, but rather have begun the arduous task of creating a modern hymnody for the generation raised on rock ‘n’ roll.

But not to worry, the review continued, the album’s “singable melodies” do not rock too hard to alienate older worshippers: “Don’t let the title Cutting Edge scare you away; this is accessible adult contemporary for older rock fans. Play this in church, and you won’t have to move the baptismal to make room for a mosh pit, but you may just want to put a drum riser where the organ console used to be.”22 Worship Leader offered the inverse perspective, emphasizing the band’s ability to walk the thin line between sacred and secular cultures, concluding that “while the twin giants of religious traditionalism and secular indifference remain obviously asleep, the children of Mother England are stirring to the Spirit-anointed music of Britain’s premier worship band.”23 Reports and reviews like these helped to scaffold the arrival of unfamiliar sounds of worship emanating from the UK for US congregations, but the ability of these new sounds to translate into worship would rely on the resonance of the songs themselves with worship leaders and congregations. Rice, too, leveraged his position in the industry to distribute the music as quickly as possible. Eager to share what he had heard and to see if the energy and excitement that he detected in Delirious? would have a similar effect on others, he wanted to get the songs out as soon as possible. Sensing that musicians and worship leaders were “creative types” who were “exploring the Internet,” he hastily assembled a website and posted a few demo recordings of the songs. Needing a web address, he borrowed the name of a British print publication, WorshipTogether, and the site became EMI’s first online resource for worship leaders.24 The quality of the recordings would not have passed muster with the leadership of Sparrow Records, EMI’s Christian label, so he created the website through the label’s publishing arm, offering the recordings as supplementary materials for sheet music that worship leaders needed in order to play the songs in their congregations. This, too, fit extant models for worship music in which the quality of recordings mattered

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less than the possibility that a congregation might sing a particular song on its own. Shortly after launching the website, Rice partnered with a fledgling online music publisher to make sheet music available, while he and a few colleagues quickly pulled together 12 low-budget recordings and packaged them as a compilation CD. As with the website, they released the album through EMI’s publishing arm, allowing the leadership of Sparrow to distance themselves from a product with suspect recording quality.25 Though offered as a resource for worship leaders, the album, entitled Revival Generation, became something of a sensation. Borrowing its name from a song by Delirious?, it featured a collection of “live” worship tracks from Stoneleigh, England, including 12 songs by primarily British musicians including Delirious? and Matt Redman, in addition to American Kevin Prosch, who contributed a version of Australian songwriter Darlene Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord.”26 The popularity of Revival Generation encouraged WorshipTogether.com to release two more compilations under its banner, including one subtitled Lovely Noise and the other I Could Sing of Your Love Forever. Both albums featured images of exuberant young worshippers on their covers and the second album expressly referenced its international reach, announcing “some of today’s leading worship leaders and artists from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.”27 Extending his understanding that people were turning to CCM for their spiritual needs, Rice also turned to the apparatuses of the Christian music industry to help promote the new release. In a virtually unprecedented move, to announce the release WorshipTogether.com took out a two-page advertisement in CCM magazine featuring a dramatic black and white photo of a shaven-headed worshipper on his or her knees bent over with his or her head to the ground, proclaiming that “unchanging truth has found a new sound.”28 The advertisement was as much a promotion for the music as it was an announcement of what kind of experience the music was intended to evoke: raw, immediate, and profound. The marketing approach was crucial to framing a new culture of worship music. Rice’s approach captured the spiritual urgency of worship in pointedly popular musical forms. In the process, he recalibrated the attention of his potential audience, implying that worship music could be as or more powerful than the other forms of music they

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were listening to. Rice also dubbed it “modern worship music.” He explained, “Well, I was a big fan of modern rock at the time—in the ‘90s— and so just put the name ‘modern worship music’ on it.”29 It did not hurt that the band was British.30 Each of these elements—the new name, the brash style, the resonant imagery, the distribution of the music via the label’s publishing arm—shared in the production of worship music as something that both sounded new and could facilitate new expressions of worship not only for the band but for worshippers and congregations everywhere.

Making Music in the Marketplace The effects of Delirious? on the worship music industry were felt well beyond the congregational context. The band’s departure from expectations about what worship music sounded like suggested to the larger music industry that perhaps the conventions that had dominated the production of worship music had just about run their course. Additionally, Delirious?’s success at reaching worshipping congregations and popular audiences predicted the rising commercial value of worship artists as the standard-bearers of Christian music. Unlike many of the approaches favored by worship artists and their labels in the past, Delirious? branded themselves and their music with slick graphics and contemporary fashions, aspiring to make music for worship that was as sophisticated as anything anyone could hear on the radio without losing its commitment to theology and worship. Before Delirious?, this seemed impossible, but soon the band’s reverberations were felt in record sales and in the choices of artists not known for making worship music to begin investing in “worship projects.” More importantly, Delirious? also helped initiate a reshuffling of the songs favored by congregations for use in worship. As influential as the group was, however, Delirious? cannot take sole credit for these changes. Around the time that Delirious? first began making waves in American worship music, Integrity Music signed two other worship songwriters who would also fuel innovation in worship music: Australian songwriter and worship leader Darlene Zschech of the Christian Hill Centre (soon to be renamed Hillsong) and American songwriter Paul Baloche. Along with Delirious?’s “I Can Sing of

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Your Love Forever,” Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord” (written in 1993) and Baloche’s “Open the Eyes of My Heart” (written in 1997) soon became some of the most popular worship songs in the United States.31 These songs initiated a rapid turnover in worship repertoire for American churches. In 1997, the most popular worship songs in the United States were, on average, 19 years old. By way of comparison, at that time, the longest a song had remained in the Billboard Top 10 was 35 weeks (LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live” held that position in 1997 and 1998). Following the introduction of songs by Zschech, Baloche, and Delirious?, by 2004 only eight of the 25 most popular worship songs had been written before 1990.32 The surge in new worship music came from almost every corner of the Christian music world, from well-established CCM acts and from new, previously unknown songwriters. The appearance and embrace of new worship music drove a shift in album sales, as well. Vineyard Music, the label of the Vineyard movement, experienced 200 percent growth between 1996 and 1998.33 Vineyard’s growth led a 21 percent rise in the sale of albums identified as worship music despite a 6 percent decline in sales of Christian music overall. In a shift of nearly biblical proportions, “the stone the builders rejected had become the capstone,” as worship music became the fastest-growing segment of the Christian music industry.34 The sudden popularity of worship music took many in the industry by surprise. Grant Hubbard, a longtime radio and promotions professional in the Christian music industry, recalled his reaction when worship songs began to receive radio play. It was crazy. I just didn’t believe it because nobody wanted to play worship music. It was not in the target zone of Christian radio. And the real breakthrough happened when MercyMe’s “I Can Only Imagine” came out [in 2001]. That was the first—and I could even remember when it came out just listening to it, and one of our sales guys stopped by my office when they were selling 25,000 a week and came in and goes, “How are they doing this?” And I said, “Have you heard the song?” And he goes, “It’s a worship song, man, and worship’s never done that.” And I am [surprised] because worship’s never broken through to the masses like this.35

Hubbard’s surprise was indicative of the sense that CCM and worship music operated in two independent spheres and that worship songs were

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not supposed to be heard on the radio. He and his colleagues had been so trapped by their own understanding of the market that they misread it, which sent them scrambling to make sense of their own audiences. If worship songs could get significant radio play, what did that mean for the Christian music industry at large, and what did that mean for the kinds of music their audiences wanted to hear when they were not worshipping? More importantly, what did it mean for the kinds of music they wished to worship with? This quite dramatic shift in the balance of power in the Christian music industry released a wave of explanations for why worship music suddenly seemed so popular. The logic of these explanations tended to emphasize the role of worship music in evangelical life, focusing on its intention and not on its sound or its style. INO Records president Jeff Mosely explained, “All we can do is point people in our direction. With worship, we’re pointing them to something eternal.”36 Scott Hughes, vice president of marketing at EMI Christian Music Group, framed their success in similar terms: “The great thing about praise and worship music is that you’ve got 300,000 churches playing your song every week. . . . So many people are singing the songs, and they are becoming a part of their lives.”37 Even CCM magazine’s John Styll claimed that the success of praise and worship music around the turn of the 21st century “indicates . . . that this kind of music is connecting to consumers because consumers want to connect with God.”38 A 2003 Worship Leader magazine cover story about this phenomenon reflected on the situation. A random sampling of artists and executives at this year’s GMA [Gospel Music Association]—where worship was relentlessly touted as, alternately, the latest “trend,” “genre” and “Move of the Holy Spirit”— conclusively establishes the genuine conviction behind most of the worship product currently inundating the market.39

Whether or not this was all lip service matters less than the reverberations that the new wave of worship music sent through the Christian music industry. Its leadership was clearly trying to make sense of what they were seeing in their audiences and what they were hearing in congregational worship. In the process, they were compelled to reformulate their conception of Christian music so that it could include increasingly

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popular forms of worship music. Changes in what people were buying and shifts in what people were singing in worship caught the attention of nearly everyone. Worship music seemed suddenly rather unlike the dowdy, intentionally generic recordings of the 1980s, and more like an exciting and viable style that could both generate album sales and cater to the needs of worshippers. It seemed, in part, like a corrective to trends in CCM during the 1990s that drove Christian labels into partnerships with major labels in moves that some critics understood as a moment in which the Christian music industry put its pursuit of profits above its commitment to serving the church.40 The Christian music industry’s commercial orientation had long been something of a problem for those within it who questioned the possibility of making music with a religious focus that also generated profits. This challenge invited a wave of critiques of worship music on the grounds that it had become just another commercial property and had sold out its higher aspirations. Author Warren Cole Smith strongly criticized “the marketing of Christian music.” Smith explained that the possibility of a “small payday” for songwriters and “promoters” (as he called them) would produce “bad consequences,” even among the best intentioned. Defending the editorial processes of hymnal creation, Smith wrote: Many consider the process bureaucratic and the product staid. But one thing you can say about a denominational hymnal: it is not an accidental or an incidental process, but one that has historically been considered vital to church life. This is a key point: the hymnals are informed by and reinforce the theology of the church. Said plainly, hymnals are discipleship tools. Contemporary worship songs, on the other hand, are a revenue stream for copyright holders and music publishers.41

Smith could not allow for commercialized worship songs to function as “discipleship tools,” because they already bear the stain of the marketplace. For him and for others like him, hymnals might be boring but they represented a well-informed, thoughtfully curated vision of what kinds of messages the music of worship ought to convey. Turning those decisions over to the popular tastes of the marketplace, he feared, would weaken the theological and ideological power of worship under pressure

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from the corrupting influence of commercial interests and sheer popularity. The consequences of empowering popular taste over editorial expertise, argue writers like Smith, would be felt in the diminution of musical and theological quality, and in the weakening of Christian life more generally. Critiques like these played on people’s long-standing discomfort with the interaction between commercial and spiritual concerns and pitted the theological expertise of clergy against the tastes and desires of congregations. With echoes of Marxist scholars Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Christian scholars and critics like William Romanowski have expressed fears that any engagement with commercial music would corrupt the fundamental purpose of Christian music.42 Romanowski, who wrote the first PhD dissertation about Christian rock music, expressed concern that undue attention to commercial demands would motivate “religious popular art out of the forces of leisure and consumption, marketing and profiteering, and celebrity cult of power,” which would lead to the “co-opting” of this religious subculture by “American consumer culture.”43 Romanowski’s distinction between commercial and religious interests, ideologically clear though it might have been, was never possible given the long history of commerce in religion, especially considering the cultural production of popular music—both Christian and otherwise—in the United States and beyond.44 One of the most prominent examples of this critique was delivered on the auspicious date of October 31, 1997, the 480th anniversary of Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses. On that date, Steve Camp, a successful Christian musician, issued his own list of 107 theses rebuking the Christian music industry for putting profits and popularity over what he understood to be its core mission of serving the church. “CCM,” he contended, “has gone too far down the wide road of worldliness.” He challenged his peers to consider whether they served God or the market, asking, “Will we leave our careers, our contracts, our carefully cultivated plans and press releases, our unequally yoked record companies to serve the Lord again with all our heart, soul, mind and strength?” His concerns for the industrial and material structure of Christian music dovetailed with deeper fears about the strength of its spiritual commitments. Thesis 41 reads, “Christian music, originally called Jesus Music, once fearlessly sang clearly about the gospel. Now it yodels of a Christ-less, watered down, pabulum-based,

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positive alternative, aura-fluff, cream of wheat, mush-kind-of-syrupy, God-as-my-girlfriend kind of thing.” The industry, he contended, had grown too preoccupied with the market and had lost sight of its purpose. Notably, Camp almost entirely ignored worship music, dedicating only one of his theses (number 49) to the subject.45 Worship music emerged at this moment as one possible response to critiques like Camp’s. It seemed to represent an effort to reclaim music making for the church even as renewed interest was driven, in part, by growing reassurance that the music might, in fact, sell records, too. For Camp and others, the promise of riches corrupted the heart of Christian music. What he could not hear were the new sounds of worship music whose popularity evidenced a kind of service, and whose songwriters were, perhaps, more careful than those of a previous generation about their responsibilities to congregations and to worship. The response came in an expanded commitment to songs that served the church and drew on the credibility of CCM to enrich, enliven, and expand the repertoire of worship music.

The Stone That the Builder Refused One of the first and biggest artists to leverage his popularity in the service of worship music was Michael W. Smith. By the late 1990s, Smith ranked among the most popular and successful CCM artists of all time, having won two Grammy Awards and 14 Dove Awards, including two for Songwriter of the Year. Smith remains a well-respected and widely popular artist, whose albums have sold briskly and widely, making him one of the most beloved and most well-respected artists in all of Christian music. He had written a few songs that had become popular as worship songs and won a Dove Award in 1993 for Praise and Worship Album of the Year, for his compilation album Songs from the Loft.46 In 1998, he released Exodus, another compilation of worship songs. What set both Songs from the Loft and Exodus apart from other worship compilations was that they included some of the biggest artists in CCM, including crossover stars Jars of Clay and Sixpence None the Richer, the rap act dc talk, and the powerful and popular band Third Day. Despite the standout success of some tracks, like Third Day’s version of Smith’s own “Agnus Dei,” Exodus barely cracked the Billboard Top 200.47 It did, however, succeed in two

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other, perhaps more powerful and long-lasting ways. First, it demonstrated the appeal of making worship music for CCM musicians, and second, in so doing, their interest in worship music helped validate it in the minds and hearts of audiences and congregations. Structured like a compilation album and trading on Smith’s reputation, Exodus helped demonstrate that commercial artists who wanted to make worship music could do so without playing into the discursive framework that held worship music at arm’s length from CCM. It validated worship music in the eyes of Christian musicians. In the words of Don Donahue, cofounder of Smith’s Rocketown Records, the album proved to other artists that “I can stick to my artistic integrity and do my version of worship music.”48 With Exodus, Smith brought to worship music the quality, consistency, name recognition, and aesthetics of CCM and, in the process, used the popularity of his collaborators to lend credibility to the surging wave of worship music. If Delirious? changed the way that people thought about worship music, Smith helped to ensure that it would not change back. In 2001, buoyed by the success of Exodus, Smith released an album entitled, simply, Worship, which cemented his prominence in the genre while helping to reaffirm its popularity, as well. This album, like its predecessor, featured a long list of guest stars and versions of a number of the most popular worship songs of the day, including Paul Baloche’s “Open the Eyes of My Heart,” Chris Tomlin’s “Forever,” and Rich Mullins’s “Awesome God.” Released in September 2001, the album seemed to resonate with the mood of American evangelicals. It became Smith’s biggest selling record to date; it was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America within two years and has since been certified double platinum. Its success seemed to both justify his choice to record an album of worship music and to affirm the commercial viability of the genre. It also helped establish the interconnection between worship music and CCM, as it was Smith’s name and his place in the Christian music industry as much as it was the music on the album that contributed to its success. Smith’s albums arrived amid a raft of new “worship albums” from a wide array of established and aspiring Christian artists. Often, these releases also featured versions of some of the new crop of worship songs. The hard rock band Skillet released Ardent Worship in the year

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2000, which included a version of Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord.” That same year, Third Day contributed Offerings: A Worship Album, which included a live version of “Agnus Dei,” from Michael W. Smith’s Exodus. SONICFLOOd’s 1999 self-titled worship album included versions of both Baloche’s “Open the Eyes of My Heart” and Delirious?’s “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever.” The year 1999 also saw the release of the first of the wildly successful WOW Worship series of new worship song compilations, which was consciously modeled on the extremely popular Now That’s What I Call Music series.49 Emerging from a partnership between Integrity, Maranatha! Music, and Vineyard Music, the series tried to capitalize on their shared resources while representing a unified effort to make more and better music for the church. The first WOW Worship collection album was certified double platinum and included versions of Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord” and Delirious?’s “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever,” alongside a number of songs by well-known artists like the Vineyard’s John Wimber and Andy Park, Integrity’s Don Moen, and the Maranatha Singers. The first WOW Worship compilation thus offered a transitional collection that included older and established songs alongside some of the most popular new songs to enter the worship repertoire of American evangelical churches. Smith’s worship albums and the WOW Worship compilations helped extend the foundation that Delirious? had begun to build. These albums added to both the repertoire of songs for congregational worship and demonstrated the purchasing power of evangelical Christians eager to listen to worship music outside of church. This new wave of music fused expectations about the expressive and experiential possibilities of worship, and it satisfied the industry’s desire for commercially viable products. WOW Worship came out of established worship record labels and built on a familiarity with both popular cultural forms and with conventions of production in worship music that favored the “generic” form of the compilation album over the artist-driven record. Though the songs may have sounded different, the conventions of sensational forms framed them in familiar ways, easing their acceptance among worshippers and worship leaders alike. The growth of worship music in the popular marketplace was bolstered from yet another direction with the launch of the Passion

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movement at this same historical moment.50 Passion took shape in the mid-1990s, when Louis Giglio, then the leader of a successful campus ministry based primarily in Bible study and worship at Baylor University, had a vision. During an impending move to Atlanta, Giglio foresaw “a massive gathering of students worshiping God,” but he sat on the idea for a while before he approached friends and colleagues with it.51 In 1997, he brought the idea to fruition, hosting a one-day conference in Austin, Texas. He called the gathering “Passion,” and he reached out to his network of college ministers and friends to help promote it as a day of teaching, music, worship, and social action. The conference attracted 2,000 college students, growing to some 5,000 the following year, and to 40,000 by the year 2000. Thereafter, it expanded to multiday events and multiple conferences held in a variety of locations around the United States and the world.52 The sheer size of the Passion conferences make for a ready-made audience for their recordings of live worship, fostering a faith in the music as something both worth listening to and praying with. Music plays a central role in Passion’s mission and sensibility, and Giglio’s approach echoes the folk discourse of the earlier generation. “It was simple,” he explained. “It was teaching that was super-challenging. Like, ‘God wants your whole life for his glory.’ And it was music, giving kids the chance to really express their hearts to God in worship. That’s all we did.”53 Tomlin, arguably the most popular, successful, and influential musician to emerge from the Passion scene, affirmed Giglio’s approach to making music. “The beautiful thing is that we never even set out to make CD’s. . . . I think most of Nashville thought it was going to flop,” Tomlin said. “We didn’t have any idea what would happen, and God started using those CD’s in incredible ways all over the world.”54 Giglio reinforced Tomlin’s account: “Interestingly, our focus was not to make and sell records, but to simply be in the presence of God. That’s still our aim. . . . At the end of the day, the Passion movement is about far more than worship CDs.”55 Attempting to shift attention away from revenues and toward the role of music in “giving kids the chance to express their hearts to God in worship,” Giglio and Tomlin incorporate some of the discursive strategies of songwriters and worship leaders in their approach to making music. This rationale belies the careful attention that Giglio and the roster of Passion-associated artists devote to aesthetics,

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style, and substance in the production of music that both succeeds in the market and serves as a vehicle for worship. His use of the folk narrative also masks the ways in which Giglio followed many of the established conventions in the production of worship music that ultimately helped make Passion legible within the logic and structure of the worship music industry. Following Maranatha! Music’s approach to its first releases, Giglio recorded an album of live worship from the first conference in 1997, which he self-released through his nonprofit ministry. Referencing Isaiah 26:8, the verse that shaped Giglio’s vision for the conference and the movement, he called the album “Our Soul’s Desire.”56 Also in line with cultural conventions, the album identifies the performers who appear on it simply and generically as the “Passion Worship Band.” The album was, as Giglio and Tomlin have indicated, successful beyond their expectations and this caught the attention of EMI, which partnered with Giglio to record and distribute the music from the following year’s conference. Known as Passion ’98 (Live Worship from the 268 Generation), it included Tomlin’s “We Fall Down” alongside three songs from the Vineyard, two songs by Charlie Hall, and one song each from Passion artists Christy Nockles and David Crowder. The album also featured versions of two Delirious? songs, “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever” and “Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble?”57 Reciprocally, the Passion Worship Band’s recording of Tomlin’s “We Fall Down” found its way onto the second Revival Generation disc, curated by Steve Rice and WorshipTogether.com, as well as the third WOW Worship release, in 2002. Deeply embedded in the emerging wave of “modern worship music” and aided both by attention to the conventions of the worship music industry and by EMI’s interest in the fledgling but popular effort, the Passion compilations mobilized the structures of commercial music to brand and market the movement and its associated artists, while Giglio and his associated artists maintained their commitment to the folk narrative, explaining the success of the music in terms of its ability to serve the needs of worshippers. If Delirious? introduced the possibilities of “modern worship” to American evangelicals, Passion cemented its acceptance, particularly among the crucial college-aged demographic. In the wake of the Passion conferences, students from all over the country could return to their college campuses and home congregations energized by their experi-

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ences and equipped with CDs full of songs ready for worship in their local churches or student groups. As they graduated, those same students built on the educational, expressive, and experiential aspects of worship in college that were choreographed, in significant measure, to a Passion-driven soundtrack.58 The artists associated with the Passion movement have also benefitted greatly from leading worship for audiences in the tens of thousands, who often become fans of both the artist and their music. It would be a mistake, however, to read the Passion movement only as a distribution network or an engine for publicity. Giglio and artists on the Passion roster deeply appreciate the power of their platform to make worship music and they work arduously to remain focused on a commitment to worship amid the music. Echoing the logic of songwriting as an outgrowth of worship, Giglio explained Passion’s success in a similar way. “It’s ironic,” he explained in an e-mail to journalist Paul O’Donnell. “We’re a theological movement from which the songs and music spring.”59 From the stage at the Passion 99 Conference, Giglio outlined the relationship between worship and music in somewhat sharper detail: This is not about worshipping worship, or the songs. This is about worshipping God. The experience of worship will always be shallow and void without a proper understanding of the majesty and wonder of God as He has revealed Himself to us. Without a glimpse of a glorious and awesome God, worship will sputter and fail[,] amounting, at most, to nothing more than beauty and sound.60

As their music improved and grew more popular, Giglio and the Passion artists had to work harder to continually refocus the attention of their communities toward worship and away from their music. Echoing the efforts of worship leaders and songwriters, Giglio felt the need to remind his audience that music does not enable worshippers to encounter God, but that it is the result of such encounters. Passion’s success and its contributions to the repertoire of congregational worship music cannot be easily understood either as the result of the purity of its vision nor as the product of strategic marketing and branding efforts. Passion, like Delirious?, is the result of conventions of

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cultural production that result in worship music that serves both as a vehicle for spiritual expression and as a marketable product. These efforts do not counteract one another, as some critics have feared.61 Rather, the production of worship music since the late 1990s has been the result of a convergence of forces, conventions, cultural expectations, and industrial infrastructure. Making music that can sell albums has become a strategy for getting new music into the hands of congregations and worship leaders, and the commercial interest in worship music has led to a more fluid repertoire of worship songs, which, in turn, allows for a greater diversity of expression than in decades prior. It has also raised the specter that success might lead to corruption and the fear that artists are turning to worship music not because they mean it, but because they think they can profit from it. Its popular success has forced those who make worship music to be ever-more careful about their intentions and about their investments in musical production to avoid the suggestion that they might be anything other than sincere in their efforts. In this way, the social pressures of making music people want to both listen to and pray with have reinforced the discourse of expression, experience, and education in the production of music for worship.

Making Songs While CD sales and established artists legitimized and expanded the appeal of worship music, it largely remained a song-driven genre. When people gather to worship, they sing songs, not albums, and those songs are brought to life by congregations, not by artists. The song-centered culture of worship music can be observed in the prevalence of compilation albums, from The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert to Revival Generation and WOW Worship. Additionally, changes in musical culture and technology changed the focus on artists and album sales in ways that forced the music industry to begin thinking differently about how it could turn recordings into profits. Beginning in the late 1990s, just as the new wave of worship music was finding its way into congregational worship, digital downloads, the emergence of the MP3 recording format, and the subsequent decline in CD sales resulted in an industry-wide decrease in album sales. The introduction of iTunes’ 99 cent-per-song pricing model emphasized the value of individual songs in ways that 45

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rpm singles did not.62 For the music industry, the emergent significance of songs represented a return to pre-LP days, when music usually sold in the form of 78 rpm singles and sheet music. The turn away from album sales as a measure of a song’s or an artist’s success suited the conventions of worship music, as the success of worship song lay not in its sales but in its ability to serve as worship in congregational settings. A more successful worship song is therefore not a song that is purchased many times over, but one that is regularly performed in and by congregations of worshippers. Originally developed as part of a strategy to guard worship music from the pressures of marketing and commercialization, the focus on congregational singing, assisted by changes in the music industry, ultimately resulted in the emergence of an unusual revenue stream. This ended up reinforcing the commercial value of worship music instead of mitigating it. At the moment when technology helped undermine the market value of recordings and albums, worship music presented a new avenue for generating revenue based not on album sales but on congregational singing. The capitalization of worship can be traced to the application of copyright law in popular music. American copyright law assigns ownership of a song to its author, unless otherwise stipulated or reassigned. Music historian Don Cusic has argued that this arrangement of rights and ownership likely contributed to the emergence of the singer-songwriter, as artists came to recognize that albums would sell lots of copies for a short time, but songwriting credits could generate income every time a particular song was performed or reproduced, regardless of who was performing it or when.63 With respect to popular music, this makes copyright more powerful than recording rights because the copyright holder owns the song, not just a recording of it. Organizations like the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) were created to ensure that copyright law was honored and that copyright holders were paid when their songs were played. The 1976 US Copyright Act provides houses of worship with a blanket exemption for the “performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work or of a dramatic-musical work of a religious nature, or display of a work, in the course of services at a place of worship or other religious assembly.”64 They are permitted, by law, to perform any song, copyrighted or not, without having to pay rights for it. That exemption, while it pro-

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tects houses of worship from paying royalties when they perform songs, does not extend to the right to reproduce songs or parts of songs in any manner. So, while worship leaders can spontaneously lead their congregation in any song they wish without paying copyright holders, the law does not allow them to copy lead sheets for their band or reproduce music or lyrics in any form to share with their congregation. This includes reproductions in the form of audio or video recordings, paper handouts, overhead transparencies, or computer-mediated projections. Historically, houses of worship did not handle copyright themselves. Instead, the responsibility for securing reproduction rights fell to hymnal publishers who curated and published their collections. Purchasing hymnals effectively amounted to obtaining the rights to use the materials they contained, which often included both lyrics and musical notation. When, in the early 1970s, churches began incorporating new songs in their worship, they looked beyond hymnals and included songs both old and new in their worship. To ensure that congregations could sing along, worship leaders or pastors often produced their own mimeographed handouts or reproduced music and lyrics on transparencies for overhead projectors. Although it captured the free-wheeling spirit of that historical moment, reproducing songs in this manner usually violated copyright law because few sought permissions from appropriate copyright holders. Nobody, it seemed, really cared about these violations until about 1984 when Howard Rachinski, an associate pastor and songwriter in a small church that had been planted in Portland, Oregon, found one of the songs that they used regularly in worship, Peter Scholtes’s “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love,” named in a lawsuit in Chicago. The suit, brought by Dennis J. Fitzpatrick, the president of religious music publisher F.E.L. Publications, argued that the Catholic Bishop of Chicago (the archdiocese) had violated the Copyright Act of 1909 when it reproduced material to which F.E.L. held the copyright. The Archdiocese of Chicago used F.E.L. hymnals from the 1960s until 1976, but individual parishes regularly and illegally reproduced the contents of those hymnals for internal use. After a failed attempt to charge parishes two cents per copy, F.E.L. instituted a $100 per year “Annual Copying License,” which gave blanket permission to make unlimited copies of F.E.L materials to the holders of the license. According to the federal

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court of appeals decision, the “parishes’ response to these offers was less than overwhelming.” So, in 1976, F.E.L. filed suit, claiming $190,400 in compensation for three years of copyright violation, plus an additional $3 million in damages. F.E.L won the initial decision, but the Archdiocese of Chicago appealed and had the award vacated.65 Rachinski became aware of the suit and the problems of illegal duplication during the appeals process and immediately his concern turned to his church. “Our church was very active musically,” he explained. “We had 400 [overhead projector] transparencies . . . and we were also giving out 6,000 tapes a year for our worship services.”66 Like the majority of other churches that prepared printed materials for congregational worship or mimeographed inserts for special events, Rachinski’s church did not hold copyright for the vast majority of their content and they did not bother to explore the option of obtaining permissions from those who held copyright for the material they reproduced. Recognizing both the potential for a lawsuit and the questionable ethics of reproducing music in violation of the law, Rachinski and his lead pastor developed the idea of a blanket license for music for worship and introduced the idea at a ministers’ conference in 1985. Twenty-five churches signed up on the spot even though Rachinski had little more than a concept. He followed up with Maranatha! Music and soon after with Integrity. Maranatha! Music launched its own program later that year, just as Rachinski and his newly created entity, Starpraise Ministries, sent out its first collection of 275 lead sheets to its first 50 subscribers. By the following year, they had 500 subscribers, and by the year after that the number had doubled.67 In 1988, Starpraise Ministries officially changed its name to the Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), and by 1990 it served over 10,000 churches in the United States. Soon thereafter, it expanded internationally, opening offices that served Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. CCLI functions like the secular music copyright organizations ASCAP, BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.), or SESAC, but only for congregational worship. While the other rights administration organizations monitor copyright compliance with respect to every dimension of musical performance and reproduction, CCLI focuses solely on providing churches with the services necessary to legally reproduce the music they want for their worship services. At first, CCLI licenses only covered the

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reproduction of sheet music and lyrics, though its services have since expanded to include live streaming and the reproduction of digital sound files, in an effort to keep pace with the technologies increasingly used for and in support of congregational worship. In congregations that project song lyrics on large screens that hang over the platform or around the worship space, it has become common practice for the first slide of lyrics to include a song’s CCLI license number, signaling to the congregation that their use of the lyrics is compliant with the law and the ethical expectations of church operations. Before CCLI, if a church wanted to legally reproduce songs, it would have had to contact the rights holder for each song and pay a license fee directly to that entity. Fees could be quite high and the administrative time spent in correspondence could easily have been a full-time job. According to Duke University’s 2009 National Congregations Study, the average congregation had approximately 75 “regular participants” and an average budget of $90,000, so the demands both of paying for individual copyrights and asking a volunteer to deal with all of the associated administration would have made it practically impossible for smaller churches to both introduce new music into their worship and abide by the law.68 CCLI has made it possible for houses of worship to pay a single fee and have access to a song catalog that currently includes just about any song that a congregation might choose to use for its worship. Managing rights and helping congregations abide by copyright law has created a situation in which the rights holders earn money when their songs are reproduced for use in worship. Each time a church makes lead sheets for band rehearsal or copies song lyrics in handouts or projects them on screens, it reports the name of the song to CCLI.69 Those reports are collected and tabulated and CCLI pays royalties to songwriters and copyright holders based on the number of churches that used a particular song during a given reporting period.70 The arrangement also gives songwriters a powerful incentive to register their songs with CCLI, so that they can be paid should their songs be reproduced for church use. Again, CCLI does not monitor which songs are sung in worship because of the blanket exemption, but it does carefully monitor which songs are reproduced in one form or another. The more often a song is sung as part of worship, the more income the song might generate over the long term because the lyrics are likely reproduced each time the song is sung.

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The result has been that a popular worship song could remain on the CCLI Top 25 list for months or even years, continuing to earn revenue well past the typical time frame for album sales. Because this rights management arrangement focuses on the reproduction of songs, and churches need to provide sheet music for their worship bands and lyrics for their congregations each week, holding copyright can generate income regardless of how recordings of a song were obtained. For singersongwriters and those who might share ownership of rights to a song, this introduced the possibility of being paid multiple times for a single song: once for a sale of a recording and continually as that song is reproduced for congregational worship. “Not only do we get the CCLI income,” observed Integrity’s Steve Rice, “but we get the record sales too.”71 Incidentally, when I asked if any worship songwriter they knew had availed themselves of the Creative Commons license, a licensing option that allows for royalty-free reuse, CCLI’s international management team laughed at the question.72 The long life of songs in congregational worship became especially important as CD sales shrank in reaction to the increased availability of digital copies and the ease of illegal file sharing, as Rice explained. The Christian music industry was doing very well at the time when it comes to record sales, I mean, selling 10 times what we might sell of a new release right now. So they’re looking at numbers and they’re going, “I just don’t know production-wise that this is going to cut it and it’s going to be able to sell the kind of numbers we’re used to selling.” But as a publisher, I was able to look at it and go, hey, if I sell 10,000 units of this, this is a self-liquidating marketing for my songs. It helps me get the songs to the church, so I don’t really care if I make a profit on the records because my profit, my bottom line, is with song licensing. You know, I’m looking for the future.73

This shift in recognizing the source of a song’s economic value has created a situation in which music executives have come to appreciate the long-term economic potential of congregational worship. Rice put it in stark industrial terms, but his shift in reasoning reflected a change in both the symbolic and financial significance of worship music within the industry.

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For a number of reasons, it is nearly impossible to obtain specific data on how much money a “successful” worship song can generate. CCLI remains a privately held company, so their payouts and schedules are not publicly available, and, as a policy, CCLI declines to estimate royalty payouts because they are “dependent on the quantity and size of the churches . . . and the type of copy activity that has taken place.”74 Additionally, CCLI explains that “the amount each song owner earns is confidential to that owner,”75 so there is no public or semipublic listing of how much a particular song might generate for its copyright holder during any given period. Both copyright holders and music publishers tend to be private, for-profit entities and are not under any obligation to release their financial information to the public. Moreover, church enrollment in CCLI remains voluntary; not enrolling merely risks the possibility of a lawsuit, but there is no systematic data about the number or size of churches that subscribe to CCLI. The opacity around the value of a successful worship song, financially speaking, is compounded by the fact that, over the course of its history, CCLI has configured its menu of license packages in a variety of ways, covering the reproduction of recordings for rehearsal, podcasting, or web-broadcasting worship services, as the market demands and the law requires. There is no available data on how many churches purchase which services, so it is difficult to even estimate CCLI’s annual revenue as a baseline for calculating payouts. Anecdotally, I have heard more than one songwriter quip that they owe their homes or their children’s college educations to their CCLI-related success. Though primarily charged with managing rights and licenses, CCLI has also become something of an influencer in the production of worship music. Its website has become a popular place for worship leaders to seek out resources including recordings of songs, lyrics, and transposable lead sheets. With over 220,000 songs in the database, searching for songs can be overwhelming, so over the years the website’s interface has become increasingly tailored to the needs of worship leaders, providing a variety of ways to locate and identify songs, including by musical key and lyrical theme. In theory, this search approach should accrue the same benefit to the well-known songwriter as it does to those who are trying to break in to the industry, as anyone can register their song with CCLI. Yet worship leaders, always searching for new songs to integrate into their congregational worship, regularly turn to the CCLI “Top 25,”

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figuring that if others are singing it, it is probably a song that will likely serve the needs of their congregation, as well. Sociological forces tend to benefit those already seen as “popular,” as Matthew Segalnik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts have demonstrated with respect to popular music generally.76 Activity within CCLI bears this out. At the time of this writing, the top 1,000 songs managed by CCLI represent 87 percent of all user activity.77 Rather than just managing and tracking the usage of songs in worship, the management of rights and the calculation of popularity have both come to shape the sound of worship. Grant Hubbard, a longtime executive in Christian radio, explained how this dynamic has influenced his approach to marketing music outside of church. I am a marketing guy, trying to sell records. One of the things that we have used has been the CCLI numbers—the chart that they put out. And we will peruse that and if we’ve got a song that’s moving up quickly, we’ll single it because we know that if we can get a song on the radio that’s being sung in churches, if it’s familiar, it’s going to go up faster. People are going to go, “Yeah, I want to hear more of that, I sing it in my church.” So that partnership has helped.78

In a peculiar fulfillment of Steve Camp’s desire that CCM ought to revolve more explicitly around the needs of the church, Hubbard’s observation captures the ways in which congregational worship has become a barometer of a song’s commercial success. According to Hubbard, CCLI encourages music executives to listen more closely to their congregations to better understand their tastes and desires. Only by listening to worship, he suggested, can labels better serve the needs of their audiences for music that can work both in congregational worship and outside of it. I think radio guys are paying more attention to what’s going on in the local churches. If they hear a song in their church that really works well and their audience connects with, they may try to go find a version of it to put on the radio. . . . So I think the worship element really helped tie the church and the listener and the radio station all in one, and it increased the listenership of most of the radio stations by doing that.79

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Steve Rice agreed, explaining that he learned that the church body who was hearing those songs every Sunday was equivalent to a radio listening audience. Record companies and publishers want their songs on radio in [a] secular market because people are going to hear that and go buy the record. Same thing in the church, you know. That was our method—you give records away. You give songs away to the radio people to play them . . . you give songs away to the church worship leaders to play them. And then the record sales came from that. I mean, the congregation goes up to the worship leader and goes, “What is that song? Where do I get it?”80

Although the industry carries an outsized responsibility for making and distributing music, Rice and Hubbard’s reflections on CCLI acknowledge the ways in which congregational worship music has become the focal point of the music industry. The relationship between copyright and the emerging conventions of singing “worship sets” of individual songs has revealed the commercial value of worship songs in a way that nobody could have either imagined or predicted.

Selling Sacred Music As the industry started paying greater attention to worship music, and as its financial value became apparent to a wider array of stakeholders, suspicions multiplied about people who might be less than sincere with their interests. The convergence of commercial and spiritual concerns in the production of worship music has not stopped critics from arguing that music makers cannot serve both God and mammon. With respect to worship music specifically, Charlie Peacock asked, “Which came first, authentic worship that industry has followed or authentic industry that worship has followed?”81 Peacock’s sharp question, however, fails to account for the full appreciation of the ways in which the industry, the music, and worship practices have evolved symbiotically, not sequentially. Delirious?’s popular appeal, Michael W. Smith’s turn to recording worship albums, and CCLI’s intention to protect churches from potential lawsuits have all reconfigured people’s understandings of what makes a song valuable across contexts. Conventional definitions of worship music

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explain that its value lies strictly in its use in worship. This remains true, but congregational use has created a situation where a song’s popularity in worship can be translated into commercial value. Consequently, the musical marketplace has facilitated an appreciation of worship music as a commercial property despite earlier efforts to resist it. For worship music, the cost of success has been paid in the redoubled efforts of music makers to assert their intentionality in serving the needs of worshippers. Responding to critiques of theological simplicity or compromise in the name of commercial interests, music industry professionals have renewed their efforts to make music that serves the spiritual needs of the church. Commercial interests have not undermined the potential power of worship music, but they have encouraged a dramatic growth of worship music since the mid-1990s. This has been characterized not only by the emergence of more congregational worship music overall but also by the expansion of the very definition of worship itself. The deconstruction of formal church-based definitions of worship has led to an expansive sense of what kinds of music could suit the needs of worshippers, which, in turn, revealed the music’s commercial potential and made new sounds possible. The breadth of commercial interest in worship music, however, should not be allowed to define the entire enterprise of musical production. No amount of marketing or artist development can ensure that a congregation will find their own voices in a given song or that it will serve a congregation’s needs in worship. Yet, the possibility that a song might be sung only for its popularity, or, worse, that a songwriter might write a worship song motivated by the possibility of a significant payout from royalties, adds a layer of complexity to the cultural production of worship music. In this context, what is notable is not that people make money from worship songs, but that worship songs still succeed in helping people to earnestly and honestly express and experience worship. It would be easy enough to dismiss the efforts of people like Giglio, Rice, Hubbard, and others as attempts to cover their pursuit of profits with a veneer of pseudo-sacred apologetics. Yet critiques of commercial interests, like those of people who wish to extricate worship music from the marketplace, seek a too-clean break of the music from the conditions of its production. Record labels, CCLI, and publications like CCM or Worship Leader are all part of the worship music industry, to say noth-

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ing of educational programs and conferences for songwriters, worship leaders, church technicians, and pastors. But, then, so are songwriters who copyright their songs, worship leaders who serve congregations, and the congregations themselves, which ultimately determine whether a song works as worship or not. Trying to separate the music from the mechanisms of its production is akin to trying to separate the music of worship from the worship it is supposed to enable. The two are too closely linked to survive disentanglement. And yet they are distinct. The music industry is not the music, and the music is not worship. The possibility that one might be mistaken for the other is what creates some of the danger in the production of worship music and, in the process, introduces the promise that singing songs and making music just might enable people to express or experience something that they otherwise would be unable to.

Conclusion Saved by Songs Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” —Mark 12:17 See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse. —Deuteronomy 11:26

During my interview with songwriter Sara Groves, we got to talking about how she understands the power of music. She told me about her own experience of hearing Stevie Ray Vaughan’s version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing.” I told [my husband] Troy, “You could get saved listening to stuff like that.” I mean, that is so amazing, and as a worshipper I worship at any number of things that I see and I understand that I am a part of worship. I am not afraid . . . I am not afraid of that. . . . He owns it all. I mean: all truth is God’s truth. . . . People have truth resonators and I think that worship happens anywhere where that truth detector goes off.1

Like Groves, I also love that version of that song, but I wouldn’t have expected anyone to be saved by it. What she detected as “God’s truth” I heard as an example of the complex cultural exchanges that make up American popular music, or the echoes of Vaughan’s own struggles, or the promises of the late 1960s, or simply the extraordinary expression of musical skill. Each overtone in the music is miraculous in its own right, but they signify differently for Groves than they do for me. She heard something in the music that I did not because she had learned to hear God’s truth where other people, like me, could just hear great music. 153

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For those who engage in the cultural production of worship music, Groves’s understanding of music contains both promise and risk, both blessing and curse. If one can detect God’s voice in any song (or any experience), then almost anything can serve a lifestyle of worship. Worship, by Groves’s definition, cannot be contained by congregational practice or even by ritualized expressions of one sort or another. Hers is a perfectly 21st century articulation of faith commitments that have grown further from their containment within religious institutions. For many worshippers, this understanding of worship is a promise as it frees them from rote repetition and liturgy while expanding the repertoire of practices that might fulfill their desire to respond to God’s grace. Yet it also poses a risk because the expanding range of expressions of worship means that the institutions of religious life have far less authority over the forms of faith than they may have had in previous generations. Producers of worship music operate at the intersection of this blessing and this curse. They wish to expand the expressive range of worship music so that it can more deeply and personally enable individuals to express themselves to God, yet they also hold deep concerns that even their music or their performances or their MP3s might accidentally mislead people away from evangelical notions of God and truth. Songs become vehicles for worship because those who produce worship music do so, in part, by carefully managing their relationship with the authority of the music they make. Critics and scholars tend to define worship as ideally unmediated and immediate responses to God’s grace, yet congregations still rely on music to mediate their regular worship events. By playing this role, songs occupy an outsized place in how people understand congregational worship. Music does not define worship, but it does influence what people think worship is and how they think they ought to do it. It is also powerfully instructive about worship, practice, theology, and character. Keenly aware of the power of their product, those who make music constantly interrogate their own efforts and their own intentions. Songwriters write songs that are both theologically sound and emotionally resonant, though they are quick to diminish the significance of the songs themselves in expressions of worship. Worship leaders take a similar approach, leading their congregations by trying to avoid the spotlight, and professionals in the music industry have cre-

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ated a situation where success in congregational worship has become an engine of profit. These tensions are generative and even definitive of worship music. There is no way to “solve” them and no way to avoid them. The possibility of failing to make music for worship, and the possibility that doing so too well might be a different kind of failure, drives songwriters, worship leaders, and industry professionals to work ever more arduously to produce songs that may, serve the needs of worshippers. In the process, they hope that their songs help worshippers serve God. But central to the prospect of making music for worship is the acknowledgment that even the best musicians and best-sounding music might fail. The power of the possibility of ritual failure became clear to me during the opening session of the inaugural National Worship Leader Conference in 2007. The conference began in the evening with a worship session. About 3,000 people packed into the worship center at Riverbend Community Church in Austin, Texas, and as people settled into their seats, happy to get a break from the midsummer heat, advertisements and announcements flipped across the large projection screen hanging over the worship platform. Right on time, Jeremy Riddle, a few months shy of 20 years old, with a newly released debut album, walked onstage and, with great nonchalance, quietly grabbed his guitar. Without a word, he and his bandmates raised their instruments and began to sing, their lyrics projected above them. Riddle quickly had the crowd of eager-tosing worship leaders on their feet, and about midway through his third song, he raised his hands, guitar hanging around his neck, and reminded himself and the congregation that this was all for “God’s glory.” Neither Riddle’s performance nor the congregation’s, he prompted us, would mean anything if it did not glorify God. His reminder of what we were all singing about, which I have seen other worship leaders offer on a number of occasions since then, both called attention to Riddle’s note-perfect performance and broke its spell. Occupying the stage and supported by a new album, Riddle bore much of the authority needed for leading worship and making music and, still, he took that opportunity to parry the tendency to make much of the music. The assembled congregation, made up largely of people who make worship music for a living, seemed, to Riddle, to need a reminder of why we were there in the first place. No matter how great things

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sounded or how well people harmonized, our efforts should be focused on something far greater than the instruments, the musicians, ourselves, the room, or the music. His comment was both an attempt to transcend the music we were making and to remind people that the entire enterprise, from song to worship service, was shaped by human effort and, as a consequence, it always teetered on the brink of failing at its appointed task. The music could never suffice where prayer was at stake. Riddle’s reminder made clear his concern for the human dimension of sacred practice. His interjection tried to get us all back on track and, in so doing, tried to teach us, again, how we should direct our intentions in music and in worship. It was a performance of worship as a cultural curriculum whose significance derives, in part, from the understanding that everyone in the room could be as attuned to worship as Sara Groves, and that even those most attuned to God’s truth still needed a little instruction every now and again. His effort to keep us all on track resonated with the acknowledgment that music has the simultaneous power to draw people into worship and to push them away from it. This dynamic is part of what defines the work of songwriters, worship leaders, and music industry professionals as the possibility that they might fail intensifies rather than diminishes their investments in cultural production. For songwriters or worship leaders, to fail is more than a lost artistic opportunity. It bears the weight of the responsibility for other possible worshippers. So they invest even more deeply in cultural forms whose shortcomings and dangers they well understand. Examining the social and cultural forces at work in the production of worship music should not undermine the power of worship songs to facilitate spiritual expressions or capture the yearnings of people to respond to God’s grace. Instead, this effort should be understood, in part, as an appreciation of complexities and difficulties, the danger and the promise of worship itself. What is so fascinating about worship music in this respect is not that it is made by and for people, but that the persistent consideration of its social and cultural contexts—from vocal range to purchasing power—can generate sincere, affecting, deep, and profound expressions of praise.2 This possibility exists whether or not people deem those expressions to be religious, whether or not they happen in church, or even, for people like Sara Groves, whether they happen in relationship to wor-

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ship music at all. That people can make music that can be used or understood as worship is practically a miracle unto itself. More than a finely tuned musical machine like the industrial songwriting structures of Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, or even Nashville, the production of worship music has organized around a much more fraught relationship with the music it is supposed to champion. In that relationship one hears not the assurance of a faith fully formed, but a much more dissonant expression perpetually in formation and produced with full awareness of the limitations, pitfalls, and shortcomings that define the relationship between humans and the divine. The music seems to matter in direct proportion to the amount of caution its producers consider. There is no single realm in which music making takes place. Worship music is produced through the more-and-less coordinated efforts of people across a range of arenas, and through a diverse set of practices. Yet each one is informed by human insights, concerns, and the possibility that the more perfect songs are the more likely they are to get in their own way as facilitators of worship. Being aware of the potential for failure generates greater investment in musical content and form, as if writing a better song might move imperceptibly closer to a fail-safe form of worship. This is, of course, an act of faith in the power of music as much as it is a response to God’s grace. The relationship between musical form and transcendent expression requires tending and effort and emerges in no small measure from the cultural dimensions of sacred service. Recalling these processes hopefully serves to remind those of us who care about religion and those of us who love music to acknowledge how much human effort is required to cultivate transcendence.

Notes

Preface

1 The literature in the field of religious studies is vast and expanding, but most agree that it does not require one to be a believer, and that it benefits from a critical distance from the object or subject of study. See Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth; Moore, “Guidelines for Teaching about Religion.”

Introduction

1 This quotation from the Bible and all those that follow are from the New International Version, except where noted. 2 Quoted in Price, “Q and A with Chris Tomlin.” 3 Meyer, “Aesthetics of Persuasion,” 750–51. 4 Marini, Sacred Song in America, 7. 5 Chaves, Congregations in America, 184–85. 6 Chaves, Congregations in America, 130, 132. 7 Author interview with Bob Kauflin, August 25, 2008. In his retelling, Kauflin inadvertently reversed the order of the verse, which reads, “Sing praises to God, sing praises; Sing praises to our King, sing praises.” 8 There are numerous mentions of instruments in the Psalms, most famously in Psalm 150, which mentions specific musical instruments. Nevertheless, there are significant debates about which instruments are most suited to congregational worship, with much attention falling on the role of drums, in particular. 9 For just a few historical accounts of these processes, see Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith; Corrigan, Business of the Heart; Finke and Stark, The Churching of America; Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door; Shires, Hippies of the Religious Right. 10 See Larson, Rock and Roll; Robb Redman, The Great Worship Awakening. For a great history of this literature, see Nekola, “Between This World and the Next.” There are countless such books and the debate is revived every few years. On the critical side, see Blanchard and Lucarini, Can We Rock the Gospel?; Lucarini, Why I Left the Contemporary Christian Music Movement and It’s Not about the Music. For a more positive approach to the incorporation of popular music in worship, see Nantais, Rock-a My Soul. 11 See, e.g., Ratliff, “Plugging In”; Luscombe, “Hip Hymns Are Him”; Leland, “Christian Music’s New Wave Caters to Audience of One.”

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23 24

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30 31

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Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism, 13; italics in the original. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 4. David Crowder, telephone interview with author, August 17, 2010. Peacock, At the Crossroads, 154. Author interview with Sara Groves, August 25, 2008. Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down, 192. Sociologist Ann Swidler has developed a theory of culture based on this notion, which formulates it not as a “web of meaning,” to use anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s resonant phrase, but as a “tool kit,” which people can access to solve any manner of cultural problems. For Swidler, culture is all about repertoire. See Swidler, “Culture in Action”; Geertz, “Thick Description.” Orsi, “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant?,” 173. Orsi, “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant?,” 173. DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius. Peterson, The Production of Culture; DiMaggio, “The Production of Scientific Change”; Peterson and Anand, “The Production of Culture Perspective.” See Peterson, Creating Country Music, and Peterson and Berger, “Cycles in Symbol Production,” for examples of his work as it pertains to American music. Pierre Bourdieu offers another account of these same dynamics, but one that is focused largely on social structures and forces, and less on people and their actions. See Bourdieu, Distinction. There are ample examples of this kind of writing. See preface, n 13. Peterson, The Production of Culture; DiMaggio, “The Production of Scientific Change”; Peterson and Anand, “The Production of Culture Perspective.” For an anthology of writing on the production of culture perspective, see Meyer et al., Production Studies. See also Santoro, “Culture as (and after) Production” and “Production Perspectives.” Peterson, Creating Country Music. Becker, Art Worlds, 35. See also Danto, “The Artworld.” Small, Musicking. Peterson and Anand, “The Production of Culture Perspective.” There are many works that address the question of genre itself, and that discussion will be featured later in this chapter. Historical accounts of the emergence and organization of the music industry include Suisman, Selling Sounds; Sanjek and Sanjek, American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century; and Miller, Segregating Sound. Southern, “Hymnals of the Black Church.” Boyer, “A Comparative Analysis of Traditional and Contemporary Gospel Music”; Broughton, Black Gospel; Cusic, The Sound of Light; Darden, People Get Ready; Heilbut, The Gospel Sound. Goff, Close Harmony. See also Harrison, Then Sings My Soul. On the segregation of the music industry, see Miller, Segregating Sound. See also Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine.

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33 Martin, Preaching on Wax. 34 The story of race as told through American religion is a fascinating and complex one, and the role of music in that story is not insignificant. For an account of how this played out in Christian music, see Haines, “The Emergence of Jesus Rock: On Taming the ‘African Beat’.” 35 Smith-Pollard, “Praise Is What We Do,” 33, 39. 36 Emerson and Smith, Divided by Faith. 37 Marti, A Mosaic of Believers. See also Marti, Worship across the Racial Divide. 38 Smith-Pollard, “Praise Is What We Do.” 39 Thornton, “What on Earth Are We Singing?” 40 Williams, Keywords. 41 Meyer, “Aesthetics of Persuasion,” 750.

Chapter 1. Making Worship and Music 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

Paris, “Table Talk,” 15. Frith, Performing Rites, 4. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz, xiii; Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 9. Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 16. Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 5. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Worthen, Apostles of Reason, 11. The moniker CCM actually derived from the publication entitled Contemporary Christian Music, which, in turn, gave birth to the generic term. For an excellent insiders’ history of CCM, see Thompson, Raised by Wolves. For an account of liberal politics and CCM, see Young, Gray Sabbath. Ratliff, “Plugging In.” Romanowski, “Roll Over Beethoven,” 79. Stowe, No Sympathy, 1. Worthen, Apostles of Reason, 144. Mall, “The Stars Are Underground,” 11. Price, “Praise and Worship: A Primer,” 36. The “horizontal” versus “vertical” aspect of worship and music’s role in facilitating it will receive a longer treatment below. Deborah Evans Price defines worship music by its “vertical” nature. See Price, “Defining the Praise and Worship Genre.” For other good discussions of the topic, see Price, “Praised Be,” 27–29. See also Kauflin, Worship Matters, 175–80. For a critique of the horizontal-vertical mapping of worship, see Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place,” 285–92. Muchow, The Worship Answer Book, 166–67. Sullivan, “Upon This Rock,” 24–25. Redman, The Great Worship Awakening, 47. Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place,” 16. Redman, The Great Worship Awakening, 53.

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23 Frith, Performing Rites; Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures; Holt, Genre in Popular Music; Lena, Banding Together. 24 On subculture, see Hebdidge, Subculture; Thornton, Club Cultures; Thornton and Gelder, The Subcultures Reader; Muggleton, Inside Subculture. Christian Smith has borrowed from these concepts to argue that American evangelicals constitute a subculture. See Smith, American Evangelicalism. On scenes, see Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change”; Kruse, “Subcultural Identity”; Bennett, “Consolidating the Music Scenes Perspective”; Bennett and Peterson, Music Scenes. With respect to religion specifically, Isaac Weiner’s Religion Out Loud is a fascinating study of how legal distinctions between public and private spaces, and definitions of noise, music, and sound, have subtly influenced the conceptualization of religion in the United States. Other books on the social dimension of sound include Corbin, Village Bells; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape; Sterne, The Audible Past; Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity. 25 Smith, American Evangelicalism. 26 DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 24. 27 Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole,” 40–41. 28 Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow, 6. 29 White, Introduction to Christian Worship, 147. 30 Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 165. 31 Luhrmann, “How Do You Learn to Know That It Is God Who Speaks?,” 85; italics in the original. 32 Kimball, Emerging Worship, 4. See also McCabe, “Making Worship a Lifestyle”; Nekola, “Negotiating the Tensions of US Worship Music in the Marketplace,” 526. 33 Author interview with Sara Groves, August 25, 2008. 34 Author interview with Charlie Peacock, August 26, 2008. 35 Perhaps the best documentation of the sense of ownership that people feel with respect to music has been captured in one of the products of the “Music in Daily Life” project, wherein scholars interviewed people about the music they loved. See Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil, My Music. 36 Hamilton, “The Triumph of the Praise Songs,” 32. 37 David Stowe makes the most far-reaching version of this claim about the role of music in the resurgence of American evangelicalism in the 1970s and 1980s in No Sympathy for the Devil. For other books that draw correlations between commerce, culture, and the rise of evangelicalism in the second half of the 20th century, see Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt; Kruse, One Nation under God; McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Sutton, American Apocalypse. 38 Ellwood, One Way, 63–64. 39 Enroth et al., The Jesus People, 58. 40 Roof, Generation of Seekers; Wuthnow, After Heaven. 41 Yancey, Soul Survivor. 42 Yancey, Soul Survivor, 8.

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43 Dougherty et al., “Recovering the Lost.” See also Hout and Fischer, “Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference”; Pew Research Center, “US Religious Landscape Survey,” “Nones on the Rise,” and “America’s Changing Religious Landscape.” On the origin of the concept of religious “nones,” see Vernon, “Marital Characteristics of Religious Independents” and “The Religious ‘Nones’.” 44 Putnam and Campbell, American Grace, 103. 45 Hout and Fischer, “Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference.” 46 Pew Research Center, “US Religious Landscape Survey,” 9–10, 20. 47 Bender, The New Metaphysicals. See also Ammerman, “Spiritual but Not Religious?”; Ammerman, Sacred Stories; Bender and McRoberts, “Mapping a Field.” 48 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. 49 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. 50 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 339. 51 Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious.” 52 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith. 53 There is quite an extensive literature in this vein. Some of the classic texts that attempt to address the nature of religious experience include Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane; Otto, The Idea of the Holy; Schleiermacher, Christian Faith. See also McRoberts, “Beyond Mysterium Tremendum.” Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience attempts to put the idea of interest in “experience” in the broader context of intellectual and cultural history. 54 Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered, 8. For a historical perspective, see Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions. 55 Stringer, On the Perception of Worship, 59. 56 Stringer, On the Perception of Worship, 208. 57 Berger, The Heretical Imperative, 53. See Proudfoot, Religious Experience, for a similar critique. 58 Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 118. 59 Nekola, “Between This World and the Next.” The rhetorical framework of the “worship war” has generated a significant number of books and countless articles and sermons, each seeking to lay out the lines of disagreement and forwarding a possible solution. See Byars, The Future of Protestant Worship; Dawn, How Shall We Worship?; Herl, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism; Labberton, “The Real Worship War”; Long, Beyond the Worship Wars; Redman, “Worship Wars or Worship Awakening?”; Stratton, Beyond Worship Wars; Towns, Putting an End to Worship Wars; Ylvisaker, What Song Shall We Sing? The phrase “worship wars” comes from Ted Peters, who coined it in a 1994 article, “The Worship Wars.” See also Hamilton, “The Triumph of the Praise Songs.” For a longer and slightly different account of the “crisis of authority” in postwar American evangelicalism, see Worthen, Apostles of Reason. 60 Nekola, “Between This World and the Next,” 5. 61 Nekola, “Between This World and the Next,” 323.

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62 Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down, 87. There is some of this critique in Brenneman, Homespun Gospel. 63 Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down, 109. 64 Greenwald, Nothing Feels Good. 65 Helmholtz, On the Perception of Tone. See Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, or Juslin and Sloboda, Handbook of Music and Emotion, for a good collection of approaches. 66 Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music. 67 Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place. 68 For accounts of spiritual themes in popular music, see Beaudoin, Secular Music and Sacred Theology; Eisenberg, The Recording Angel; Gilmour, Call Me the Seeker and Gods and Guitars; Keuss, Your Neighbor’s Hymnal; Marsh et al., Personal Jesus; Scharen, Broken Hallelujahs. For genre-specific accounts, see Bivins, Spirits Rejoice!; Johnson, Seditious Theology; Miller, Traveling Home; Pinn, Noise and Spirit; Sylvan, Traces of the Spirit. For accounts that explore a specific artist, see Brown, John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom; Glazer, Tangle of Matter and Ghost; Rogovoy, Bob Dylan, Prophet, Mystic, Poet; Symynkywicz, The Gospel according to Bruce Springsteen. 69 Lofton, Oprah. The first scholarly collections to address these questions were Forbes and Mahan, Religion and Popular Culture, and Chidester, Authentic Fakes. Questions about religion’s ability to provide meaningful structures remains an active question, one posed in the document “How We Gather,” written by Angie Thurston and Kasper ter Kuile, two students at Harvard Divinity School, who list a number of loci for “personal spiritual growth and social transformation,” positing a shift away from religion and toward secular sites of gathering, connection, and meaning making. “How We Gather” has been the subject of two separate stories in the New York Times. 70 Dubler, “Neutral Milk Hotel.” 71 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art; Berman, “Concerning the Spiritual in Indie Rock.” 72 See Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart. See also Roof, Generation of Seekers and Spiritual Marketplace; Wuthnow, After Heaven. 73 Thurston and ter Kuile, “How We Gather.” For further elaboration, see also their second publication “Something More.” For a fuller theoretical engagement with the possibilities of religion without God, see de Botton, Religion for Atheists. 74 Nichols, Jesus Made in America, 16. See also Prothero, American Jesus. 75 Roof, Spiritual Marketplace, 174. 76 Bender, The New Metaphysicals, 57. 77 Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 221. 78 Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 189. 79 Becker, Deep Listeners. See also Brahinsky, “Cultivating Discontinuity.” 80 Becker, Deep Listeners, 29. 81 Becker, Deep Listeners, 68.

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82 83 84 85 86

Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, xxii. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, xxi. Schmidt, Hearing Things, 198. Schmidt, Hearing Things, 30, 11. Bruner, “The Role of Dialogue in Language Acquisition,” 254. Bruner’s concept of scaffolding is linked closely to the work of Lev Vygotsky, whose theorization of learning mapped out a correlation between levels of competence and challenge. The “zone of proximal development” aligns with appropriate measures of both, and is facilitated by a “more knowing other.” See Vygotsky, Mind in Society. 87 Wineburg et al., “Common Belief and the Cultural Curriculum,” 69. 88 Wineburg et al., “Common Belief and the Cultural Curriculum,” 70.

Chapter 2. Songwriting

1 Neil Young, quoted in Barker and Taylor, Faking It, 212. 2 Chris Tomlin and Louis Giglio, “Holy is the Lord” (c) 2003 Worshiptogether.com Songs, Sixsteps Music. “Holy is the Lord” is a model of a contemporary worship song. The song revolves around Isaiah 6:3, in which Isaiah retells a vision of the Lord, surrounded by six-winged seraphim who were singing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:3). As reworked in the book of Revelation 4:8, that verse becomes the liturgy of the “four living creatures” that surround the throne of God, which they repeat forever. As the eternally repeated phrase of praise in heaven, the verse has become one of the central refrains of Christian worship, both modeling the heavenly vision of prayer and providing the text for its human imitation. Quoting scripture, the song delivers theology while also enabling its singers to perform that same theology by singing in the ways prescribed by the biblical seraphim. Structurally, thematically, and musically, the song is built around the chorus. The song’s twice-repeated verse is pleasant and brief, foreshadowing the chorus with two instructions for worship: lifting up hands and bowing down. The song includes a short “pre-chorus” or “channel” in order to build a little musical tension, which enhances the musical and performative momentum by urging “and together we sing / everyone sing.” In at least one live performance, Tomlin’s band amplified the pre-chorus by using a musical trick perfected by the Pixies, a mid-1990s indie rock band. Tomlin performed the verse quietly, with just a drummer supporting his acoustic guitar. As he arrived at the pre-chorus, his guitarist added a single dramatic strum, stoking the tension of the pre-chorus, before the drummer introduced the chorus with a classic rock drum fill. The bridge, built around a two-measure repeated phrase, is written to be repeated in order to build additional musical and rhythmic momentum that mirrors its lyrical content. In the same performance, Tomlin repeats the lyrics of the bridge four full times, each time adding tension and energy as he builds sonically from the nearly a capella first repetition to the final one, supported by the band at full volume and intensity.

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3

4 5

6 7 8 9

10

11

The chorus is built around a simple five-note melodic phrase that matches the lyric “Holy is the Lord” note for syllable. The next line is punctuated by a dramatic melodic leap upward to correspond with the arrival of the phrase “God Almighty,” which gently descends in time for the verse’s final, repeated line, which itself stretches upward twice in its exclamation “the earth is filled with His glory.” The music of the chorus pairs melody with lyrics in order to highlight certain words and phrases: Holy, God, earth, His. But more than that, the tune is catchy and can be learned easily. As a song, it has a great hook. Sonically and melodically, the chorus provides resolution to the tension built up throughout the song’s other elements, so that when singers arrive at the chorus, the biblical declamation works to resolve both literal, lyrical expectations about how to worship and musical ones created in the repetition of the bridge or the pre-chorus’s rising tension. The chorus, with its biblical vision of eternal worship, supplies not only musical but theological resolution, as well. All of the above is drawn from the author’s field notes. Chris Tomlin, Wednesday, July 23, 2008. “Songwriting” Session at the National Worship Leader Conference, Austin, Texas. Author interview with David Garratt, August 11, 2010. Shires, Hippies of the Religious Right; Ellwood, One Way; Eskridge, God’s Forever Family. For more historical context, see also Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, and David Di Sabatino’s documentary film, Frisbee. Eskridge, God’s Forever Family; Di Sabatino, The Jesus People Movement. Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, 298. Quoted in Romanowski, “Roll Over Beethoven,” 132. Carmichael is a fascinating figure, having been a successful songwriter, arranger, composer, and, eventually, founder of Light Music, one of the most successful white gospel labels. He was no outsider to evangelical media, either. He scored the Billy Graham films Oiltown USA (1953), The Heart Is a Rebel (1958), and The Restless Ones (1965). He would later score the film adaptation of David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade (1971). See his biography, He’s Everything to Me. See also Billboard magazine, “Lexicon Music: Carmichael’s Baby.” For a historical account of Youth for Christ, which had a great impact on Carmichael, see Bergler, “I Found My Thrill.” Ball, “Musicals Come to Church,” 46. See also Romanowski, Rock’n Religion, 130, n. 46. Hearn also co-edited a hymnal of this new music with Kurt Kaiser called Sing ’ n’ Celebrate. For more on the Christian folk musicals themselves, see Hendrix, The Sounds of Discipleship. See also Canedo, Keep the Fire Burning. For a study of Catholic folk musicals, see Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, 61–94. The liner notes for Bob Oldenburg and Eddie Lunn’s church musical, Happening Now (Broadman Records 452–091), noted that it “speaks to the problems and issues surrounding youth today. It makes reference to the ‘gap’ in communications, the awfulness of war, the pangs of hunger, the rebellious spirit that typifies our time, and the attitudes of contemporary society.” It goes on to promise that

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“the music is interesting enough to attract people who would hesitate to attend worship services in a church.” Carmichael’s website explains his musical choices in his desire to produce something that his daughter could “relate to”: www. ralphcarmichael.com (accessed March 8, 2012). Hearn also co-edited a hymnal of this new music. Hearn, liner notes to Real: A Soul Experience (Light Records LS-5771), 1971. Denisoff, Great Day Coming; Filene, Romancing the Folk; Hajdu, Positively 4th Street; Petrus and Cohen, Folk City. Emerson, Always Magic in the Air. Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll, 5. Bangs, “James Taylor Marked for Death.” Stahl, “Authentic Boy Bands on TV?” Moore, “Authenticity as Authentication”; Shuker, Authenticity; Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place; Tetzlaff, “Music for Meaning”; Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll. A good account of how music critics construct the notion of authenticity can be found in Mueller, “Keeping It Real.” Quoted in Crowe, “Joni Mitchell”; also quoted in Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” 33. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man; Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye. Norman, quoted in Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock, 51. “Rallying for Jesus.” For a detailed account of the multidimensional phenomenon that was Explo ’72, see Eshelman, The Explo Story. Despite the attention paid to the musical element of Explo ’72, the only contemporary account of the event dedicated a mere half dozen pages to the music (85–91). The book paid the same amount of attention to the job fair and a good deal more to the various tracks of learning offered at the event. Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil, 58–80. See also the soundtrack, distributed by Campus Crusade for Christ, Jesus Sound Explosion. Crouch is a particularly interesting figure in this story, as one of a small handful of African American singers to have found an audience among largely white evangelical churches. For a part of this story, see Kidula, “The Gospel of Andrae Crouch.” There are many accounts of these formative years, but among the most popular contemporary studies are Blessitt, Tell the World; Ellwood, One Way; Enroth, Erickson, and Peters, The Jesus People; Halliday, Spaced Out and Gathered In; McFadden, The Jesus Revolution; Pederson and Owen, Jesus People; Streiker, The Jesus Trip; di Sabatino’s The Jesus People Movement is a popular bibliographical resource and Shires’s Hippies of the Religious Right includes good historical information. Wuthnow, After Heaven, 53. “The Alternative Jesus: Psychedelic Christ.” See also Shires, Hippies of the Religious Right. Vachon, “The Jesus Movement Is upon Us”; Howard, “The Groovy Christians of Rye, New York”; and “Street Christians.” See also Dart, “The New Evangelism,”

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

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| Notes

which appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and “Freaking Out on Jesus,” which appeared in Rolling Stone, both in 1971. In January, NBC covered the story, and in April CBS followed suit. Even the Saturday Evening Post covered the emergence of Christian rock in Baker, “Rock of Ages.” For a contemporaneous account of the communes, see Ward, The Far-Out Saints of the Jesus Communes. See also Pederson and Owen, Jesus People. For contemporaneous accounts of the music, see Baker, “Jesus Music,” “Setting the Good Word to Modern Music,” and “Singing the Good News.” Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism; Fromm, Textual Communities. For footage of Frisbee set in the context of Costa Mesa and Calvary Chapel, see Di Sabatino’s documentary, Frisbee. Smith, quoted in Fromm, Textual Communities, 197–98. Quoted in Fromm, Textual Communities, 217. Marketing a studio album as a “live concert” was already a popular convention of popular music, e.g., Big Brother and Holding Company, Cheap Thrills (1968), and James Brown’s Sex Machine (1970). There is a much longer list of albums like this, most of which feature studio-recorded tracks overlaid with recordings of audiences. The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert did not include imported applause or other voices, which meant that the “concert” was not quite audible, though it featured in the graphic design of the album jacket. Author interview with Debbie Kerner Rettino, December 5, 2008. Author interview with Debbie Kerner Rettino, December 5, 2008. Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place,” 60–68. Author interview with Debbie Kerner Rettino, December 5, 2008. Quoted in Baker, Contemporary Christian Music, 37; see also Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil, 27. Quoted in a history of Love Song, oneway.org. Author interview with Debby Kerner Rettino, December 5, 2008. Girard, quoted in Fromm, Textual Communities, 220. In one sense, it was like a Christian version of the oft-quoted quip about the Velvet Underground’s first album, which only sold about 1,000 copies, but that everyone who bought the record went out and started a band. The big difference is that for the Velvet Underground, that was not their intention. For Maranatha! Music, it was. Rick Warren, 2005 interview with Chuck Fromm. Quoted in Fromm, Textual Communities, 204–5. Quoted in Seay, “So You Want to Write a Worship Song?,” 18. Author interview with Don Moen, August 25, 2008. Baloche, “Stop Trying to Write Songs.” Redman, The Heart of Worship Files, 32. Darlene Zschech, “Shout to the Lord.” Redman and Redman, Blessed Be Your Name, 13. Maher, “Your Grace Is Enough.”

Notes

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66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

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Millard, quoted in Baloche, Owens, and Owens, God Songs, 29. Quoted in Reid, “Laura Story: All My Hope Today,” 66. Quoted in Seay, “So You Want to Write a Worship Song?,” 18. Charlie Peacock, Songwriting Session at the Christian Songwriters’ Retreat, August 25, 2008. Author’s field notes. Brown, “Enduring,” 10. See also Brown, “Song Writing.” Baloche, Owens, and Owens, God Songs, 88, 103. Baloche, Owens, and Owens, God Songs, 99. Baloche, Owens, and Owens, God Songs, 65. Author interview with Phil Silas, August 6, 2008. Baloche, Owens, and Owens, God Songs, 65. Author interview with Debbie Kerner Rettino, December 18, 2008. Redman, The Heart of Worship Files, 167. Doerksen, “Fresh Words for Familiar Themes,” 27. Charlie Peacock, Songwriting Session at the Christian Songwriters’ Retreat, August 25, 2008. Author’s field notes. Paul Baloche, Songwriting Session, National Worship Leader Conference, July 25, 2007. Author’s field notes. Bielo, Words upon the Word; Crapanzano, Serving the Word. For another account of how evangelical Bible studies engage with the text, see Meigs, “Ritual Language in Everyday Life.” Chris Tomlin, Songwriting Session at the National Worship Leader Convention, Austin, Texas, July 23, 2008. Author’s field notes. Kendrick, “Songwriting: The Creed and the Craft.” Song Discovery began by producing and sending out compact discs and recently has begun making playlists for download. Song Discovery website, under instructions for submitting a song, worshipleader. com (last accessed November 30, 2015). Baloche, Owens, and Owens, God Songs, 65. Wuthnow, All in Sync. According to my analysis of musical transcriptions, The Essential Modern Worship Fakebook. The Essential Modern Worship Fakebook, 382. Author interview with Tommy Walker, July 22, 2008. Seay, “In Pursuit of Pure Worship,” 27. Matt Maher, Songwriting Session, National Worship Leader Convention, Austin, Texas, 2008. Author’s field notes. Author interview with Matt Ewald and Jimi Williams, October 6, 2010. Marini, “From Classical to Modern,” 26. Author interview with Don Moen, August 25, 2008. Author interview with Laura Story, August 21, 2007. See also Baloche, “Writing Songs for Your Own Congregation.” Author interview with David Crowder, August 17, 2010.

170 | Notes

82 Marshall and Todd, English Congregational Hymns, 79. 83 Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment. 84 Ogasapian, Church Music, 25–31. See also Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. See also Marini, “Hymnody and History.” 85 Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. 86 Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, 53. 87 Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism, 87. 88 Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone. Interestingly, Helmholtz was not interested in affect, but in the essential meanings of certain tones and melodic combinations. See also Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music, 204. 89 Turino, Music as Social Life, 18. 90 Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, 82–89, 201–42. 91 Frith, Performing Rites, 72–73. 92 See Nekola, “Between This World and the Next.” 93 Luhr, Witnessing Suburbia; Nekola, “Between This World and the Next.” 94 Larson, Rock and the Church, 67. For a longer discussion of Larson, see Luhr, Witnessing Suburbia, 47–53. See also Larson, Rock & Roll. For a slightly earlier version of this same argument inflected with Cold War fear, see Noebel, Rhythm, Riots, and Revolution. 95 Larson, Rock and the Church, 54. 96 Quoted in Enroth et al., The Jesus People, 78–79. 97 Quoted in Ortega, The Jesus People Speak Out!, 98. 98 Quoted in Ortega, The Jesus People Speak Out!, 98. 99 Psalms, The Jesus Kids, 35. 100 Wilkerson, Jesus Person Maturity Manual, 63. 101 Wilkerson, Jesus Person Maturity Manual, 63. 102 Graham, Just as I Am, 420. See also Graham’s The Jesus Generation for his letter to the baby boomers. 103 Graham, The Jesus Generation, 130. 104 Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down, 109. 105 Dawn, A Royal Waste of Time, 24. 106 For a collection of essays on and insights into the intersection of the senses and religion, see Promey, Sensational Religion. 107 Baloche, Owens, and Owens, God Songs, 44. 108 Webb, Tunesmith, 121–22. 109 Baloche, Owens, and Owens, God Songs, 44; italics in the original. 110 Kauflin presentation at Mt. Hermon Songwriters’ Retreat, August 24–26, 2008. Author’s field notes. 111 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 352.

Chapter 3. Leading Worship

1 Smith and Borlase, Delirious, 70. 2 Author’s field notes, March 7, 2008.

Notes

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3 Author’s field notes, March 6, 2008. 4 Vaillant, Sounds of Reform. 5 The quote is from Jim Brown’s documentary film, Pete Seeger. For a light autobiographical account of the power of collective singing, see Horn, Imperfect Harmony. 6 Quoted in Dunaway and Beer, Singing Out, 196. Dunaway also wrote a biography of Pete Seeger; see How Can I Keep from Singing? 7 Eno, “Singing.” 8 Turino, Music as Social Life; Miller, Traveling Home. 9 Levitin, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Quoted in Horn, Imperfect Harmony, 177. 10 Levitin, The World in Six Songs, 205; italics in the original. Stories about the scientific benefits of singing abound, including in Horn, Imperfect Harmony, and in Haensch, “When Choirs Sing, Many Hearts Beat as One.” 11 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 12 This line of investigation has been examined by Collins and others. See Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains. For a survey of the relationship between social life and emotional states, see Turner and Stets, The Sociology of Emotions. 13 Chaves, Congregations in America, 129. 14 Marti, Worship across the Racial Divide, 77–78. 15 Titon, Powerhouse for God, 291. 16 One introductory text glossed the difference in the following way: “The concert hall may be purely detached performance; the church is participation.” White, Introduction to Christian Worship, 118. 17 Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 170, 171. 18 Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 168. 19 Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 169. 20 For a fuller description of this approach, see Begbie, Theology, Music and Time. 21 Dawn, A Royal Waste of Time, 181; italics in the original. 22 See Wuthnow, Producing the Sacred, 223. See also Wuthnow, “Taking Talk Seriously.” 23 “Album Review, City on a Hill.” 24 Price, “Defining the Praise and Worship Genre.” 25 Girard, quoted in the “History of Love Song.” one-way.org/jesusmusic (accessed April 23, 2014). 26 For the biblical roots of these practices, see Acts 10:45–46, and 1 Corinthians 14:13. Susan J. White has described the breadth of these gifts in the following way: “Others look for the gifts of healing and prophesy, for uncontrollable physical movements such as falling, shouting, laughing, and dancing, and even on occasion the power to handle deadly serpents and drink poisons (Mark 16:18) without coming to harm.” White, Foundations of Christian Worship, 12. For accounts of this kind of circulation of the Holy Spirit, see Poloma, Main Street Mystics. Interpretations of these also may be used to distinguish Charismatic Christians from Pentecostal Christians, though the differences are often subtle.

172

| Notes

27 Vineyard Music Group, All about Worship, 10. Don Miller’s account of the birth of the Vineyard traces it to a meeting in 1977, while Chuck Fromm dates its founding to 1979. See Fromm, “Textual Communities and New Song.” See also Smith, The Reproducers, 47–49. The formal split between Calvary and Vineyard came in 1982. For an excellent account of this evolution, see Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 13–38. 28 Jackson, “A Short History of the Association of Vineyard Churches,” 134. 29 Quoted in Miller, “Routinizing Charisma,” 147. 30 From Wilt, “Leading Worship in the Vineyard.” 31 The Church Growth Movement is quite controversial for its application of the principles of marketing and capital accumulation to church growth and evangelism. It has been credited with the growth of “seeker friendly” churches like Willow Creek and Saddleback. Rick Warren, the longtime pastor of Saddleback, wrote The Purpose Driven Church as a sort of manual for church growth. For a study of seeker churches, see Sargeant, Seeker Churches. A key figure in the Church Growth Movement has been Donald McGavran. See McGavran and Wagner, Understanding Church Growth. For other perspectives, see Towns et al., Evaluating the Church Growth Movement. See also Inskeep, “A Short History of Church Growth Research”; Olsavicky, The Church Growth Movement and Its Impact on 21st-Century Worship.” 32 Pettigrew, “The Other Side of the Coin.” 33 Pettigrew, “The Other Side of the Coin.” 34 Advertisement, Worship Leader 1, no. 1 (February–March 1992), 22. 35 Advertisement for this festival appeared in Worship Leader l, no. 1 (February– March 1992), 30. It also appeared in CCM 14, no. 5 (November 1991), 11. 36 Elliott, “Bringing Praise into the ‘90s.” See also Faris, “21st Century Praise.” 37 Elliott, “Bringing Praise into the ‘90s.” Articles like these were pretty rare, and although they indicate a rising attention to worship music, they also demonstrate some ignorance about worship music. Elliott misidentified popular worship songwriter and worship leader Don Moen three times, calling him “Don Moon,” and signaling, again, the publication’s general disinterest in worship music and worship leaders. 38 Author interview with Chuck Fromm, August 6, 2008. 39 Fromm, “Letter from the Editor,” 4. 40 Fromm, “Come Join Us in the Search for ‘True Worship.’” 41 Fromm, “Letter from the Editor,” 4. 42 “Worship Leader Boot Camp,” specifically Andy Park’s contribution to the feature “Finding Timothys: Recruiting and Training New Members for Your Worship Team,” 22. 43 Seay, “The Worship Professional,” 17. 44 Worship Leader has had an online presence since at least 1995. One short article reminded readers that “if you are a CompuServe user, be sure to visit Worship Leader Magazine’s new ‘Worship Center’ on CompuServe.” Another article in

Notes

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the same issue, entitled “Techno Church,” touted the use and utility of “e-mail, message boards, and interest forums” for connecting with “cyber-seekers.” Gould, “Timeless Message, New Media”; Millheim, “Cyber Church.” Worshipleader.com Higher Ed guide, 2012, Worship Leader, worshipleader.com, accessed January 12, 2013. Author interview with Ross Parsley, March 19, 2009. Hughes, “What a Worship Leader Looks for in a Band,” 154. See also Boschman, “Five Qualities of an Effective Worship Leader.” Hughes, “What a Worship Leader Looks for in a Band,” 154. Hughes, “What a Worship Leader Looks for in a Band,” 153. Hughes, “What a Worship Leader Looks for in a Band,” 155. Author interview with Scotty Smith, October 10, 2009. Chan, quoted in the article “The Other Side,” 31. Author interview with Glenn Packiam, May 29, 2009. Tozer, On Worship and Entertainment. Author interview with David Garratt, August 11, 2010. Conducted over Skype. Author interview with Bob Kauflin, August 25, 2008. Author interview with Bob Kauflin, August 25, 2008. Muchow, quoted in Gillaspey, “Saddleback Valley’s Rick Muchow,” 17. Baloche, “Worship Leader Boot Camp,” 24–25. Author interview with Meredith Andrews, August 13, 2008. The advertisement appeared on page 9 of the July–August 2008 issue of Worship Musician magazine. It featured a photo of Chris Tomlin with a guitar hanging around his neck by a strap and his hands outstretched above his head, which is tipped back, eyes closed. The text of the advertisement reads, “when the music is the message, the sound must be clear,” and offers Shure brand “wireless mics and personal monitors” as one way to ensure that the music is presented without distraction. The Shure Corporation declined requests for permission to reprint the advertisement. Redman, “Revelation and Response,” 14. Telephone interview with Derek Webb, November 19, 2008. On his 2009 release, Stockholm Syndrome, Webb has a song called “The Spirit vs. the Kick Drum,” that echoes some of these ideas. Author interview with Paul Baloche, August 26, 2008. Author interview with Paul Baloche, August 26, 2008. Chuck Kraft, “Do We Depend Too Much on Worship Leaders?,” 7. Author interview with Bob Kauflin, August 26, 2008. Baloche, “Worship Leader Boot Camp,” 19. See Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place.” Witvliet, Worship Seeking Understanding, 282. Witvliet, Worship Seeking Understanding, 283–85. Author interview with Laura Story, August 21, 2007. Author interview with Glenn Packiam, May 29, 2009.

174 | Notes

74 Author interview with Glenn Packiam, May 29, 2009. 75 Author interview with Drew Cline, July 22, 2008.

Chapter 4. Selling the Spirit

1 Author interview with Steve Rice, October 6, 2009. 2 Author interview with Chris York, October 6, 2009. 3 DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 23; italics in the original. See also Williams, Keywords, 92. 4 Quoted in Price, “Praise and Worship Music Is Extending Its Reach.” 5 This would change, beginning in the late 1990s, when worship artists began appearing on the cover of the magazine, and the magazine began running reviews of “worship projects.” As of 2012, worship artists appeared with some regularity, and the website has sections under “reviews” and “features” that are dedicated to worship. 6 Decker, “Steve Green: Dispelling Myths,” 18. 7 Styll, “What Makes Music Christian,” 35–36. 8 Sugar, “Developing a Full Time Music Ministry,” 39. 9 Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus. 10 Author interview with Chris York, October 6, 2009. 11 Author interview with Chad Segura, October 8, 2009. 12 “Talentpool.” See also Carlozo, “The Latest Craze.” 13 Author interview with Steve Rice, October 6, 2009. 14 Author interview with Steve Rice, October 6, 2009. 15 Author interview with Chris York, October 6, 2009. 16 Author interview with Chad Segura, October 8, 2009. 17 Smith with Borlase, Delirious (Kindle edition, locations 454–55). 18 The band took a stylized approach to its name, often written as Deliriou5? But for the purposes of clarity, it will be rendered as Delirious? throughout this book. 19 Riddle, “England on the Edge,” 26–28. 20 Riddle. “Across the Pond,” 37. Worship Leader’s review of Cutting Edge offered more of a description of the group’s “musical and spiritual maturity” and their “musical chops,” but said little about the content of the album or its context. Millheim, “Cutting Edge,” 54, 56. 21 According to Smith, “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever” emerged out of their experiences as “Cutting Edge,” which was the name Smith and his bandmates gave to their experimental Sunday Night worship service, which had begun a few years before they recorded anything. They applied that name to themselves as well as to their first four EPs, which they recorded and self-released, although in the United States they were first promoted as “The Cutting Edge Featuring Delirious?” The band color coded their Cutting Edge releases. Their second release, which included “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever,” was red. See Smith, Delirious, Kindle location 589 of 1908. For the reference to “The Cutting Edge Featuring Delirious?,” see the first advertisement for Delirious? in Worship Leader (November–December 1997), 17. 22 Newcomb, “Cutting Edge,” 56.

Notes

23 24 25 26

27

28

29 30 31

32

33 34 35

36 37

| 175

Millheim, “Cutting Edge,” 56. Author interview with Steve Rice, October 6, 2009. Author interview with Steve Rice, October 6, 2009. The title comes from the band’s song “Revival Town,” whose second verse concluded, “You let a broken generation / Become a dancing generation / This is revival generation.” Martin Smith and Stuart Garrard, “Revival Town.” 1997 Curious? Music UK. Revival Generation: I Could Sing of Your Love Forever, WorshipTogether, CD 227, 1999; and Revival Generation: Lovely Noise, WorshipTogether, 1999. See also Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place,” 139 and 142. The advertisement appeared in the August 1998 issue of CCM, and it featured the same photo as the album cover. See Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place,” 142–43, for a discussion of the album and its iconography. Sensing the shift, in 1997 Integrity Music inaugurated its own version of a specialized imprint that focused on the same burgeoning market. Vertical Music “represented something of a new direction for Integrity, conjoining as it did praise and worship content with contemporary alternative music.” From “Integrity Inc.,” Reference for Business, www.referenceforbusiness.com (accessed December 3, 2012). See also full-page advertisements in CCM (March 1998), 51, and Worship Leader. Both feature limegreen backgrounds with the title “Vertical Music” and the tagline “change your direction.” See also Price, “Integrity Launches Youth-Targeted Vertical Music.” For a great analysis of the semiotics of the marketing effort that supported the release and others, see Nekola, “I’ll Take You There.” Author interview with Steve Rice, October 6, 2009. Ingalls, “Transnational Connections, Musical Meaning and the 1990s ‘British Invasion’ of North American Evangelical Worship Music.” Shout to the Lord finished second in a CCM readers’ choice poll for best “praise and worship album” of 1998. Petra Praise 2 came in first that year. CCM (June 1998), 34. Calculations based on author’s tabulations. Data was drawn from the CCLI website, www.ccli.com, which presents the top 25 songs for each biannual reporting period, beginning in 1997. The August 1997 report, the earliest that is publicly accessible, contains data from surveys returned between October 1, 1996, and March 31, 1997. The data calculated here includes church song usage from 1996. Price, “Third Day Offers a ‘Worship Album’.” Psalm 118:22: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Author interview with Grant Hubbard, October 8, 2009. MercyMe recorded the song for its self-released 1999 album, The Worship Project. The band included it again as the single for their major label debut, two years later, which garnered significant attention and probably was the first that Hubbard heard of the song and the band. Quoted in Seay, “What Is Worship Worth?,” 18. Both the Vineyard statistic and Hughes quote appear in Price, “Praise and Worship Music Is Extending Its Reach,” and “Thank Heavens for the Music.” See also Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place,” 159–67.

176

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55 56 57

58 59 60

| Notes

Quoted in Price, “Gospel and Christian Music.” Seay, “What Is Worship Worth?,” 16. Camp, “107 Theses.” Smith, A Lover’s Quarrel with the Evangelical Church, 108–10. Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry.” Romanowski, “Roll Over Beethoven,” 107–8. See also Howard, “Contemporary Christian Music.” For histories of the intersection of religion and economics, see Moore, Selling God; Schmidt, Consumer Rites. For critiques, see Carrette and King, Selling Spirituality; Einstein, Brands of Faith. It reads, “Redemptively, it is used in the church corporately and individually as part of the totality of worship and praise to the One Triune God” (1 Chronicles 25:1–8). The album, Songs from the Loft, was another compilation album that featured two songs by Amy Grant, who had already proven herself a successful crossover artist. It retrospect, that album seemed like a warm-up for Exodus, which itself won a Dove Award in 1999 for Special Event Album of the Year. Its “incongruous but exciting mix” of songs received a lukewarm review in CCM 20, no. 12 (June 1998), 46. Author interview with Don Donahue, October 9, 2009. See Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place,” 159–67. Its particular combination of high-energy music and intense worship has been the subject of one complete dissertation and the focus of a significant segment of another. See Busman, “(Re)Sounding Passion,” and Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place,” 175–259. Hansen, “Passion Takes It Higher.” Ingalls’s “Singing Heaven Down to Earth” offers a full ethnographic analysis of worship at Passion conferences along with a brief history of the movement. Quoted in Farias, “A Passion for the Christ.” Quoted in Chismar, “Our Love Is Loud,” 28. The story of Passion’s music, focusing on Giglio, Tomlin, and David Crowder, was that month’s cover story. The cover featured a photo of Tomlin and Crowder, and lush photos from Passion conferences accompanied the article. Tomlin also graced the magazine’s cover again in September of that same year. Giglio, “For His Name and Renown,” 26. Isaiah 26:8: “Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws, we wait for you; your name and renown are the desire of our hearts.” “268 Generation” is also reference to Isaiah 26:8. Giglio explained, “Its confession embodied everything we were sensing about this vision that breathed Passion to life.” Giglio, “For His Name and Renown,” 25. For other demographic and broadly sociological differences between baby boomers and the generation that has followed them, see Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers. O’Donnell, “Passion 2011.” Quoted in Smeby, “A Vision for Campus Worship,” 31.

Notes

61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69

70 71 72

73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81

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See Romanowski, Rock’n Religion. See also Moore, Selling God. Sterne, MP3; Cummings, Democracy of Sound. Cusic, “In Defense of Cover Songs.” See also Cummings, Democracy of Sound, 11–63. 17 US Code, 110, “Limitations on Exclusive Rights: Exemption of Certain Performances and Displays.” United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit. 754 F.2d 216. F.E.L. Publications, Ltd., v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago. See also Colannino, “Copyright Infringement, Copyright Violations in a Catholic Archdiocese.” Author interview with Howard Rachinski, September 7, 2010. Author interview with Howard Rachinski, September 7, 2010. Chaves, Anderson, and Byassee, “American Congregations at the Beginning of the 21st Century.” Typically, churches will include the CCLI registration number alongside such reproductions, either in print or on projection screens, right alongside the songwriting credits. For more information about CCLI, visit their website, www.CCLI.com. Author interview with Steve Rice, October 6, 2009. Author interview with Fred Rachinski, Andy Bodkin, and Malcolm Houlka, September 7, 2010. At the time of the interview, Rachinski was the chief operating officer for CCLI of North America, Bodkin was the CCLI managing director for Europe and Africa, and Houlka was the CCLI managing director for the AsiaPacific Region. Author interview with Steve Rice, October 6, 2009. “CCLI Copyright FAQ” (accessed March 5, 2012). “CCLI Royalty Process” (accessed March 5, 2012). For the scientific paper, see Sagalnik, Dodds, and Watts, “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market.” For a more readable account of the same phenomenon, see Watts, “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” Author interview with Howard Rachinski, September 7, 2010. Author interview with Grant Hubbard, October 8, 2009. Author interview with Grant Hubbard, October 8, 2009. Author interview with Steve Rice, October 6, 2009. Author interview with Charlie Peacock, August 25, 2008.

Conclusion

1 Author interview with Sara Groves, August 25, 2008. 2 Ammerman, “Spiritual but Not Religious?”

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Index

Page numbers followed by f refer to a figure on that page. affect, 75–76, 80–82, 170n88 African American churches, 12–13 African American congregations, 12–13 American evangelicalism, 13, 18–19, 27, 162n37, 163n57. See also evangelical churches Andrews, Meredith, 106–107

vals, 125; marketplace, 118, 123; purpose of, 121, 135. See also contemporary Christian music Christian music industry, 16, 21, 51, 117, 130, 132–35, 137, 147 Christian radio, 124, 132, 149 Christian rock, 13, 20–22, 77–78, 119–21, 125, 135, 168n27 baby boomers, 27–28, 51–53, 55, 94, Cline, Drew, 113–15 170n102, 176n58 congregational worship, 3, 6, 11, 14, 23, 26, Ballmer, Randall, 51, 75 31, 35, 44, 48, 54, 68, 70, 72, 76–77, 80, Baloche, Paul, 1–3, 62, 64–66, 68, 81, 106, 83, 88, 95, 113–15, 118–19, 124–25, 128, 108–10, 131–32, 137–38 133, 138, 141–42, 145–51, 154 Becker, Howard, 8–11, 17, 22, 92, 128 contemporary Christian Music (CCM), Becker, Judith, 42–43 13, 19–23, 40, 51, 55, 66, 93, 107, 121, 123, Berman, Judy, 37–39 130, 132, 134–37, 141, 161nn9–10 Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) Calvary Chapel, 57–61, 96, 98, 119, 168n29. magazine, 97–98, 120–21, 122f, 128, 130, See also Frisbee, Lonnie; Maranatha! 133, 174n5 Music; Smith, Chuck; Vineyard churches Crouch, Andrae, 55, 121, 167n23 Camp, Steve, 135–36, 149 Crowder, David, 6, 72–73, 140, 176n54 Carmichael, Ralph, 52, 166n9, 167n11 cultural curriculum, 44–45, 67, 82, 156 Chaves, Mark, 5, 25, 90 cultural forms, 3, 7–11, 33, 41, 44, 49, 54–55, Children of the Day, 55, 57, 61 63–64, 79, 116, 138, 156 Christ: body of, 13; lyrics about, 21; worcultural production, 10–11, 13–14, 17, 22, ship leading and, 102; worship music 39, 46, 92, 94, 111, 135, 142, 151, 154, and, 35, 39, 59, 76, 79, 82, 135 156 Christian Copyright Licensing Interculture, production of, 8–9, 11, 160n24. See national (CCLI), 145–51, 175n32, also cultural production 177nn69–70, 177n72 Christian music, 2, 21, 52, 97, 118, 121, 123, Dawn, Marva, 7, 34–35, 80–81, 91–92 126, 128, 131–33, 135–36, 161n34; festiDC Talk, 124, 136

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Delirious?, 121, 125–32, 137–38, 140–41, 150, James, William, 31–33, 83. See also reli174n18, 174n21 gious experience DeNora, Tia, 8, 23, 118 Jesus Christ Superstar (Webber), 56, 78 Deyo, Jeff, 69, 124. See also SONICFLOOd Jesus Music, 13, 55, 135. See also ConDillard, Annie, 23–24 temporary Christian music (CCM); Dubler, Joshua, 37–39 Christian rock Durkheim, Émile, 5, 90–91 Kauflin, Bob, 5, 82, 105, 109, 159n7 evangelical churches, 6, 13–14, 34, 97, 138, Kenoly, Ron, 97, 120–21 167n23. See also American evangelical- Kerner, Debbie, 58–60, 63, 65 ism Kraft, Chuck, 108–9 Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert, The, 57, 60–61, 77, 83, 142, 168n32 Lamott, Anne, 23–24 Larson, Bob, 6, 77–78, 170n94 F.E.L. Publications, 144–45 Levitin, Daniel, 36, 75, 89–90 folk discourse, 58–61, 63, 94, 109, 139 liturgy, 33, 37, 154, 165n2 folk music, 52–53, 55, 77 Love Song, 57, 59–60, 95, 121. See also folk-rock, 13, 55 Girard, Chuck Frisbee, Lonnie, 57, 168n29 Luhrmann, Tanya, 25, 42–43 Frith, Simon, 17, 75–76 Luther, Martin, 6, 135 Garratt, David, 49, 104–6 genre, 12, 20, 22–23, 133, 160n29, 164n68 Giglio, Louis, 139–41, 151, 176n54, 176n57 Girard, Chuck, 59–60, 63, 95–96, 101, 109, 121 Graham, Billy, 55, 56, 79, 166n9 Gramsci, Antonio, 18–19 Great Awakenings, 6, 38, 74–75 Grossberg, Lawrence, 36, 75 Groves, Sara, 7, 26–27, 29–30, 35, 37, 118, 153–54, 156 Guthrie, Arlo, 89, 92 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 36, 75, 170n88 Holy Spirit, 2, 8, 43, 86, 104–5, 133, 171n26 Hubbard, Grant, 131, 149–51, 175n335 Hughes, Tim, 102–3 hymnals, 4, 12, 27, 70, 124, 134, 144, 166n10 Ingalls, Monique, 22, 58 Integrity Music, 97, 117, 124, 131, 138, 145, 147, 175n28. See also Rice, Steve

Maher, Matt, 47, 62, 69 Maranatha! Music, 57, 98, 119–20, 138, 140, 145, 168n41 Marini, Stephen, 4, 70 Marti, Gerardo, 13, 90–91 megachurches, 94, 97 MercyMe, 63, 132, 175n35 ministry, 95; campus, 139; cassette tape, 57; music, 112, 123; teen 85; worship, 113; youth, 125 Moen, Don, 61, 71, 138, 172n37 Muchow, Rick, 21, 106–7 Mullins, Rich, 129, 137 music: power of, 35, 57, 75, 77, 79, 81, 89, 91–92, 101, 153, 157; and prayer, 3, 6, 23, 40–41, 63, 77, 88, 101, 105, 110, 117, 119–20; role in Christian culture, 21; transcendence and, 35–36, 75. See also Christian music; contemporary Christian music; popular music; rock and roll; worship music musical culture, 10, 20, 62, 77, 118, 121, 142

Index

musical tension, 36, 165n2 musicianship, 36, 103–5, 110, 113 Nashville, Tennessee, 15–16, 103, 139, 157 National Worship Leader Conference, 47, 62, 100, 113, 155 Neutral Milk Hotel, 37–38 New Life Church, 85, 100 New Life School of Worship, 85, 100–101. See also Parsley, Ross Norman, Larry, 54–55, 77 Nyro, Laura, 53, 58 Orsi, Robert, 7–8, 23, 33 Owens, Jimmy and Carol, 65, 68, 81–82 Packiam, Glenn, 103, 112–13, 115 Paris, Twila, 15, 109, 121 Park, Andy, 125, 138, 172n42 Parsley, Ross, 100, 102 Passion movement, 138–41, 176n52 pastoral work, 111–12 Peacock, Charlie, 6–7, 26, 29, 64, 66, 150 Peterson, Richard, 8–10, 17, 22 popular culture, 17, 19, 40, 44, 119 popular music, 3, 9–10, 20, 35–39, 45, 51–52, 65–66, 75–78, 80, 83, 91, 119, 130, 135, 168n32; American, 12–13, 22, 53, 64, 79, 153; copyright law and, 143, 149; evangelical, 20, 74; spiritual themes in, 164n68; worship and, 159n10 Porter, Eric, 17–18 prayer, 4, 7–8, 17, 23–25, 38, 42–43, 86–87, 91–92, 106, 165n2; congregational, 25; as expressive form, 45; music and, 3, 6, 23, 40–41, 63, 77, 88, 101, 105, 110, 117, 119–20; practices, 30; songwriting and, 61, 72 Price, Deborah Evans, 21, 93, 161n17 Psalms, Roger C., 78–79 Rachinski, Howard, 144–45 Redman, Matt, 62, 66, 107, 110, 125, 130

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Redman, Robb, 6, 22 Revival Generation series, 130, 140, 142 religious experience, 29, 31–35, 38–39, 43, 45, 86, 92, 163n53. See also James, William Rice, Steve, 117, 124–25, 128–31, 140, 147, 150–51 Riddle, Jeremy, 155–56 ritual, 5, 7, 24–25, 33, 35, 37, 42–43, 75, 98; congregational, 45; failure, 155; performance, 93; religious 28, 30, 90; worship music and, 4, 89, 116, 123 ritual forms, 4, 25, 29, 33, 45–46 rock and roll, 6, 10, 14, 27, 29, 36, 53–54, 59, 70, 76–79, 83, 106, 123 Romanowski, William T., 20, 135 Roof, Wade Clark, 28, 38, 41 Saddleback Church, 21, 61, 94, 106, 172n31 Seeger, Pete, 89, 91, 171n6 seeker churches, 94, 172n31. See also Saddleback Church; Willow Creek church Segura, Chad, 124, 126 sensational forms, 4–5, 7, 14, 44, 119, 123, 138 singer-songwriters, 8, 26, 36, 51–60, 72, 111, 143, 147. See also songwriters Small, Christopher, 10–11 Smith, Christian, 13, 23, 162n24 Smith, Chuck, 57, 96 Smith, James K. A., 24, 91–92 Smith, Martin, 125, 127–28 Smith, Michael W., 121, 123, 136–38, 150, 174n21 Smith, Warren Cole, 134–35 Smith Pollard, Deborah, 12–13 Song Discovery, 65, 67, 169n68 songwriters, 1–8, 11, 19, 35, 45, 50–55, 58–61, 63–71, 73, 75, 80–84, 87–88, 100–101, 106, 115–16, 120, 125, 132, 134, 136, 141, 154–56; copyright law and, 146, 152; folk discourse and, 94;

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songwriters (cont.) relationship with congregations, 73; strategies of, 139; worship, 44, 47, 49, 50–51, 60–64, 66, 68, 70–73, 81–83, 121, 131, 147. See also singer-songwriters songwriting, 26, 47–49, 51, 53–54, 59, 61– 63, 69–73, 80, 112; copyright and, 143, 177n69; as a craft, 3, 14, 49, 58, 81–82; folk narrative of, 95; industrial, 157; personal, 56; popular, 68; as social act, 83; workshops, 1; worship, 60, 63–65, 82–83, 123, 141 SONICFLOOd, 69, 124, 138. See also Deyo, Jeff Story, Laura, 64, 71–72, 112–13, 115 Stowe, David, 20, 162n37 Stringer, Martin, 32–33 Styll, John, 121, 123, 133 Sullivan, John Jeremiah, 21–22 Third Day, 136, 138 Tomlin, Chris, 1, 47–49, 61, 66, 137, 139– 40, 165n2, 173n16, 176n54 transcendence, 35–36, 75, 157; God’s, 64 Turino, Thomas, 75, 89 Vatican II, 52, 58 Vineyard churches, 6, 25, 42–43, 66, 132, 138, 175n37; split from Calvary Chapel, 94, 96, 172n27 Vineyard Music, 119–20, 125, 132, 138, 140 Warren, Rick, 61, 172n31 Watts, Isaac, 6, 12 Webb, Derek, 107–8, 110, 173n63 Wesley, Charles, 6, 74 Willow Creek church, 94, 172n31 worship bands, 85–86, 102, 117–18, 120, 125–26, 129, 147 Worship Leader magazine, 64, 98–100, 120, 128–29, 133, 151, 172n44, 174n20 worship leaders, 3–4, 6–8, 11, 15–16, 35, 44– 45, 94, 102, 106–7, 109–11, 120–21, 124,

138–39, 150, 152, 154; failure and, 156; professionalization of, 101, 111; resources for, 95, 98, 128–30, 148; role of, 83, 97; song selection and, 68–69; technique and, 99–101, 104; training of, 97, 99–101; worship music and, 87–88, 93, 101, 103, 111, 114–16, 129, 141–42, 144, 155 worship music: CCM and, 120–21, 123–25, 137; Christian, 48; congregational, 23, 26, 35, 141, 150–51; conventions of, 143; copyright law and, 143–49 (see also Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI)); corporate, 27; criticism of, 83, 134, 136; cultural production of, 13, 142, 154–57; culture of, 130, 142; definitions of, 21–23, 126, 150; development of, 29–30, 34, 55, 61, 95, 97; discursive production of, 35–36; early writing on, 77; emotion and, 73–74, 81–82, 84; folk discourse of, 58; lyrics and, 66; makers of, 34, 37, 39, 45–46, 141; models for, 129; modern, 13, 131–32, 140; new wave of, 133–34, 138, 142; origins of, 51, 63, 70; popular music and, 79–80, 91; producers/production of, 3, 8, 11, 14, 17–18, 40, 46, 78, 87, 105, 116, 118–20, 131, 137, 140, 142, 148, 150, 152; quality and, 76; sacred orientations of, 40; as subcategory of CCM, 20; worship leaders and, 11–12, 115 worship music industry, 15, 45, 124, 131, 140, 147, 151 worship services, 2, 5, 13, 15, 29, 57, 67, 69, 83, 90, 94, 96–97, 115, 124–25, 145, 148, 156, 167n11, 174n21 worship songs, 1, 4, 10, 15, 40, 45, 49, 58, 62, 64–72, 132–34, 136–37, 142, 151, 156; commercialization of, 134, 150; congregational, 48, 68; corporate, 26, 118; as sensational forms, 14 worship songwriters, 44, 47, 49, 60–64, 66, 68, 70–73, 81–83, 103, 121, 131, 147, 172n37

Index

worshippers, 103, 109, 154, 156; emotion and, 81–82; evangelical, 90; leadership and, 95; needs of, 3, 7, 22, 49, 70, 73, 80, 104, 110, 134, 140, 151, 155; prayer and, 25; worship music and, 4, 6, 8, 11, 16–17, 21, 29, 35, 40, 44–46, 64, 67, 71, 81, 83, 102, 105–6, 115, 128–31, 138, 141, 143 WorshipTogether.com, 68, 70, 126, 129– 30, 140

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Worthen, Molly, 18–19 WOW Worship compilation series, 138, 140, 142 Wuthnow, Robert, 56, 68, 92 Yancey, Phillip, 29–30 York, Chris, 117–18, 124, 126, 128 Youth for Christ, 52, 166n9 Zschech, Darlene, 62, 130–32, 138

About the Author

Ari Y. Kelman is Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

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