This book includes thirty-three provocative essays on corporate worship, hymnody and psalmody, issues, and composers and composition. It explores scripture teaching on the role of music in the church. This volume exists because it contains ideas that every worshiper (pastor and layperson) and Christian musician (performer and academic) may benefit from reading, since it is entirely possible to live in the subculture of the evangelical church without encountering some of them. - Publisher.

Furthermore, they extract useful lessons for fostering faith communities around the globe.

Something about the lyrics of many of the hit contemporary Christian worship songs is at best problematic for many clergy persons in mainline denominations. Sometimes the songs are downright offensive theologically to the pastor. Often the problem is rooted in a theological nuance or doctrine that the pastor does not embrace. Sometimes these contemporary worship songs use too many Christian buzz words or clichswords or phrases that the pastor deliberately avoids in every other aspect of the liturgy. Often the problem is that the new songs show no sensitivity at all to things like inclusive language or the theological challenges of doctrines like penal substitutionary atonement. Sometimes the pastors feel that most of these new songs lack substance, that theyre too sugary, too individualistic, and too other-worldly. Sometimes theres an emotional tone to this contemporary worship music that might work well in another kind of church but which just doesnt feel authentic in a traditional or mainline congregation. Now I would imagine that at least some of you began to glaze over a bit as you attempted to read those last few paragraphs. Or maybe you didnt fully understand some of the terms I just used. If so, dont worrythats why I wrote this book! If you have no idea what things like penal substitutionary atonement or inclusive language are about, this book will help you understand what these terms mean and why its important to your pastors for you to know your way around these issues and concepts a bit as you seek new songs to bring into the worship life of your congregation. And I promise--Ill do my best to use down-to-earth language that youll be able to easily understand without a seminary education!

This book is an investigation into church music through the lens of performance theory, both as a discipline and as a theoretical framework. Scholars who address religious music making in general, and Christian church music in particular, use "performance" in a variety of ways, creating confusion around the term. A systematized performance vocabulary for the study of church music can support interdisciplinary investigations of Christian congregational music making in today's complex, interconnected world. From the perspective of performance theory, all those involved in church musicking are performing, be it from platform or pew. The book employs a hybrid methodology that combines ethnographic research and theory from ritual studies, ethnomusicology, theology, and church music scholarship to establish performance studies as a possible "next step" in church music studies. It demonstrates the feasibility of studying church music as performance by analyzing ethnographic case studies using a developmental framework based on the concepts of ritual, embodiment, and play/change. This book offers a fresh perspective on Christian congregational music making. It will, therefore, be a key reference work for scholars working in Congregational Music Studies, Ethnomusicology, Ritual Studies and Performance Studies, as well as practitioners interested in examining their own church music practices.

This book is about the culture of American Christianity and what it does to our understanding of God, self, and community as reflected in the way Christians worship.