Becoming What We Sing: Formation through Contemporary Worship Music

By David Lemley

Contemporary worship music is ubiquitous in many Protestant Christian communities today. Rather than debating or decrying this post–worship-wars reality, David Lemley accepts it as a premise and examines what it means for us to be singing along with songs that aren’t so different from the pop genre. How do we cope with the consumerism embedded in the mentality that catchy is good? How do we stay committed to subverting cultural norms, as Christians are called to do, when our music is modeled after those cultural norms? How do we ensure that the way we participate in the liturgy of contemporary worship music rehearses a cruciform identity? 

Becoming What We Sing draws on cultural criticism, ethnomusicology, and liturgical and sacramental theology to process the deluge of the contemporary in today’s worship music. Lemley probes the thought of historical figures, such as Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, and the Wesleys, while also staying situated in the current moment by engaging with cultural philosophers such as James K. A. Smith and popular artists such as U2. The result is a thorough assessment of contemporary worship music’s cultural economy that will guide readers toward greater consciousness of who we are becoming as we sing “our way into selves, societies, and cosmic perspectives.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jan 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467461634

Book preview

Introduction

Following American Idol’s season 7 Idol Gives Back episode on FOX, viewers raced online to react to pop-star competition contestants performing Darlene Zschech’s contemporary worship staple, Shout to the Lord. Some regarded this performance, which was on the sixth-highest-ranked television program of that week, as a sign of impending religious revival. Others criticized the performance of contemporary worship music (CWM) on a secular program. Some thought it was overt proselytization; others believed it was inauthentic worship.

This flurry of online commentators demonstrated a twenty-first-century reality about music’s place in worship and culture. Shout to the Lord was not only a widely recognizable worship song, but it was also a popular commodity with proven marketability. Idol considered Shout to the Lord not only a musical fit for their performers but also a demographic fit for their audience and advertisers. The song choice initiated a process of obtaining necessary permissions and rehearsing performers to meet the expectations of authenticity for this musical style. Fans’ interactions online, the performance’s ranking as iTunes’ fifth-highest download the following week, and the song’s appearance among the top-ten-copyrighted worship songs reported in congregational use through 2009 (CCLI) encompassed everyone who interacted with the episode as a participant in the worship song.

Although not a historical first, Idol’s inclusion of Shout to the Lord was a watershed moment that revealed the cultural shift in liturgical participation in music. How was this performance of Shout to the Lord a worship song? Was it in the relationship of the song to its license-holders’ purpose? Was it in the authenticity of those on stage who believed it? Was it in the millions of listeners’ reception to the song? Was it in the social-media response and individual downloads? Was it in the hearts of the listeners who made it the soundtrack of the next few days?

These questions rise from two premises, one cultural and one theological. For the viewing audience, the experience of music extends far beyond the performance of a song into a wide range of everyday activities set within a larger cultural horizon. Our microlevel practices, like the activities contributing to participation in the performance above, cohere in a social imaginary grounding our everyday assumptions, habits, actions, and decisions. It is meaningful for us to share the experience of a performance with other participants or extend the experience through our consumer choices. Ethnomusicologists suggest that musical performance is only one act in an ecology or geography of macrolevel cultural patterns that give music and our means of participation in music meaning. Theologically, we pose questions about this performance as worship because we assume worship is more than a song alone. Music is one act that focuses our response to God, but worship is a life offered to God in every thought and deed. Worship is also part of a participatory geography that gives it meaning: the kingdom of God. When our worship intersects with our cultural practices, new possibilities emerge within the idea that all of life is worship. In contemporary worship music, our Christian liturgies and cultural liturgies converge.

Many North American traditions rely heavily on CWM in corporate worship. That emphasis is an invitation to Shout to the Lord and to participate in a cultural economy comprised of worshipers, performers, producers, and distributors who produce not only sound and meaning but also pop-culture lifestyles that foster Christian and consumer communities alike. CWM is a new liturgical symbol that requires conscientious reflection on commodity and consumption, along with the gift and grace it facilitates. CWM is a new symbol with new implications, but the reflection it requires is as old as the church. It harkens back to the consumption of everyday symbols on the eucharistic table described in 1 Corinthians. In that instance, the issue was not whether those gathered ate bread suitable for the Lord’s pantry, but whether it was shared in a manner suitable for the Lord’s Supper. The worshipers’ meal must do more than satisfy the body through the process of ingestion; it must form a certain kind of community through patterns of participation. Likewise, the worshipers’ song must provide more than a satisfying performance. The song becomes worship as the community performs its faith.

Thinking along these lines may offer scholars, students, ministers, and churches a way of evaluating the role and effectiveness of CWM in worship, related to spiritual and missional formation. The dual function of CWM’s theological and historical context for participation in music as an element of worship may be examined for how popular music’s cultural practice and social function influence Christian participation in worship music. However, rather than debate or decry worship music’s accommodation to the music market or the commodification of worship music, it may be helpful to simply recognize that congregations are filled with people whose participation in worship, particularly where music is considered the primary participatory element, is partly learned through participation in popular music.

What can be discovered about opportunities for and limitations of participation in worship by examining the broader cultural function of music? How does popular music’s cultural economy relate to biblical, liturgical, and sacramental theologies of authentic worship participation? How and in what way is CWM an effective and sufficient liturgical symbol; or is it?

Worship in Pop’s Cultural Economy

Most people in the North American context can talk about music but not in the language of making music. Rather, when we talk about music, we tend to mean our participation in a system of aesthetic preferences, social identities, and lifestyle choices—and to participate personally in personal and community formation. Cultural studies describe popular music as a symbol in a system of cultural artifacts and social structures that invite consumers to shape an identity through their choices of music. In this largely invisible system of engagement, individuals can take on a lifestyle and join a like-minded community through authentic identification with certain genres, performers, their music, and the artifacts attached.

This is a system in which consumers are caught up in more than a simple financial transaction. American worshipers take roles in a society that communicates norms of believing, belonging, and behaving through aesthetic choices, like popular music—music that is a language beyond lyrics. If we wish to become full participants in our culture, we must learn and must understand that language.

The metaphors of geography, ecology, or cultural economy describe the macrolevel cultural patterns made up of the social, political, and emotional investments that comprise participation in our material culture.¹ Buying and selling material goods establishes people and institutions in a network of cultural values, ethical commitments, daily practices, and social identities. Our daily lives are filled with consumer choices that have little to do with simple sufficiency of physical resources. Americans spend time, effort, and earnings in the task of expressive individualism, establishing a public sense of self that aligns us with people of similar tastes and means.² This process establishes a human geography beyond subjectively drawn affective maps and cognitive borders, a geography that produces identity and meaning through public activity that creates belonging among diverse individuals bound together in the communication of consumer preferences. This geography, and the means of establishing it, goes mostly unexamined by those immersed in it. But people know their brand when they see it.

This kind of economic activity affirms the strange modern reality of separated signs and signifiers. We may accumulate objects with no true relationship to their intended purpose or our everyday lives, acquired in order to help confirm our preferred identities, preferences that may be hidden from full consciousness. I might drive to work in a car more powerful than my route requires to establish my relationship to executive salaries. I might spend Saturday afternoon in the movement-friendly, body-cooling mesh of an official NBA uniform, watching my team and favorite starter from a sofa conformed to my slouch. I do not need an oversized hat to protect me from the elements; I need it to communicate my identification with Pharrell’s care-free, celebratory ethos in the song Happy, in which he wore a hat like this. A mountain climber’s carabiner clamps my cell phone case to my downtown apartment house keys, jingling as my construction-worker boots tap the coffeehouse floorboards where I am on break as a barista, ranking a film (I’ve mostly forgotten) on a social-media site so that my acquaintances will know what kind of person I am. My consumer investments do not merely mean what they appear to mean; they mean what I want you to perceive about me. We learn and speak a complex, nuanced language in our consumer choices we believe adequate to the central symbol of our projected self.

The economic choices we make, and the social and financial realities that determine what choices are available to individuals and communities, have ethical implications more subtle than profit motive or corporate greed. Individualism or consumerism may be ideologies that Christianity critiques, but being a consumer is a fundamental aspect of how Christians in a prosperous free-market society will relate to the world, engage their neighbors, and even articulate the church’s mission. In popular music’s cultural economy, a financial transaction, or the investment of time and energy in pop music as a commodity, is related to establishing and expressing personal and social identity. The shape of our everyday lives makes Christians participants in this formational process.³ In any society, Christians may find the economy of grace at odds with the predominant cultural economy and negotiate redemptive strategies to express countercultural (i.e., the culture of God’s kingdom) commitments.

Popular culture is to be examined not merely for the moral content of each cultural text produced but for the identities participants rehearse as consumers. In the current American context, this may be seen as consumer decisions between different products, which, in content or presentation, are more—or less—affirming of certain American Christian moral interests. Should Christians choose a film with more—or less—objectionable language and content? Should they dress like a pop star with a more—or less—promiscuous reputation?

However the choice is made, the means of participation in that moral (or Christian) practice is a symbolic transaction. One’s identity and sense of belonging are assumed to be bound up in the right use of disposable income to establish a pattern of pop-culture consumption. But is a cross Christ’s cross when brandished on the shields of an attacking empire, or dangling from the earlobes of a celebrity provocateur? Is I Could Sing of Your Love Forever a worship song, inserted in a pop star’s arena concert set list? If so, how?

In such a context, the way a cross is used, and by whom, is clearly more important than the mere presence of any symbol, Christian or non-Christian. Further, in a global context of economic disparity and labor injustice, Christians must increasingly ask more than which purchase is Christian? and seriously consider the possibility that a daily rehearsal of establishing identity and community through consumer-brand management is a way of being spiritually formed.

Studying CWM as Pop Music

Popular music studies provide a range of definitions and approaches to the subject. My own interests lie less with pop music’s sonic features than with its affective impact and social functions. I will examine the ways in which participation in popular music contributes to a sense of believing, belonging, and behaving. I will not attempt a complete theory of popular music, but I hope the integration of the following sources demonstrate some coherence in my approach.

In terms of believing, my interest is in how popular music as a cultural text offers a certain way of seeing the world, and how it serves as an affective experience of the encounters it offers. In this regard, I rely on Lawrence Grossberg’s rock and roll apparatus, in which the listener affectively invests in an imagined ideal, and Josh Kun’s concept of audiotopia, in which the listener encounters the other as an unfamiliar identity. I was introduced to the former through Pete Ward’s Selling Worship.

In terms of belonging, I am most interested in how participation in popular music aligns individuals with certain cultural patterns and ways of relating to others. This is filled out by Andy Bennett’s distillation of cultural studies and popular music, and political philosopher Jacques Attali’s theory of musical performance as socially constructive.

In terms of behaving, I am relying on Tia DeNora’s approach to popular music as a means of empowerment in everyday life, and Tara Brabazon’s description of popular music as a means of reexperiencing cultural memory. Simon Frith’s shadow is cast across the conversation. As I am not a musician, I am indebted to authors, performers, and colleagues who provided some musicological wisdom along the way.

Through this lens, designating CWM as a form of popular music will imply certain characteristics of pop as an art form, but this designation primarily is descriptive of how CWM is experienced in everyday life. This focus is relevant to my interest in offering a liturgical spirituality.

Contemporary Christian music (CCM) emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a form of performed popular music primarily produced by and marketed to Christians. Contemporary Christian music was occasionally used in churches, supplementing more traditional hymns, but it was not until the 1980s that it came to be commonly used in churches’ primary weekly assemblies. The use of contemporary Christian music’s pop-music style of song for congregational worship on the Lord’s Day, previously experienced through recordings or in crowded performances, evolved into CWM.

For leaders of the Christian community, any question of CWM’s suitability for corporate worship is not only, Is this text beautiful enough for God? or, Is this text theologically fitted? or, Is this text a product of Christian people with Christ-like motives? but also should be: Does participation in this cultural liturgy rehearse a cruciform identity commensurate with the vision of God’s kingdom economy? Is this symbol a way for the church to become and be the church? This project, then, examines CWM as a symbol in Christian liturgy—a work of the people—evaluating what it signifies. The aim is to describe what kind of Christian and what kind of church are rehearsed through a pattern of worship centered by Scripture and CWM.

In describing CWM as a meaningful and formative liturgical symbol, we consider its role in facilitating God’s self-communication and the church’s participation in the geography of the kingdom. CWM as a form of pop music carries meaning as a cultural artifact beyond the sound and lyric. We must concede that, whatever its formative value might be, CWM brings with it a model for participation from pop music. And we must concede that pop music functions in a cultural economy that can challenge participation in the economy of the kingdom. Any symbol employed in worship, such as the bread and cup, invites a reorientation to life in God’s kingdom when employed in the context of liturgy. Patterns of sharing bread and cup, among the most ubiquitous domestic commodities, become actions of declaring the resurrected Lord when performed through Christ, in the Spirit, to the Father. How might pop music become this kind of symbol?

Studying CWM as Worship

Studies of Christian media, contemporary Christian music, and CWM have boomed over the last decade. With a variety of scholars and approaches now available—historical, musicological, theological—I will take a moment to place myself in their company and describe the approach of this study.

Understanding CWM as Worship Music

Scholars, students, and ministers of worship have long recognized the need for models of theology and practice that account for CWM’s unique characteristics as a symbol in corporate worship. The scholarly discussion about CWM expanded from a focus on the authenticity of CWM as music, in the 1990s and early 2000s, to the authenticity of CWM as practice, after about 2007. A boom of materials at the turn of the twenty-first century looked primarily at the issue of whether CWM was a suitable musical style for expressing worship, given associations of its style and production with questionable artistic merit or production-industry values. Daniel Frankforter portrayed CWM as an element in the reduction of worship to an entertaining recruitment device.⁴ He argued that its use rose from the false assumption that traditional worship music was responsible for declining participation. Frankforter proposed that popular music’s style and function entertained audiences rather than facilitated worship. Other critics, including contemporary-Christian-music veteran Dan Lucarini, challenged the compatibility of contemporary worship music and authentic worship because of CWM’s style, arguing that it drew from the hedonism of secular popular music and its means of production that valued profit over purpose.⁵ More moderate voices, such as Marva J. Dawn, called for balance in musical style and form and for theologically responsible lyrics.⁶ She identified contemporary song in its intent to utilize music that will appeal to younger people who often have not been actively involved in congregations.⁷ But Dawn warned, Candy is very popular with children, but we wouldn’t feed them only candy if we want them to grow strong and healthy.⁸ This concern was at the heart of many cases for blended worship. Some suggested that a theologically sound approach to worship could transcend the false dichotomy between traditional and contemporary that fueled the worship wars. This was modeled in Robert Webber’s 1998 Planning Blended Worship, which grounded song selection in a fourfold pattern that balanced elements of liturgy.⁹ Similarly, Ronald Byers’s The Future of Protestant Worship: Beyond the Worship Wars emphasized intentionality and variety of music within a certain pattern.¹⁰ Frank Burch Brown affirmed the aesthetic value of many forms of music and encouraged incorporation of many different styles, while discerning the excellence of music.¹¹ The overall focus of the public dialogue tended toward aesthetic value and theology in the lyrics.

In the new millennium, resources largely moved from questions of whether to use CWM to questions of how to use it well. Practical guides, from Barry Liesch’s The New Worship to Constance M. Cherry’s style-spanning seminary standard, The Worship Architect, accounted for CWM’s opportunities and challenges as givens to be navigated by worship leaders with theological and pastoral wisdom.¹² Histories and theologies of worship through this era took a similar approach, bringing CWM into the discussion as a matter of studying present practices rather than debating its value or longevity. John Witvliet’s Worship Seeking Understanding, Plantinga and Rozeboom’s Discerning the Spirits, and essays in Todd Johnson’s festschrift honoring Robert Webber offered balanced discernment for scholars, pastors, and songwriters for whom CWM was a presumed norm.¹³

Understanding CWM as Worship Practice

Editors Robert Woods and Brian Walrath offered a seminal collection of studies in The Message in the Music, which considered the most commonly used CWM songs among local churches in 2007.¹⁴ Authors addressed theological themes, patterns of participation, and characteristics of musical style, drawing implications for how CWM songs might shape worshipers’ and churches’ theological understanding. Contributors often emphasized the importance of pastoral discernment called for by their findings.

The postworship-wars discussion expanded toward understanding not only what CWM as a symbol represents but also what participation in CWM as worship means for worshiping communities. Robb Redman considered not only CWM’s sound but also local churches’ access to its means of production a critical aspect of his Great Worship Awakening.¹⁵ Lester Ruth’s proposal of Scripture (word), sacrament, and song as a taxonomy for contemporary worship recognized CWM’s influence on the common structure shaping Sunday. Ruth continues to illuminate how flow, as an approach to designing worship, points toward a particular theology of worship common to CWM churches.¹⁶ Pete Ward’s Selling Worship provided a history of modern worship music among British evangelicals and how modern worship influenced the ways Christians signified their faith and engaged God in corporate worship.¹⁷ By 2008, Sarah Koenig articulated a sacramental theology of evangelical praise and worship in which CWM serves as a means of grace for evangelicals.¹⁸ David Stowe described the importance of contemporary Christian music in forming evangelical cultural identities, in his No Sympathy for the Devil, asserting a relationship between contemporary Christian music’s adoption in congregational worship and the alignment of evangelical Christianity with religion’s cultural role as a preserver of conservative American values.¹⁹

Ethnomusicologist Monique Ingalls significantly shaped current scholarship regarding the implications of CWM as worship through both independent scholarship and cofounding the Congregational Music Studies research network.²⁰ The Routledge series from that group offers much to this discussion,²¹ and Ingalls’s Singing the Congregation treats CWM not just as a worship style but as a multivalent worship practice with implications for contemporary Christian ecclesiologies.²²

A Liturgical Spirituality of CWM

This book will especially rely on the trajectory marked by these latter studies, considering ethnomusicological observations about contemporary musical experience and performance, and theological observations about the experience and performance of worship. Integrating a number of interdisciplinary influences, I hope to provide a liturgical spirituality of contemporary worship music, considering how this particular practice intersects faith and everyday experience and contributes to spiritual and missional formation. This consideration will arrive at implications for CWM practices of a type, and in a manner, that accounts for authentic participation in God’s self-communication, and the outcomes of authentic Christian love in the lives of participants.

Embracing a Lexical Salad: Worship or Liturgy; Eucharist or Communion; Ordo or Flow?

Is there such thing as a liturgical theology of contemporary worship music? This ground has been thoroughly and thoughtfully broken by many free church theologians approaching the study of worship through methods and ideas shaped by Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline liturgical theologians. Todd E. Johnson, Lester Ruth, Constance Cherry, and many evangelical scholars influenced by Robert Webber demonstrate the effectiveness and limitations of integrating these approaches. Melanie Ross’s Evangelical versus Liturgical? Defying a Dichotomy offers an excellent consideration of common ground among worshipers across the spectrum of this lexicon.²³ Further, Ross and others demonstrate the usefulness of liturgical studies’ categories for exploring meanings and enriching practices for free-church worship traditions.

CWM has its most immediate roots in American Pentecostal and charismatic evangelical churches, and it is most prominently represented today among multidenominational or postdenominational evangelical worshipers. Along this spectrum, I must locate myself within a tradition tangential to both my discipline’s origins in liturgical theology and the worshipers at the center of this study.²⁴ My faith was formed in a cappella congregations in the American Stone-Campbell Movement. These churches sought to retrieve a New Testament pattern for worship, calling Bible things by Bible names: prayer, song, preaching, the Lord’s Supper, and the collection of offerings. I see these Restorationist impulses in many evangelical or nondenominational churches seeking to be Christians only, and I rely on these instincts to provide a biblical foundation for worship. At the same time, I found language in sacramental theology that deepened my appreciation for my experiences of weekly communion and staying true to the teaching of the church. So I hope to recognize in CWM how the voices of church tradition echo through even a free-church commitment to biblical fundamentals. That being said, in the pages ahead I rely so thoroughly on a variety of sources that I can at best (1) attempt a level of faithfulness to the preferred designations represented by my sources and subjects and (2) recognize the limits of some of the language I will use.

Regarding the first intention, for example, Roman Catholic Regis Duffy provides a sacramental theology, while I will also rely on Constance Cherry’s alternative response category to designate aspects of worship correlating to table in many noneucharistic worshiping communities. An example of the second intention will be evident in the way Duffy’s model for effective sacrament is the basis for my criteria for effective worship music. I will not argue for a particular sacramental understanding but presume meaningful intersections between Roman Catholic categories and ideas about authentic worship in Protestant CWM churches. For the purposes of this discussion, adequate symbol or effective worship will share the substance of Duffy’s sacramental efficacy (but not its linguistic accident).

From the outset, I will explain and assume the applicability of liturgical theology’s axiom lex orandi, lex credendi, as well as the descriptive terms ordo, ritual, rite, and liturgy. Lester Ruth’s description of CWM flow represents a common evangelical ordo. Ritual and rite are useful as descriptive terms, even when not explicitly theological—for example, the rituals of consumer habits or, in Simon Frith’s well-known title on popular music, Performing Rites.

While worship and liturgy may be interchangeable at points, I rely on Dwight Vogel’s useful distinction: worship implies human response to that which is worshiped, including such elements as prayer and praise, lament and thanksgiving, confession and commitment. These elements may be manifested through ritual expressions, but they are not restricted to those expressions. Praise of God is worship regardless of whether it is embodied in ritual.²⁵

He continues, Liturgy is corporate by definition; worship is not. Liturgy involves ritual action, worship may or may not.²⁶ In terms of theological discourse, I rely overall on liturgical theology and liturgical spirituality, rather than aiming at a comprehensive theology of worship. I am interested in identifying how CWM relates to corporate worship and what common patterns ground this practice. Liturgy and liturgical categories are a more precise way of categorizing these observations.

Regarding liturgy, I also employ it in a manner similar to James K. A. Smith’s idea of cultural liturgies,²⁷ presuming that human beings are inherently worshipers. By this token, I’ve adapted ordo and categories of orandi, credendi, and vivendi as means of describing aspects of popular music.

I pray my colleagues of more strict observance will be forgiving.

Singing Ourselves Christian

Though the focus of this book is clearly music, secular and sacred, this is not a book about which music we should listen to, nor is it about aesthetic analysis. It is about the realities of how we engage in music, sacred and secular, how the cultural economy of CWM maps communities, and how worshipers are formed by CWM practices.

As to who we are becoming, it asks not what language shall I borrow or which styles are sacred, but rather, how should the symbols that make up our liturgical repertoire be employed to faithfully rehearse the kingdom we receive and announce? It asks, what kind of people make this kind of music, and what kind of people does this music make? The book moves toward a matrix for evaluating CWM and corporate worship in effectively exploring these questions on a congregational level, through the lenses of popular music and liturgical theology.

The first two chapters provide a foundation for thinking together about these ideas. Chapter 1 offers a theology of worship and spiritual formation, personal and missional, and a framework for measuring authentic participation. It provides groundwork for talking about the correlation of our ways of believing, praying, and ministering. This chapter also introduces the vertical axis of our matrix, depicting how we discern and measure the impact of worship on loving God.

Chapter 2 provides a series of snapshots of worship music through Christian history, demonstrating how music functioned in a variety of modes in distinct eras and places. Rather than an explanation of historical progression, these snapshots offer examples of how music, as a unique intersection of worship and culture, facilitated distinct aspects of Christian worship in different historic communities.

The next four chapters provide an integrative study of how, and how effectively, contemporary worship music serves as a liturgical symbol, describing its unique relationship to formation, participation, and mission.

Engagement with music through the shared microlevel practices of pop music as a cultural artifact grounds every listener, and worshiper, in a shared way of making music audible and of making a world visible. We perform our way into selves, societies, and cosmic perspectives. Chapter 3 describes the remarkable shifts for musical participation in the twentieth century that establish the experience and practice of popular music.

Chapter 4 describes how standards for pop sound and pop performance were introduced to Christian worship through CWM and how CWM practice then shaped the way worshipers experience doctrine and prayer.

In CWM, worship music conformed to the cultural liturgies of popular music, and pop