Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community

by Monique Marie Ingalls

Contemporary worship music shapes the way evangelical Christians understand worship itself. Author Monique M. Ingalls argues that participatory worship music performances have brought into being new religious social constellations, or "modes of congregating". Through exploration of five of these modes--concert, conference, church, public, and networked congregations--Singing the Congregation reinvigorates the analytic categories of "congregation" and "congregational music."

Drawing from theoretical models in ethnomusicology and congregational studies, Singing the Congregation reconceives the congregation as a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through communal practice--in this case, the musically-structured participatory activity known as "worship." "Congregational music-making" is thereby recast as a practice capable of weaving together a religious community both inside and outside local institutional churches.

Congregational music-making is not only a means of expressing local concerns and constituting the local religious community; it is also a powerful way to identify with far-flung individuals, institutions, and networks that comprise this global religious community. The interactions among the congregations reveal widespread conflicts over religious authority, carrying far-ranging implications for how evangelicals position themselves relative to other groups in North America and beyond.

272 pages, Paperback

Published October 12, 2018

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

With an intuitive, yet neglected thesis in the study of evangelicalism (music making is crucial to the formation of “congregations” as well as to the honing of beliefs and ritual practices and what meaning and content evangelicals attach to “worship”), Ingalls has a lot of room to experiment without risking the overall salience of her intervention. Most of that experimentation pays off, as in her analysis of global worship brands, worship conferences and concerts, online congregations (including musical worship YouTube channels), and even worship marches/parades. So the venues are chosen thoughtfully and bear out her overall argument about the crucial role of musical worship in evangelical social, ritual, and theological formation.

But some of the theoretical lenses she applies seem random (some seem quite appropriate). Her post-colonial lenses in particular yield spotty results, which she sometimes takes too far. That’s not to diminish her gestures toward the racial politics of mainstream contemporary evangelical worship. Rather, it felt like she was eager to slap the power dynamics of colonialism onto a few of the evangelical scenes she investigated—sometimes rightly—sometimes doing so sloppily, evoking insufficient tension in her depictions of evangelical racial politics:

Are global evangelical worship brands really parrots of colonial power? Perhaps not in all conceivable dimensions. That’s at least too clean and all-encompassing a critique. And what of the common stated aim of mainstream evangelicalism to foster diversity and work towards justice? We can pick on the racial politics of cringe-worthy Passion Conferences all day, and those are indeed very representative of global evangelical music worship brands. But what of other organizations with international reach that include if not primarily run on evangelical participation? (maybe IJM?) Ingalls found easy targets to demonstrate the hierarchical racial politics of mainstream evangelical worship, but there are pretty readily available examples of counternarratives within evangelicalism (my experience with evangelicals, including white ones, has provided robust conversations about race and justice such that I continue to find the monolith of racist far right evangelicalism wanting as an accurate picture of folks who are evangelical or evangelical leaning in the US and probably abroad).

Makes me wonder if that’s just my experience in Chicago and New Haven, though. It seems quite likely that her personal religious and social experience and her perspective on the 2016 election have led her to assume that most evangelicals are unaware of their racial politics and their consequent contributions to racial hierarchies in evangelical worship, congregation formation, and institutional structures. She gestures towards this as why she doesn’t consider herself an evangelical anymore.
Those are some hard conclusions to avoid in 2020, particularly if they do arise from and reinforce her own experience. But i think her work still contributes to the shaky if not false monolithicization of evangelicalism in (only) racial and political senses. She breaks down the monolith at virtually every other possible turn.

[John Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This study of how evangelicals are formed by the worship music they listen to and sing together was quite interesting. Dr. Ingalls' status as an outside observer--she is an Episcopalian herself--gives her a unique vantage point for her research. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the book is how she compellingly redefines what it means to be a "congregation." Typically we have thought of this as the gathered body of believers in a local church; Ingalls argues that this is but one of five significant "modes of congregating" in which contemporary worship music forms evangelicals, and not necessarily the most formative. In addition to singing in their local churches on the Lord's Day, evangelicals also congregate to sing at conferences, worship concerts, praise marches (i.e., singing outside in public spaces), and in front of screens. Prior to COVID I might have argued that this final mode should qualify as "congregating," but even before the pandemic, the engagement with contemporary worship music on screens certainly had a significant formative effect on evangelicals. This book may not have much appeal outside of the academic study of worship music, but for those of us engaged in such things, this is a worthwhile resource.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ingalls is a careful and thoughtful observer of contemporary worship music and how it forms people into community, whether in settings of concert, conference, local congregation, praise marches, or online. This book is well-written and engaging, with helpful examples and illustrations. Whatever you think about contemporary worship music, if you want to know more about its impact on evangelicals (and the spillovers into other spaces within the Christian family), this can be a helpful book. Read in the time of pandemic, where church for many has moved away from buildings to online, it provides much food for thought about "congregation" and "community".

[Joseph Arze · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the topic is really important but honestly each chapter had such few and specific case study context examples and she did a good job talking about each one but discussed each as if they were fully representative of the contexts that she was discussing, so each chapter ended up being way too specific of each example and not discussing each context as a whole, which I found pretty unhelpful.