Christian Congregational Music

Performance, Identity and Experience

Monique Ingalls, Carolyn Landau, Tom Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317166771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Christian Congregational Music explores the role of congregational music in Christian religious experience, examining how musicians and worshippers perform, identify with and experience belief through musical praxis. Contributors from a broad range of fields, including music studies, theology, literature, and cultural anthropology, present interdisciplinary perspectives on a variety of congregational musical styles - from African American gospel music, to evangelical praise and worship music, to Mennonite hymnody - within contemporary Europe and North America. In addressing the themes of performance, identity and experience, the volume explores several topics of interest to a broader humanities and social sciences readership, including the influence of globalization and mass mediation on congregational music style and performance; the use of congregational music to shape multifaceted identities; the role of mass mediated congregational music in shaping transnational communities; and the function of music in embodying and imparting religious belief and knowledge. In demonstrating the complex relationship between 'traditional' and 'contemporary' sounds and local and global identifications within the practice of congregational music, the plurality of approaches represented in this book, as well as the range of musical repertoires explored, aims to serve as a model for future congregational music scholarship.

PART I
Performing Theology

Chapter 1
On One Accord: Resounding the Past in the Present at One African American Church

Will Boone

Now we are looking at Acts and talking about Pentecost,
But I’m trying to let you know how much it’s going-to-cost.
Because it ain’t just about Pentecost, it’s about you.
I’m translating this to you.
You’re the ones that need it during the week.
You need to know how He comes.
So when He comes you won’t be shocked.

– Bishop Leroy McKenzie, Faith Assembly Christian Center,
Durham, North Carolina, 9 October 2011

The experience of time significantly shapes the religious beliefs and practices of the African American pentecostal1 believers at Faith Assembly Christian Center in Durham, North Carolina. Worshippers declare with equal triumph that ‘old things have passed away’ and that they will be exalted ‘in due time’.2 Their memory of the past is filled with the harsh facts of generational poverty, oppression and racism – a legacy of actual and symbolic bondage. They imagine a future bright with potential. The present, they affirm, holds the key to negating the old and embracing the new. Believers gather together each week in worship so that their present might be empowered with the transformational presence of the Holy Spirit.

In this chapter I suggest that, for believers at Faith Assembly, a present empowered with presence is often inextricably interwoven with knowledge of the past. Importantly, however, this knowledge is enacted and embodied as much as it is ‘known’ in the intellectualist sense. Such an interpretation of knowledge is consistent with the epistemological position that the church’s founders, Bishop Leroy and Pastor Mary McKenzie, hold in regard to the Word of God. They claim that effective Christian discipleship requires that a believer seek not only to understand and apply the Word, but also to ‘eat the Word’, and to ‘sow your body into God’.3

Musical practice is one of the most powerful ways in which such holistic knowledge comes into being. Faith Assembly’s musical repertoire is composed almost entirely of songs released as commercial recordings in the last ten or fifteen years. Paradoxically, however, when the congregation uses music to collectively move into experiential spaces where they believe that the Holy Spirit makes ‘all things new’, they frequently abandon this repertoire and create more improvisatory sounds that resonate with established cultural traditions and biblical narratives. This chapter will offer an analysis of an approximately 20-minute segment of a single worship service in which an improvised musical journey led from a contemporary gospel recording, through several musical moments that drew on longstanding African American church traditions, to something like an impromptu reenactment of the scene which begins the second chapter of Acts, where on the day of Pentecost some 120 people suddenly began praying and crying out to God in strange new languages ‘as the Spirit gave them utterance’.4 Sonically-driven moments like this one offer a means through which believers can embody a holistic knowledge of cultural tradition and biblical narrative that adds a layer of complexity to the content of preached messages at Faith Assembly; messages that often forcefully exalt the future and renounce the past.

This work builds on that of recent scholars of contemporary African American worship and musical practice who have shown how particular churches consciously adopt practices that preserve tradition even as they foster innovation.5 While these authors have written about how the dialectic between tradition and innovation shapes repertoire selection, liturgical structure and congregational identity, I focus instead on how this dialectic – between tradition and innovation, past and future – plays out in the experiential present.

My involvement at Faith Assembly dates back to 2002 when a classmate in an undergraduate music class asked me to join the church band. Despite being white and having at the time very little interest in religion in general and no experience with African American pentecostal music, I agreed. Although initially I was very much an outsider at Faith Assembly, by the time I started my dissertation research in 2010 I was thoroughly ensconced in the community. Thus, the descriptions and analyses that follow inevitably reflect the fact that my roles as researcher and participant at Faith Assembly are inextricably intertwined.6

Past versus Future at Faith Assembly

The extent to which members of Faith Assembly value newness is reflected in their very decision to join a church that is less than 20 years old and has no denominational affiliation. Faith Assembly has no hymnals, no written out liturgy and no illustrious denominational pioneers anchoring them to an historical legacy with stone gazes from beyond the grave. Their church building is a renovated former nightclub furbished to suggest stylish contemporaneity. Traditional Christian iconography can’t be found. A large mural stretching across the side wall just below the ceiling shows clouds and dark-skinned angels in misty pastels. Its stylized spray-painted title, ‘City of Faith’, looks like the work of a Christian graffiti artist, and seems to suggest that even Heaven might have a modern black urban flavour.

Church members’ desires for the new are bound up with a desire to move away the socioeconomic instability that many of them have experienced in the past and toward a stability that may be coalescing on the horizon. Most of the church’s members reside in what Jonathan Walton, a religious studies scholar who has written extensively about contemporary African American Christianity, has called the ‘nebulous category between the working and middle class’.7 Some are first generation college graduates and some are the first in their families to own homes. Among the members there are a number of professionals including nurses, teachers, small business owners and various kinds of government employees. Nevertheless, very few are strangers to poverty; its spectre lingers in their neighbourhoods, their families and their own pasts. They live with a day to day knowledge of the facts reported in a recent study by the Institute of Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University – that ‘only 26 per cent of African American middle-class families have the combination of assets, education, sufficient income, and health insurance to ensure middle-class financial security’, and that ‘one in three (33 per cent) are at high risk of falling out of the middle class’.8 Believers frequently express belief that the future holds the key to greater well-being and stability, particularly as they echo the rhetoric of prominent African American mega-pastors and televangelists such as T.D. Jakes, and proclaim faith in the imminence of prosperity, ‘new levels’ and ‘financial breakthroughs’.

But the desire to leave the past behind is not only a matter of economics. Bishop Leroy McKenzie’s idea to found the church was a direct result of the murder of his 17-year-old nephew, a victim of street violence. Durham, North Carolina’s rate of violent crime consistently ranks well above national and state averages, and African Americans are prosecuted for such crimes far disproportionately to whites.9 Everyone at Faith Assembly has family members, friends or acquaintances that are, or have been, incarcerated. One of the stalwarts of the church community is the mother of a son serving a lifetime prison sentence.

Church members look to the future with the hope of leaving behind this grim legacy of crime and imprisonment. Bishop McKenzie encourages believers to base their faith on ‘where [they] are going and not where [they] have been’.10 And nearly every aspect of worship at Faith Assembly is imbued with a sense of forward focus; even their songs. ‘The Best is yet to Come’, they sing, ‘It’s A New Season’. We’re ‘Moving Forward’.11

Musical Practice at Faith Assembly

Music and Newness

Each Sunday morning worship service at Faith Assembly opens with Praise and Worship where songs are brought forth in a concert-like manner from a small group of singers (the Praise Team) who perform from a stage. Participation is encouraged, but the Praise Team uses microphones and the sound of their amplified voices coupled with the accompanying electric instruments greatly overpowers the sound of the congregation. The songs that they sing are almost exclusively versions of popular recordings released in the last fifteen years. They regularly add new songs to their repertoire, often singing in church the same songs that are current gospel radio hits.

There is a hipness factor that figures into the allure of musical newness for Faith Assembly. This is paralleled by many members’ tastes for the latest fashions in hairstyles, apparel and automobiles. But they hope that musical newness and its corollary hipness also serve evangelistic ends. Bishop McKenzie explicitly encourages an embrace of musical newness because he believes it makes the church more welcoming to potential members, young people in particular. In one meeting with the Praise Team and musicians he explicitly urged us to play more of what was ‘hot’, more of the ‘stuff that’s on the radio’. Not only would this help ‘bring new people in’, but it was biblical. The Psalms, he reminded us, exhort believers to ‘sing unto the Lord a new song’.12

As Bishop McKenzie’s reminder suggests, there are also theological factors in the embrace of musical newness at Faith Assembly. God’s abundance is a central theme for them – partially a reflection of the influence of the prosperity-inflected theology that has inundated African American pentecostalism in recent decades.13 God’s blessings, believers at Faith Assembly say, do not operate on a scarcity model. He is a God of ‘more than enough’; one who does ‘exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think’.14 It follows that God did not gift all of His best songs at some point in the past. To rely exclusively on a hymn book or to sing only the songs sung by one’s parents and grandparents is to enact a lack of faith in God’s continuing abundance. If God desires a ‘new song’, as it suggests in the Psalms, then He must be continually providing such songs. And these new songs often bring, in the words of believers at Faith Assembly, a ‘fresh anointing’, a ‘right-now Word’, or inspire a ‘right-now praise’. Songs that lack this ‘freshness’ and ‘right-nowness’ are considered to be far less effective in helping people deal with their current ‘situations and circumstances’. Furthermore, believers suggest, churches that sing only old songs risk being disobedient to God and being poor stewards of the new gifts that He is giving.

For many at Faith Assembly a focus on musical newness is also about separation from the past. Music has a propensity to become inextricably interwoven with particular circumstances and events in a person’s life. In one rehearsal at Faith Assembly the drummer began playing the kind of BOOM-chick, BOOM-chick pattern that is associated for many African American Christians with traditional quartet-style gospel music. The lead singer of the Praise Team wrinkled her nose. ‘You better get out of here with that Baptist music’, she scolded playfully. ‘Nobody here wants to hear that. We left that behind.’15 The sound of certain ‘old’ songs or performance styles is, for some members of Faith Assembly, the sound of a place that they hoped to resign to the past. That ‘place’ might be a life of poverty, or it might be the Baptist church that they grew up in. In any case, to sing new songs – often songs that didn’t even exist during those past circumstances – is a statement of separation. ‘By singing this music’, one implicitly says, ‘I am not that; I am not what I used to be.’

Music and ‘The Programme’

Preaching one Sunday about the faith of the disciples who dropped everything to follow Jesus, Bishop Leroy McKenzie sa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Prelude
• Part I Performing Theology
• Part II Interplay of Identities
• Part III Experience and Embodiment
• Index